I took a pair of steps over to the head of the bed and snagged the tiny pouch. “Okay, why?”

  “Hand it here.” She immediately opened the pouch when I handed it to her and dumped the metal jack into her hand.

  “So—”

  “Shh. I haven’t quite figured out how to do this,” she muttered. “Give me a minute. Or two.”

  So I stood there patiently, watching her turn the thing this way and that, intensely staring at it the whole time. Maybe a minute into her examination, she clenched her eyes and grimaced.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, this is kinda like those stereoscopic images. You have to stare at it just right before it just pops out at you.”

  I pursed my lips. “Yeah, those never worked for me. Astigmatism. Bad enough I can’t use holosights. All I ever got from them was a headache.”

  She rubbed her forehead for a moment, letting the hand holding the jack sink to her lap. “Yeah, I’m thinking even doing this right gives me headaches.” When she looked back down, a bright red splotch appeared on her wrist. Then another.

  “Holy shit, Jenna,” I muttered and turned to find some scrap cloth or my first aid kit, whichever presented itself first.

  “Ah, yeah, nosebleeds, too. Sorry.”

  I handed her a length of relatively pristine cloth from my gun cleaning kit. “Are you sure it’s supposed to work that way?”

  “Honestly? No clue. Fiachra looked at me like I was making shit up or speaking in Klingon when I asked about it, so I’ve kinda just been figuring things out as I go along.”

  I did my level best to make sure the stare I gave her said, “I have a concern,” instead of “Are you fucking retarded?” Not sure I succeeded, but whatever I aimed at her elicited a sheepish grin on her part.

  “So?” I asked.

  “Uhm, well, I’m not entirely sure what it does.”

  My lips pursed together on their own.

  “Sam, patience. Please,” she muttered and looked back down at the jack while applying pressure to her nose. “Like, I get there’s a triggered effect and that trigger is environmental, not commanded, but I’m not quite sure what the effect or the trigger is.”

  “Would you like to phone a friend?”

  Jenna glared at me. “I’m doing my best, Sam. This isn’t rocket science. Not yet anyway.”

  “Sorry. I have faith in you, senpai.”

  Moments later, I was rubbing the muscle right above my kneecap where she’d punched me. “Ow!”

  “Serves you right, you fuckin’ nerd. Eh, I give up. I mean, he gave it to you to help, so it should be something useful, and the trigger isn’t complex. Something along the lines of exposure to something in specific means it’ll fire off whatever that weird jigglefucking squiggle thing is. I’d say it’d vibrate, but what use would that be? If we were stuck in a hentai, I’d tell you it’s the weirdest shaped marital aid I’ve ever seen, but you do you.”

  When I snorted, she looked up at me and asked, “What?”

  “Uh, you’re not wrong. I mean, you are, it’s not a vibrator, not technically. Fiachra said you put it in water, and it basically knocks the dirt off things. Sounds like one of those ultrasonic cleaners I read about.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She looked back down and then cocked her head to the side a little.

  It took exactly one heartbeat to figure out what went through her head and I snatched the jack out of her hand just before she tried to spit on it.

  “Hey! I’m conducting science here!” she muttered at me indignantly.

  I returned the comment with a stare while stuffing the jack back into the pouch. “Fiachra said it made a hell of a racket outside of water. I’d like to not have a headache the rest of the day. It’d probably make yours worse, too.”

  “Oh.” Jenna shrugged. “Well, that’s fair I guess. Got anything else I can look at?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “For science?”

  She grinned. “For science!”

  Everything else Fiachra gave me was basically a mundane item, so I went with the only other magic item I had on hand. I handed her the sword Cailleach had given me, but from her perspective it certainly didn’t look like one. At this moment, anyone who didn’t know better would think I’d handed her a decent walking stick.

  She eyed me as I set the weapon in her hand. “You do realize I was standing next to you when she gave it to you, right?”

  I nodded. “Consider this a slightly harder puzzle. You know what it is, but can you figure out anything else about it? Like how the illusion works?”

  She squinted at the stick in her hands and then glanced up at me. “Fine. Challenge accepted.”

  After a good thirty seconds of squinting and turning her head this way and that, I finally asked, “Problem?”

  She made a small, annoyed noise. “It feels almost like it doesn’t want to be looked at.”

  Somewhat puzzled by the statement, I only grunted.

  “I wonder,” Jenna muttered and waved her hand over the weapon like she was trying to clear smoke. “No? Hm.”

  She focused for an instant and then suddenly winced and reared back. “Holy shit!”

  Having not seen a thing, all I could do is ask, “What?”

  “It’s—” Shielding her eyes with her hand, she sat back up. “It’s fucking bright. And, and wow. There’s so much here. I have no idea what the hell any of this is. It’s—” Her hand slowly slid down away from her face and her eyes widened. “—beautiful.”

  “Jenna?” I stepped a little closer and snapped my fingers. “Jenna?”

  It felt like something hit me, like every inch of me, the moment a weirdly opaque fog jumped into existence. I couldn’t move. Vaguely, I recognized that full body slap from a now unnaturally distant memory. Blast. Overpressure. The world wasn’t moving. And then Jenna’s lips quivered.

  Words rolled out of her mouth that made no sound, yet I felt them crawl along my skin. I felt them twist in the gap between spoken word and translation injected into my mind by Aoibheann’s gift. The world rung around me like I stood in the hollow of a gigantic bell. Everything went black.

  The first thing I recognized was the sound of a breeze rustling leaves. I then recognized the sound of hooves against stony ground the moment a jarring bounce translated to my ass losing contact with whatever I was sitting on. Now suddenly very awake, I grabbed the first thing I saw in an attempt to not go spilling ass over teakettle, which turned out to be the wooden back of the bench I’d been propped up against.

  Where the fuck am I?

  I was in the back of a horse-drawn cart driven uphill by a man in what might’ve been light leathers and a deep blue cloak. Trees sparsely lined the path ahead which appeared to only get steeper with every crest. A quick glance at the clouded sky overhead told me we were heading south, and it wouldn’t be long before noon.

  The sun glittering off the scales of the armor on the man across from me drew my eye. Most of them were spattered with blood and dusted heavily with soot. The scales gone, only structural chain jingled along a rent in one section at about waist level on his left side. Neighboring scales along the gap were all either bent or looked oddly melted. All I could see through the hole in the armor were wrapped bandages. The helmet on the bench next to him had fared little better, a sizeable ding on the right side over the ear and long rivulets of dried blood between scattered pockets of black char.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  He was leaning, eyes closed, against a sheathed sword whose tip was wedged between the planks separating us. While the hand holding the weapon bore a gauntlet, the one in his lap was tightly bound in cloth that looked ready to soak through with blood any moment. It took me a moment to see through all the soot, muck, and blood covering the rest of him to notice his undercoat and the other non-metal clothing were all blue, either sky blue or a much darker hue.

  A series of loud snaps cracked off behind us. I jerked about and peered over the other occupants, none of whom looked any better than the soldier across from me. Off in the distance, a cloud of dust rose on the far side of what looked like a medieval city of some sort, one with a skyline dominated by an enormous cathedral. Echoes of the rippling explosions reached my ears from the hills ahead of us while I struggled to understand what was going on.

  “Hey you, you’re finally awake.”

  My head swam as I sat back down to find the soldier across from me staring at me intently. I mutely nodded.

  “Good. I was worried you might not last long enough to see us cross the border. You took a hell of a hit.”

  My head suddenly felt like it was stuck in a vice. Everything sounded muffled. I squeezed my eyes together, panting from the sudden pain. When it finally passed, I realized the only reason I hadn’t pitched forward was the solder’s hand against my shoulder.

  “Easy, lad. Stay with me. You don’t want to just die now, not after you got this far, right? That’d be a hell of waste of good luck.”

  It took me a moment to unscramble my thoughts and a few more to order them in something approaching complete sentences. “What happened? Where am I? Who are you?”

  The soldier’s eyes held nothing but friendly concern as I rattled off my questions. After a long sigh, he tugged open a pouch on his belt and produced a silver flask. “Take a sip of this, then.”

  When I eyed the shadowed image of a wolf seemingly floating just under the surface of the flask without moving to take it, he added, “The flask is Syr make, gift from my father when I commissioned. Contents came from the Syr, too. You won’t like the taste, but it’ll help.”

  Head still pounding, it took me a bit to figure out the stopper, and before I’d even managed to swallow the mouthful I’d taken, I regretted it. The liquid was thick, almost syrupy, and tasted like someone had scraped the char off a latrine burn barrel, mixed that with mud, and then diluted it fifty-fifty with green death flavor Nyquil before finishing it with a sprig of mint for flavor.

  I spent the next few seconds coughing hard enough I could feel my blood pressure in my eyes, but by the time that quieted down I ended up feeling almost perfectly normal.

  “Better? Good. So, starting with the most relevant, I am the commanding officer of the Third Acadian heavy infantry, though I suppose it might be more accurate to say I was the Timberwolves’ commanding officer. Given the blank look on your face, I’m just going to assume you don’t remember much of anything at the moment.”

  I responded with an unhappy grunt.

  “Well, you certainly aren’t the first I’ve seen get the sense knocked out of you like that, but you are the first to live this long. Who knows what got knocked loose, right? So, stop me when this starts sounding familiar. What you just heard was probably the Syr dropping the bridges across the Fuilteach connecting Annesport with Longreach. Didn’t know the long-eared grubbers still had fight in them, but they showed up with an army last night, told us to get our wounded out while we still could. You, me, and the rest of the Timberwolves have spent the last two weeks fighting off groups of whatever godsforsaken creatures we’ve been hearing about for months as they came up the Fuilteach. None of this is familiar?”

  I slowly shook my head. It felt vaguely familiar, but beyond that, this was all new to me. “To be honest, I don’t really remember much of anything before I woke up just now. Just a bright light and something knocking me off my feet.”

  “Ah, that. Yeah, that makes sense. We were getting the wounded together when those things attacked. Still no idea how they made it past the sentries.” The soldier grunted. “It’s not like the things were trying to be sneaky, so our sentries probably ended up as dinner. At any rate, you got all heroic, didn’t see one of the big ogre lookin’ ones, and he got you across the head with what looked like a signpost. Broke that fancy staff of yours, too. Explosion turned everything around you to mince, but aside from the knock on your head, you weren’t touched. A bit of a miracle, if you ask me.”

  The wagon lurched and I realized we’d just pulled off to the side just as the sound of boots on the march reached my ears. I leaned to look around the driver and saw a column of helmeted slender figures, four abreast, descending the crest ahead of us.

  “Ranja’s teats, there’s more of them?” the lieutenant muttered.

  We watched row after row of grimfaced elves as they trudged past us, most of them wore armor not terribly different from the Lieutenant’s, save the scales looked iridescent and made remarkably little noise as they marched with long blades at their sides. The rest were clad in light leathers and bore curved bows of wood and darker material, all of intricate make. Full quivers with green and black fletching had been tied off on every spare inch of their packs and swayed with every step.

  Then the character of the marching ranks passing us changed from one rank to the next. Their armor and weapons didn’t carry the same gleam, nor the same heft. While still as grimfaced as the preceding ranks, these elves carried a hint of uncertainty and nervousness with them.

  So used to the sea of green and black marching by, a sudden flash of color drew my eyes. Flame-red hair swaying in the wind, a pair of silent elves carried an air of menace with them as they passed us by, in step with the column between them. Seconds later, another pair came along, and I noticed each of them carried different weapons than the others. Varied though they were, every edge gleamed with terrible purpose, and I had little doubt their bearers knew precisely how to use them.

  Across from me, the Lieutenant blew air through his teeth and slowly sank to his seat.

  I shot him a glance. “What?”

  The lieutenant answered by pointing farther up the path.

  My eyes landed at the column’s end where another pair of the red-haired elves brought up the rear. While that pair were just as impressive as those before them, I knew immediately what the Lieutenant had pointed at.

  A mist was spreading down the crest of the hill, growing deeper with every passing footfall. Three hooded figures clad in green and purple robes, both colors dark to the point of almost black, sat atop three black horses. Though each design differed from the others, all three horses bore a long staff strung along their sides, tied like lances to be kept when needed.

  A cloud passed before the sun just these three riders neared, but the colored gems worked into the staves still glittered from within just as brightly. Of the riders themselves, all I saw were weathered hands gripping the reins as they passed. Their staffs, their robes bore intricate looping whorls and sigils of such complexity and miniscule size carved or woven into them that I only noticed the designs when they were close enough for me to almost touch.

  I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until they had passed. When I exhaled, the sound seemed muted. Moments later, the mist reached us, flowing silently down after the Syr column. As the mist thickened into a fog, the world around me seemed to dim and lose color. The sounds of nature went silent. Out of the corner of my eye, our horse’s tail stopped its incessant flicking as the beast went rigidly still.

  I blinked, intending to look for what had spooked the horse, and a shadow loomed through the mist. By its narrow figure, I assumed it was an elf while its stride suggested a woman. As it walked by, the mist thinned ever so much, and the hood turned toward me.

  For the space of two heartbeats I sat transfixed, my eyes locked on an ageless pale face whose grey eyes projected the weight of more than merely centuries. The hair on every inch of bare skin I had stood on end, and I knew in no uncertain terms that, despite the friendly smile blooming on her face, I gazed upon the face of Death itself, and behind her marched her servants.

  A small sound shattered the deathly silence, and I broke off our shared gaze to find the source, a silver church bell the size of my thumbnail dangling from the short necklace around her neck.

  The fog thinned within moments of the Lady’s passage to reveal another column marching in pairs, another two dozen or so elves clad completely in black who made just as much sound as their Lady before them. Though they wore cloaks, their hoods were down. Unlike so many at the start of the column, these elves didn’t bear grim looks on their faces. Instead, to a one, their faces wore a singular expression on the border between boredom and alert, a studious detachment that spoke of little else but readiness.

  It was only when the last two passed and the color seeped back into the world that I realized literally every elf in the column had been male except the Lady and the last pair of silent assassins, whose mirrored faces gave me pause until I realized they were twins.

  I sat back on the bench while the driver returned the cart to the road.

  Across from me, the Lieutenant looked deathly pale.

  “Something wrong?” I finally asked after several minutes of unnerving quiet.

  “Where’s their supply train?”

  I squinted. “What?”

  “Take a long look, Alex. You don’t march without field supplies unless you don’t need them. With that many in one place, and a good chunk of them militia, there’s only one reason to march without. Those are probably the last elves any of us will ever see.”

  I shot the man a sudden frown. “Maybe they’re just out ahead of their supplies?”

  The lieutenant replied with a wide-eyed, disbelieving stare before he looked behind us and slowly shook his head. “No. I don’t think so.”

  Distant thunder reached my ears, and I pivoted in my seat, once again looking over the others in the cart. Behind us, dark clouds of smoke billowed into the air as the riverlands burnt from new fires spreading with unnatural speed.

  “Still think there’s a supply train up ahead?” the lieutenant quietly asked.

  In the distance, an entire hill vanished in a dark cloud of rapidly expanding fire and debris. The grasslands around the blast rippled in an ever-expanding wave that pushed what looked like a thin cloud ahead of it for the briefest moment.

  Several seconds lapsed before the blast’s roar reached us. My mouth moved on its own. “No.”

  And with that, a searingly bright line dropped through the clouds far off onto the ground below in an instant. Despite looking away, purple afterimages hovered in my eyes. I felt the beam’s light grow warm on my skin and turned to ask the Lieutenant what was going on, but as I did so the world fell out from underneath me in a sudden rush of black silence.

  A pinprick of light appeared in the dark and it expanded with the thunder of an oncoming train. My lungs screamed for air, and I gagged trying to fill them. My hands, my feet stung with electric pain, feeling as if they were on fire and freezing at the same time. I struggled but could not move.

  The roar in my ears began to fade as my vision and sense of self returned. I was laying on my back, a familiar face I’d seen only minutes before looking down on me with great concern. I had one hand around her throat. My fingers were unnaturally pale, blue even.

  I froze, chest still heaving for air, and lay there doing little else but blinking while my brain fought with singular purpose to figure out what the fuck was going on.