The following morning we had a respite from the rain, if not the clouds, and this revived my companions, though not to the level of discourse to which we’d become accustomed. I was nursing a headache, eyes half-closed, when Radburn began it.

“We cannot arrive at Vigil soon enough. When this adventure was advanced to me, I had no idea I’d be spending most of it sodden with a back stiff from sleeping on the ground day after day. I can’t believe the faculty made this trip in such discomfort.”

“Believe it,” Eyre said. “We did not have even the courtesy of the barn the Vessel procured for us. Once you leave Saintly behind, you can expect few comforts. The north has been abandoned to itself, and there is little to commend it to anyone who might want it.”

I could sense my companions’ puzzlement, but unlike them I had senses capable of corroborating Eyre’s pronouncement. To the eye, the land seemed wild but not overtly wrong; one had to scrutinize it to see that the only shrubs growing on the hills were the same species, hard and thorned. The trees did not seem stunted, but looking into their eaves one spotted branches grown into strange shapes, or that sported dead spots without obvious sign of disease.

“I wouldn’t want to live here,” Ivy said, casting her gaze around her. “Everything feels awry.”

Or perhaps I underestimated human senses.

“It no longer invites habitation,” Eyre said. “No doubt the Vessel could supply you with reasons as to why that might be. Suffice to say I have spent many a trip north as afflicted as you, Mister Douglas... and with several more decades to excuse my stiffness of joint than I believe you can claim.”

Guffaws there. Radburn scowled but took the critique without attempt at defense.

“Though I don’t mind roughing it—” Guy grinned at Radburn’s sour expression. “—I’m looking forward to our arrival as well. There presumably being libations more exciting than cold stream water, if not wenches.” Ivy sighed loudly, and Guy said, “Very well, then, wenches and men of loose morals, for the lady.”

“Are you serious?” Kelu asked, peering at him from behind Radburn. “You want to get to Vigil so you can have sex? Why don’t you just make arrangements with one of your friends? Then you could be having sex all the way there.”

A long pause. I cleared my throat and said, “Humans don’t have casual liaisons, as a matter of course.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Radburn said. “Humans have casual liaisons all over the place, Morgan. It’s men tumbling men that humans won’t admit to. Or women tumbling women, I suppose, but no one believes women to be interested in sex so they never posit the existence of carnal relationships between them.”

Kelu’s ears drooped in such astonishment that I could read it despite my headache and my position on the other side of Ivy’s horse. The genet twisted in the saddle until she could meet my eyes and said to me, “They can’t be serious.”

“I’m afraid they’re quite in earnest,” I said.

“In denial, maybe, but in earnest?” Kelu jabbed Radburn in the back, drawing a yelp from him.

“I suppose in dissipated tropical cultures, people will swive anything that moves,” Guy said. “Sounds good to me. When can we go there?”

“We,” I said, “are going north. To Vigil. Hopefully without any swiving, given that we have more important things to do.”

“Such a killjoy,” Guy said.

“Are you looking forward to your return, Professor?” Chester asked, ignoring the conversation pointedly.

“I am, yes.”

But I had been his student too long to miss the hesitation, despite its brevity. “But?”

He shifted in his saddle. “I had hoped to bring my colleagues with me. Coming alone will be....”

We were all listening now as he sought the right word. At last, he finished, “Difficult.”

“Difficult,” Radburn repeated.

“Alone?” Chester asked.

“Ah. I meant from a professional standpoint.” Eyre’s smile was decidedly wintry. “You must understand: Vigil is a site of great interest to a plethora of scholars. There are learned men from over half a dozen universities working there, with the inevitable jostling for hierarchy and use of resources. It can be a very... competitive... situation. I would have preferred to arrive with more support.”

“We don’t count?” Radburn guessed.

“I’m guessing no one counts except other professors,” Ivy said.

“What about the priests?” Chester asked.

Eyre suppressed his flinch masterfully, I thought. If his horse hadn’t twitched, it might have gone unnoticed. “I am afraid arriving in the vanguard of a host of priests who would like their goals to take precedence over the research currently in progress will not endear me to them.”

“Wonderful,” Guy said. “A man wants ale, wenches, and a world free of demons, and instead he receives petty politics.”

“Life in a nutshell,” Chester agreed.

“Your life, maybe,” Ivy said.

“Or a man’s,” Kelu said, grinning over the back of Radburn’s horse at her.

“Are you truly allowing your retinue to be contaminated by women’s suffrage?” Guy said to me.

“They are women,” I said. “For some reason I can’t imagine, women’s suffrage seems to be relevant to them.”

“We’re not women,” Almond murmured. “We’re genets.”

“We come in only one sex,” Seven agreed. “That makes us different.”

“Not that different,” Emily said from behind Ivy.

“God help us,” Radburn said, but he was smiling. “An entire new race of scholars, and mouthy ones.”

The conversation rambled on from there, with Ivy holding forth—and holding her own—against Radburn and Guy, and Chester opining now and then as a mostly neutral power; I thought his position in society had given him a different perspective on the rights of women than our friends’. The wealthy could afford to buy themselves advantages the less well-heeled could not, but they were also subject to customs held over from the aristocracy. In some ways, Duchess Minda (or perhaps I should say Princess by now) had fewer choices than Ivy. Watching the latter arguing her point to Radburn while Emily leaned over to listen, furred ears trembling with interest, I gave thanks that the choices she did have had led her here.

“Politics,” Chester said to me quietly, distracting me. I glanced at him and he said, “That’s bound to be trouble.”

“Do you think?”

Chester rubbed his thumb over the leather of his reins. “Do you recall two years ago, when they unearthed that stela from the time of the War of Annexation?”

“I heard something about it,” I said. “But history isn’t my field, so it fell from mind, I’m afraid.”

He nodded. “Let us just say that the competition amid scholars to bring home the most important finds is… bitter.”

“And what are we,” I muttered.

“Precisely.”

That evening, Last had a look at me and folded his arms. “You are not well, Lord Locke.”

“I have a touch of a headache,” I answered, which made little of something that was inspiring my eyes to water. I removed my spectacles and polished the droplets that my lashes had spattered on their inner surfaces. “But I have suffered a great deal more pain in my life, Last, and the staff will not learn to fight itself. Please.”

Was that approval? I hoped. God knew my course was ill-advised, particularly since I had no idea what might cause an elf to have persistent pain. It seemed the sort of thing that would heal itself, given the enchantment.

Or perhaps not. The enchantment cared little for pain. It healed with little regard for how it felt to the person suffering that healing.

I followed Last away from our camp, hidden among the trees off the road. The terrain here was a slowly swelling hill, and there was a field adjacent to our copse, which is where he led me. Perhaps he thought to spare me the difficulties of fighting around the trees, but what he succeeded in was making my head worse. Something about the sky with its dense clouds, close and dark, made the sensation so intense I had to force myself to keep walking.

Chester followed, intent on his own lessons. Ivy trailed after, with Almond and Emily. I didn’t usually begrudge them the sight of me failing to best my guard captain exchange after exchange, but tonight I wished they had chosen to stay behind... particularly Ivy, who rarely spectated. Perhaps Last had some magic to read thoughts, for he sent Chester and Sabaf off toward the trees and politely asked ‘Lady Ivy’ if she would accompany them for now. She glanced at me and I managed a lopsided smile. “He perhaps would prefer me without distraction,” I told her, and this convinced her to join Chester, the genets trailing.

“You are not well,” Last repeated when at last we were alone. “You do not need an audience.”

“No,” I said. “But I will give it my best.”

He nodded, tapped my staff with his weapon, and we set to work.

Every night, Last drilled me against some different attack. He demonstrated how a man without weapons might disarm a man with a staff and then beat him with it. He showed me how a better-trained man with a staff might drop a poorly-trained man with a staff to the dirt with a well-timed swipe. Tonight it was how a man with a sword could still beat a man with a staff whose reach should have made such an exercise perilous. But very little was perilous for an elf. We fought with uncapped steel and Last rarely pulled blows. I sprouted punctures that healed themselves, leaving streamers of blood down my arms. Something about this was a relief, as if there was a pressure inside my body that needed release.

As we worked, I felt the cold less and the pain more, until I fought with my eyes closed, accepting the wounds and answering blows by rote. Last was speaking, but I didn’t hear him… the clouds were too close—so close—

The heat that swept through me was the Archipelago’s, eternal summer on a bright ocean breeze, pricking all the hair up along my neck and scattering my pain. I gasped and looked south, joy rising, shocking, perfect.

He was coming! My brother was moving, was free—

“Lord Locke!” Last barked, yanking me back into my body. I heard glass shatter and felt steel, and my sight dissolved into motes of spinning color. I fell forward, stumbled back, and in desperation grabbed to keep from falling.

But not with my hands.

The power in Last leaped to me, flooding my nerves until they sang. Everything skewed toward me, as if I had become the sun and all the world desperate for warmth. I had one fleeting moment of perfect elation and then I gasped, leaping for Last as he crumpled. “No, no, Captain, no!” I said, sensing the guttering of his heart as the enchantment struggled to maintain itself in the absence of the magic I’d stolen. I poured it back in, quickly, too quickly, and he shuddered in my arms, hiding his face so I wouldn’t see what it did to him, the reprieve, the glory of it. Grimacing, I pressed my eyes against his hair and held him, willing my heart to slow. “Last,” I said, stroking his hair. “Last. My apologies. I am clumsy, I did not mean to—”

His trembling hand flattened against my chest and I quieted. He did not speak for so long I feared I had horrified him past bearing, but when he did his voice was low with awe. “No.”

Carefully he pushed himself onto his knees and I allowed it, though I saw his face streaked with tears and it was abomination. Yet again, he shook his head, reached and grasped my shoulder carefully.

“No,” he said. “My prince.”

All the weeks of ‘Lord Locke’ fell away, and I felt suddenly how distant he’d been, how carefully he’d stressed the gulf between us. I had accepted the title without realizing how it had alienated us from one another.

But now… now he believed. I was no longer his lord’s assignment. I was the prince of elves. His prince. I had used my powers on him, and he’d felt it in every sinew. I had compelled, and he had answered, and I had given him back his life.

I fell silent and allowed him the moment. I allowed it to myself as well, for I was still shaken by how casually I’d commanded the elemental spark that animated him. Had I kept that power, I could have starved him of the enchantment’s fuel and killed him, for he was not like Kemses and Thameis and the other blood-flags. He did not have the magic to spare for anything beyond the maintenance of his immortality. That I had this power... that it was what would make me prince... sent a frisson of fear down my spine. I knew that Eyre believed in my rectitude, and perhaps he was right to have that faith. But the thought that the royal gifts must have been capable of manifestation in the existing elven society, among people who would have found it very useful for reasons nowhere near so noble as designed....

Was it luck that had seen the prince-gifts rise in a man raised among humans, in a world slowly moving toward liberty and equality? Or did it constitute destiny? And who was I, to receive such a mantle?

Last brought me from my anxious reverie with a touch, this one less awed and more focused: he was tilting my face to one side. “Can you see again?”

Again? “Yes…?”

Carefully he unhooked the spectacles from behind my ears. “I’m afraid these will be less easily mended than the eye.”

The left lens had shattered and was drenched in blood. A few limp shards edged in rubine clung to the inside curve of the frame. Touching them, I said, “What happened?”

“I expected you to duck,” Last said, rueful. He flaked the remaining bits of glass from the inside of the frame, leaving one lens whole and the other gone. “You didn’t, and the sword went—”

“Into my eye?” I said, suppressing a flinch.

“Into the lens, and skidded to one side,” Last said. “But your eye is fine now.” He squinted, studying the lashes. “No pieces in it, I assume, or you’d be blinking?”

“God, no,” I said, touching it gingerly. Nothing, not so much as glass powder. I sighed as he placed the spectacles in my hands. Putting them back on, I found it strange to see more clearly out of the emptied side than out of the side with the lens. “I am grateful not to have lost the eye. Thank God I am not human, or these lessons would be the death of me.”

“If you were human, we wouldn’t be practicing with live steel.” He studied my face for injury, saw none, brushed at the streaks of sticky blood fanning from my eye. “What was it that had you distracted, if I may ask, my prince?”

In the shock and urgency of tending to Last, I had set it aside… but his words brought my gaze back to it, and my heart surged with a joy untainted by the theft of someone else’s energy. “My brother,” I said. “My brother is free. And he’s close. He’s coming toward us.”

“Close?” Last straightened. “Close enough that we should wait?”

“I… no.” I scanned the horizon, found myself surprised by the sight of a star or two, visible now from behind clouds that were tearing beneath a cold wind. “But the sea is no longer between us.”

That clear wind, the harbinger wind, was tousling my guard captain’s hair around his throat as he stared into the horizon with a frown. Tilting his head, he looked at me and said, “Does that mean the sorcerer is also moving?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Yet I can’t imagine what would have inspired him to release Amhric, save perhaps caprice.”

“Caprice he is capable of,” Last said, rising and offering me a hand. “Yet I think it a mistake to believe him incapable of any other motive.”

“I do too.” I accepted the help up, dusting off my pants. “I suppose we will find out when he joins us.”

“Will he?”

“Yes,” I said, certain of it. “He can find me. He knows where I am, and he… he is coming.”

Last’s sigh was relief, I thought. “Let us find your man and repair to our beds. There is work to be done.”

“Yes.”

Chester was still working against Sabaf; this was the first opportunity I’d had to watch, as Last typically exercised me longer. I’d known Chester had been in lessons since he was old enough to walk; dueling was no longer legal, but the aristocratic habit of raising male children to the sword lingered in the upper class.

I said the obvious. “He’s good.”

“He will be good,” Last corrected, absent. “Once Sabaf trains all the sport out of him.” At my quizzical look, he said, “Your companion was taught a game. One used to see it, when we could still be hurt, that there were those who learned weaponry as a competition with rules. But there are no rules on a battlefield, save what kills one’s opponent. He seeks to score points. It is a bloodless understanding.”

I considered Chester from this perspective, trying to see whatever it was Last found so obvious, but the clues remained opaque to me. All I saw was a man who could die fighting with a blade, and doing it well. I sensed the breath in his throat, the flash of a quickened pulse, the heat of muscles. I saw confidence and attention. I found it beautiful.

“Enough,” Last called to Sabaf in the Gift. “He tires.”

Sabaf halted, saluted Chester and received a salute in return.

“Go you with your people, my prince,” Last said. “I will tell your guard that the King comes.”

“Thank you,” I said, and went to collect Chester, Ivy, and Almond, and I got halfway to them before Ivy leaped to her feet and ran for me, distress written in every motion.

“Morgan!” she exclaimed, touching my face. “You’re….”

“Not harmed,” I said, leaning down so she could see. “I pledge it.”

Behind her, Chester said, “Not harmed anymore, you mean to say. What shattered your spectacles?”

“A blow I failed to duck,” I said ruefully.

Chester frowned. “He pushes you hard.”

“And he must. I have a great deal to learn, little time, and a body that will permit it.” I tamped down my shiver of delight. “My brother comes. He’s crossed the sea.”

“Already?” Ivy asked. “I thought the sorcerer had him imprisoned. And that it was a voyage of at least a month by ship!”

“I don’t know how he has managed it,” I said. I crouched so that I could face Almond and offered her my face. She quivered, then leaned forward and delicately lapped at the dried blood. I closed my eyes for her ministrations. “I just know that he has, and that he won’t be long. We might meet in Vigil.”

“If the weather clears,” Chester murmured.

“The weather will clear.” I felt it now, in my joints, in the air moving through my body, like a bright salt wind. “We’ll have no more rain.”

“That would be a kindness,” Ivy said ruefully. “I was trying not to complain, but sleeping damp every day was unpleasant.”

I sought her hand and clasped it, laughing. “If all you have to say about it is that it was unpleasant, you are far less given to complaint than Radburn.”

“Poor Douglas,” Chester said, shaking his head. “He’s not suited to rustication. He prefers the city.”

“We’ll have shelter soon enough at Vigil, and with my brother’s aid we’ll find what we need and put paid to our task.” I breathed out. “It won’t be long now.”

Almond finished her work, leaving my temple cool and damp. I kissed her cheek and murmured, “Well with you?”

“Master,” she whispered, hugging me tightly. I straightened, pressing her head to my side.

“Is it really worth it?” Chester asked, quiet. He set his finger to the underside of my spectacles, on the empty side. “Working so hard for this brother.”

“You have only to meet him,” I said. I thought of the royal gifts, and how easily they might be abused... and how astonishing it was that they might not be. “You’ll know then. Human kings might be one matter, Chester. An elven king is another altogether.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Ivy said. “So let’s to bed, the sooner to greet that day.”

On our way back to our bedrolls, Chester murmured, “It would be something… to have a man worthy of one’s trust. One’s work.”

I glanced at him, wondering at the odd tone in his voice. Perhaps I was as oblivious as everyone declared, because I could not unriddle his expression, save to think it too grave, and perhaps too melancholic.

What had Amhric told me in the Fount’s cage? That what he needed was a connection to this world, a touch to make it real? I dared to draw close, brush Chester’s shoulder. When he didn’t object, I put an arm around Ivy’s waist and rested a tentative hand on Chester’s back, and this did not earn me a rebuff. He glanced at me with a winsome smile, wan but less distant, and I thought that permission, and an improvement. Almond took Ivy’s free hand, and so we returned. I missed Amhric still, but I thought I could grow accustomed to what was developing here, among my friends.