The scream tore through the trees — high-pitched, terrified, and unmistakably human.
Halfdan didn't think; he ran. Branches whipped his face, the ground blurred beneath his feet, and the wind roared in his ears. Arash's power pulsed through his veins — instinctive, primal, clean. His body moved with a grace it had never known in all his life.
A smear of red flashed ahead. He leapt over a fallen log and skidded to a stop.
The clearing reeked of blood and fear.
Five wolves had cornered a girl beneath an old oak, lips peeled back, teeth slick with foam. One of them limped, its skull half-crushed and one eye gone — whatever happened here, the kid had fought back. A broken sling hung from her wrist, stone fragments scattered at her feet.
Not bad for someone under ten, he thought grimly.
Without a sound, Halfdan drew his bow. Arash's skill did the rest — the motion smooth as breath, mana coalescing into translucent arrows that shimmered like starlight.
Breath, distance, angle—his body knew it the way a hand knows a doorknob. All he had to do was listen, pay attention to what it was telling him, and follow its lead. This time, he would.
Halfdan drew his bow without a word. Arash's instincts aligned his sight — the air stilled, every sound sharpening. He loosed.
The first wolf dropped without a sound, a clean puncture through the eye before it could pounce. The second snarled and twisted to leap—two shots, chest and throat. The third bolted and he turned with it, loosing, feeling the arrow land in the soft spot behind the shoulder. The last two sprang together; he took one midair, pivoted hard, and drove the final shaft down through skull to soil.
Silence fell.
The girl peeked through her fingers, blinking at the sudden quiet. She had eyes the odd color of fresh blood thinned with milk—pink, but not sickly; alive.
Halfdan lowered his bow, exhaling. His heart raced, but not from exhaustion — exhilaration, maybe. So this is what strength feels like.
"Hey," he called after "un-including" Arash, stepping closer. "You okay, kid?"
"I am unbitten," she said, then made a face, as if she'd just tasted a medicinal tea. "I mean, I'm fine. Thank you. You were… tolerably swift."
"Tolerably swift," he repeated. "I'll try for 'adequate' next time."
That made her grin. She straightened, brushing leaves from her skirt with brisk, tiny slaps. Up close she might have been nine, possibly small for ten. Her hair, pale as straw left in sun, was braided in a lopsided crown that had given up halfway and now hung in loops around her ears.
"I am Lilika of Ganma," she announced with the solemnity of a proclamation, then wrinkled her nose even harder. "Ugh. That name is icky. Lili is better. You may call me Lili. 'Lilika' sounds… ill-favoured."
"Halfdan," he said.
She tried it out under her breath. "Half-dan. Half a dan. Is that like half a loaf? Do you prefer Hal?"
"Half is fine. Hal is fine. Anything but 'tolerably swift.'"
"Tolerably swift Hal," she said, deadpan, and looked delighted with herself when his mouth twitched.
Her speech was odd—layers that didn't belong together. A child's directness under words that belonged in old books. A drift of "unbitten" and " ill-favoured" pushing against "icky". He couldn't decide if it was cute or unnerving. Both, probably.
He gestured toward her sling. "You know how to use that?"
"Papa taught me," she said proudly, lifting her chin. "We practice for birds. Only the bad ones that steal grain. Papa says one must be kind to the small and stern to the greedy." Her face clouded for a moment; she looked toward the trees as if expecting someone to step out. "He is presently lost."
"Presently lost," Halfdan said. "Right."
She put her fists on her hips. "Do not look at me like that. He is always wandering off. I told him he must hold my hand—thusly, like this—and he said, 'Aye, captain,' and then he went to look at a squirrel and was gone. So he is lost."
"Not you," he said.
"Certainly not." She paused. "Though I suppose I was momentarily entangled with wolves."
"Momentarily," Halfdan echoed. His mouth kept wanting to smile without permission. "How long have you been… disentangling?"
"A while." She shrugged, and it was so bravely casual he felt something pull in his chest. "But I was not afraid. Not very. I yelled, and now you are here, so that was wise."
"Questionable strategy, yelling in a forest full of things with teeth," he said. "But I can't complain about the results."
She rocked on her heels, then reached for his gauntlet like a magpie spotting a coin. "What is that?"
He almost pulled back, then let her poke at the gold. The black cloth underneath breathed like leather and not like leather; the inlaid symbols caught sun and threw it in tiny nets.
"Bracelet," he said lightly. "Fashion."
Lili gave him the flat, unimpressed look of a child who has seen adults lie for sport. "That is a very large bracelet."
"Big wrists run in the family," he said.
She beamed, either accepting the joke or filing it under "nonsense adults say that will be useful later." Then she held out her hand.
"Well?" she said.
"Well what?"
"You will help me find my Papa," she said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "You are tolerably swift. You have a fine bracelet. You may be useful."
He had precisely zero reasons to help, and a few to keep walking until his legs gave out. Cadeguardia burned like a coal at the base of his skull—Giuliano's bright hair, Lucia's soft eyes turning away, the Grand Duchess smiling like a butcher measuring ribs. He could keep walking. He could pretend that nine-year-old girls did not get surrounded by wolves and speak like misbound library books.
The image of Contessina or Lucrezia—small, frightened, and alone in some distant forest—made his stomach twist. His decision was made before the thought had even finished forming.
He took her hand.
"Lead on, captain," he said.
They set off through the brighter part of the wood, following a path that might have been a path or might have been a habit of deer. Sun spilled in golden bars; the air smelled of warm resin and some sweet flower he couldn't name. Arash's precision faded to a hum in his bones. He could call it again with a thought. For now he liked the way his own muscles worked: not shaking, not stiff, not trying to fold him into a coughing fit. He could have wept from the sheer novelty of existing without pain.
"Where are we?" he asked as they walked. "The forest is lovely, but my map is blank."
"Ganma," she said promptly. "We are on Ganma."
"And Ganma is…?"
"A little island, like a bead on a string," she said, and drew a wavy line in the air with her finger. "The string is the Archipelago. The Archipelago where the Empire of Nicaria is located, Ganma, is part of the Empire. We have olives, wine, and fish, and very fine goats with curly hair. The goats eat anything. Papa says goats are jokes the world tells."
"The Empire of Nicaria," he repeated, tucking the name away beside Draven, Cadeguardia, and all the other places that made his head feel like it contained two calendars arguing.
Nicaria—that one he actually recognized. An island in the southern realms, so far from Alexander Di Luca's home that it was almost never mentioned. Known for marble, wine, oils… and apparently fine goats.
He hadn't even known there was any empire in this part of the world.
"How far from the Western Continent?"
She scrunched up her face, calculating. "By ship, if the winds are sweet and the sea does not shout, Papa says… many days and nights. More than thirty and less than a hundred. He gave me numbers but they ran away."
"Fair enough," he said. "Do you live in the town?"
"In the settlement," she corrected, with ludicrous dignity. "Words matter."
"Words matter," he parroted, smiling. "Do you live there with your papa?"
"Yes." Her voice warmed. "Papa is very good at everything. He can lift two men at once and put them on a roof to fix tiles. He cooks fish with oranges and rosemary. He can make a sling stone bounce from water to water and still hit a tin cup. He says the sea and the sky love him because he is polite to them."
"Sounds like a menace," Halfdan said. "Polite menaces are the worst kind."
She laughed and skipped a step, and it was so purely pleased that it stamped into him like a seal. She moved like children do when they're not thinking about moving—elbows, knees, sudden spins to look at a beetle, then back to the story.
"Every spring," she said, and her voice shifted into something careful and bright, "we go to the field where the lilies grow. The whole ground turns white and pink and gold, and I lie down and look up and the sky looks like the bottom of a lake. We count how many bees there are. We pick one flower each, only one, so the bees do not sulk. He says, 'Lili, the lilies are named after you,' and I say, 'No, Papa, I am named after them,' and he says, 'We shall argue about this when we are ancient and our hair is ridiculous.'"
Halfdan tried to answer and found that the machinery of his throat had stuck. He swallowed, found a voice that didn't sound like the inside of a tin.
"That sounds… good," he said. "What color is your lily?"
"White with the tiniest blush," she said. "Like someone pinched it and it pretended not to mind. We have a promise," she added, looking up at him with that dead-serious solemnity children pull like a cloak. "We will go again this spring. Even if it rains. Even if he is busy. Promises are bridges, Papa says. Bridges are things you cross together."
Promises are bridges. He stared at the path. He had made a promise once to a little girl in a different life that he would teach her how to make paper boats in the pond when his knees didn't hurt. He had promised his dearest companion that they would one day travel to the Empire of Eldamarion and lose themselves in its vast libraries, uncovering the secrets of the world together. He had promised a certain squire that one day, when he got better, they would spar together in the courtyard. And in return, the boy had sworn he'd become the finest swordsman in the Grand Duchy by then—and teach him himself. He had broken so many small bridges just by dying. The thought stung like lemon in a cut.
"Make another bridge," Lili declared suddenly, stopping dead in the path and thrusting out her pinkie. "With me."
He blinked. "With you."
"You will help me see the lilies," she said. "You are here. You have a fine bracelet. You are tolerably swift. We require no more qualifications."
He wanted to say no. He wanted to say he didn't do bridges anymore. He wanted to say he had already fallen through too many. Instead, he hooked his little finger around hers and squeezed. The old instinct was still there—indulge, humor, lie with kindness. It came up against the harder thing under it, the thing that had watched the axe fall: tell the truth; if you say it, do it.
"I'll help you see the lilies," he said quietly.
Her face went very serious, then she nodded once, satisfied, like a tiny magistrate sealing a decree. "It is done."