“ - after all, who are we to deny the very men and women who build our kingdom their legitimate voice in our affairs?” Mayor Larimer’s deep voice rolled along with the kind of momentum that Liv could only envy. She could well see how he’d managed to convince the people of Gold Creek to support him during the last election.

  “Are we less advanced, less enlightened, then Lucania?” Larimer shook his head, causing his bushy, half-tamed beard to wiggle in the air. He had the look of a mountain man who’d just come walking down the slopes from his winter cabin, straight into town and to a barber for a trim. “They’ve given the guilds a voice for decades now, while our own alliance council is dominated by the hereditary aristocracy.”

  “Lucania doesn’t give mayors a voice,” Liv pointed out, while the big man was taking a breath to plow forward with his arguments. “That was my idea, by the way.”

  “And a most forward-thinking plan it was, at the time,” Mayor Buckler said, leaning forward across the table. Over the past hour, he’d apparently decided to take for himself the role of the conciliator. “You set an example, at the time, that Lucania has yet to follow, though of course we may hope. And now, dare I say it, Your Majesty, it is time to set another example. Show any of those who might criticize you that their complaints are baseless. Renew your subjects’ faith in your wisdom.”

  Liv drummed her fingers against the dining room table. “I would be willing to accept the creation of nine additional seats which are filled by a general election from among the commons,” she offered. “If a member of the guild, who lives within alliance lands, wanted to stand for election to one of those seats, they could certainly do so. But seats specifically tied to the Lucanian guilds?” She shook her head. “No. Not as things currently stand.”

  Take the offer, Liv pleaded, silently. If she could split off even one or two of the mayors, break up this voting block which had somehow quietly formed without her knowledge, she was certain that she could defeat the proposal.

  “And if we have the votes to carry the question, Your Majesty?” Mayor Saltner asked. Liv noted that after the earlier incident, the woman had been very careful to address her politely. “Will you accept the will of your people?”

  It was all Liv could do not to simply release her Authority again. It would be so, so easy. The barest slip of her restraint, and she could crush every person in the room to the floor. She wouldn’t even have to cast a single spell; not a single one of them had a hope of resisting her. She’d matched her will against a goddess!

  Liv took a deep, slightly shaky breath, and deliberately forced her lips to curve in a smile. “I have always supported the decisions made by the alliance council. I will make my arguments, as I have before, and then I will abide by the vote.”

  “Good,” Mayor Buckler said, rising from his chair. Somehow, over the course of an hour of arguing, the platters of food which had been laid out for the luncheon had been decimated. No less than three roasted chickens, each picked down to the bones, testified to how vociferous the arguing had been. “That is all we ask, Your Majesty. That each of us bring our own arguments and our own conscience to the chamber tomorrow, and trust that together we will find a path forward for this kingdom.”

  As if his words were the signal, the other mayors rose, pushing their chairs aside, and began to offer her bows and curtsies.

  “Stay behind a moment, Mayor Buckler,” Liv said. She watched the rest of them leave - particularly Saltner. She was going to have to talk to Bryn Grenfell about that woman, and see what she could learn. Where had that sneer come from? There had to be some reason behind it. Finally, only she, her niece, and Buckler remained in the dining room.

  “Where is this all coming from, Ira?” Liv asked, allowing the stiff formality of the queen to fade from her voice, to be replaced by something resembling intimacy.

  Ira Buckler took one of the chairs in his hand, and dragged it over to where Bryn sat at Liv’s side. He set the chair down and slumped into it. “The immediate answer is the guilds, Your Majesty. They’ve offered substantial benefits to any mayor who supports this push of theirs. The longer answer is more complicated.”

  Liv leaned back in her chair, letting her eyes travel up to the ceiling. “Let me hear it, then. And don’t hold back.”

  Buckler hesitated a moment, probably choosing his words carefully. “It’s been nineteen years now since you won the battle at the pass,” he said. “An entire generation has grown up never having known war with Lucania. If you talk to the apprentice joiner working on your new house, he doesn’t know why that war was fought. He just knows that his guild has a voice on the council in Lucania, but not here in his own home. It’s very easy to frame that as a lack of respect.”

  “They attacked us!” Ettie burst out. “They killed my grandparents, and if they’d had their way they would have killed my parents as well!”

  “Over a feud between nobles,” Ira Buckler said. “A feud that the common people fought and died for, leaving a generation of orphans who are now grown. And if you asked them what they got out of that war, I’m not certain many of them would be able to tell you.”

  “That hospital, two blocks down, that treats them when they’re ill,” Ettie said, her voice rising. “The college their children can go to to learn magic. The goods coming in by waystone from Lendh ka Dakruim and Varuna! The sigil-etched cobblestones in the roads that melt snow in the winter. The army that keeps them safe.”

  Mayor Buckler spread his open hands. “I’m not arguing with you, My Lady,” he said. “All of those things are true. But there are other true things which cause resentment. The Temple inquisitors being given a free hand, for instance, or the fact that their queen didn’t wed a human.”

  “My marriage is none of their affair,” Liv growled, dropping her gaze from the ceiling to meet the mayor’s eyes.

  “You don’t understand how your human subjects might feel uncomfortable at the prospect of being ruled by the Eld?” Buckler’s eyebrows seemed to rise halfway up his forehead.

  “I’m half human,” Liv said, shaking her head. “The fact that Keri’s Eld shouldn’t matter.”

  “And yet, it does. These people, some of them, have been born, passed their entire childhood, and now grown to adulthood under the reign of a queen who doesn’t look a day older than when she took the crown,” the mayor said.

  “I look older,” Liv grumbled. “I’ve given birth to a daughter, Ira. I’m not some slip of a girl barely grown.”

  “You look, perhaps, twenty-five,” Buckler said. “Twenty-six if we’re being generous. At fifty-seven years old. People are starting to ask themselves just how long you’ll be queen for. Another fifty years? Easily. Another hundred? Will every working man and woman alive today have grown old, withered, and died while you still wear that crown, looking as fresh as a mountain meadow?”

  “And they don’t like that,” Liv guessed.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Buckler leaned forward. “It makes them wonder just how long certain things are going to go on. And if there’s no hope of the monarch changing in their lifetime, some of these people are going to begin looking for some other way of effecting change. You could defuse a lot of this by calling the temple off.”

  “And let the cult fester?” Liv shook her head. “No. We learned that lesson with the Day of Blood, and everything that followed. If Lucania hadn’t ignored them for so many years, they wouldn’t have burrowed so deep into the Drovers Guild in the first place. They wouldn’t have recruited the rusting dowager queen and crown princess of Lucania. The priests don’t hunt anyone but the guilty - Bheuv makes certain of that.”

  “Some might argue that the mere choice to worship a different goddess is not, in fact, just cause for death,” Mayor Buckler said. “That if they keep the laws of the alliance, there is little difference between someone who offers prayers to Ractia, and someone praying to Sitia.”

  “No.” This time it was Liv who leaned forward, and before she knew it, she was jabbing a finger directly at Ira Buckler’s face. “I fought Ractia, face to face. I led an army up Nightfall Peak. I watched my grandfather die because of her cultists. These are people who’ve tried to kill me, my friends and my family - not even once, but over and over again. You can’t compromise with fanatics who’ll take the slightest opportunity to plant a poisoned knife in your back.”

  Buckler looked at her finger until Liv dropped her hand, and then met her eyes. “There are those who would argue that conflict could have been prevented,” he said. “That negotiation and compromise, rather than war, would have been the preferable avenue.”

  “Well, those people weren’t there,” Liv shot back. “They weren’t there in the blood and the mud and the shit with good soldiers, good people dying all around them. They didn’t watch Ractia’s bloodletters drag our people off and slit their throats on top of that mountain. We did what we had to do, I did what I had to, to survive, and to get all of these people through alive, and I’m not going apologize for it.”

  Ira Buckler sighed. “And this is why there is a movement to temper your power on the council,” he explained.

  “To challenge her,” Ettie broke in. “You might as well say it plainly.”

  “To create a power block which can soften certain of the queen’s stances,” the mayor said. He stood up, and placed his chair back where he’d taken it from in the first place. “I don’t believe that anyone in this room was truly your enemy, Your Majesty.”

  “No,” Liv snapped. “They simply want to hand power over our alliance to Lucania.”

  “I do have other appointments today, Your Majesty,” Buckler said. “With your leave...”

  Liv waved her hand, and the mayor made his way out of the room. Only after he had gone did she turn to regard her niece. “Did you catch any lies?”

  “Buckler truly believes everything he said to you,” Ettie declared, without hesitation. “Doesn’t mean he knows everything that’s happening, of course. The most honesty you got out of Saltner was right at the beginning - after that, she was more careful. I think you scared her pretty good. But whenever she said she trusted you, had faith in you, anything like that - it was just empty words. The rest of them were considerably less committed. Doubtful. Hedging.”

  Liv sighed, and stood up. “Thank you, Ettie. Let’s get you back to your classes. I’d like you to come up to the palace for dinner tonight, though, if you can. My father and grandmother should be here this afternoon, and they don’t come south very often.”

  “Of course.” Ettie nodded, and rose from her own chair. “And I can still do what we talked about before?”

  “You can keep an eye out,” Liv confirmed. “So long as you don’t put yourself in any danger or get yourself in trouble. Come along.” She put her hand on her niece’s back, and led her out of the dining room.

  ?

  By the time Liv had dropped Ettie back off at the edge of the college campus, there wasn’t so long to wait until her family was due to arrive from Kelthelis. Liv had the carriage parked just outside the stone walls which protected the waystone, and then she climbed the stairs with Ghveris. The student who was on duty, and the guards waiting with their crossbows, all snapped to attention when they saw their queen, but Liv waved them off and found an empty patch of wall where she and her friend could wait alone.

  “How bad was it?” Ghveris asked, his voice a low rumble that Liv could feel deep in her chest, when they stood this close to each other.

  “It certainly wasn’t what I was expecting when I woke up this morning,” Liv told him, with a shake of her head. “It’s infuriating, honestly. I don’t understand how they can’t see what a problem it is to give Lucanian guilds, with guild masters appointed by the Lucanian king, a voting block in the alliance council.”

  The war-machine considered her words for a moment. “You have a great voice in the Mages Guild,” he pointed out. “Can you use that to divide your enemies?”

  “You would think so, as one of the only three archmages in the world,” she said. “I don’t know. I’ll talk to Lia Every about it. But if I had to guess - I doubt the other guildmasters brought her into this. She’s already on the outside, because she wasn’t appointed by a Lucanian monarch.”

  Ghveris let out a small blast of steam. “Talk to Lucan, then. He seemed a good boy, when last we met him.”

  “That was four years ago, before he reached his majority,” Liv pointed out. “A lot can change in four years. And setting up a meeting with the monarch of the neighboring kingdom isn’t something I can do with an afternoon’s notice.”

  “You have another plan, then?” Ghveris asked.

  “I’ll meet with the undecided votes,” Liv declared. “And firm up my own supporters, make sure none of them can be carved away. It’s about the only thing I can do.”

  “Not the only thing,” her friend said. “You are the queen. You could simply say this thing will not happen, and send your soldiers to arrest anyone who resists.”

  “If I did that, I really would be a tyrant,” Liv pointed out. The memory of the God-Eating Queen, that nightmare version of herself that she’d been shown by House Kaulris, floated, unbidden, to the surface of her mind, as if had so many times over the last eighteen years.

  But wherever her thoughts might have gone at that moment, she was interrupted by the red glow which began to build about the V?dic sigils etched into the white stone of the ancient circle below them.

  “Travellers, coming in!” one of the guards shouted. “Clear the stone!”

  It was already clear, but the man was only doing his job. Liv had, in fact, supported the use of such clear procedures, intended to make absolutely certain that with the increased traffic coming and going from Bald Peak, there would be no accidents.

  A column of light burst up into the sky, and when it faded, Liv’s father Valtteri, astride the saddle of a shaggy northern horse, was revealed. He wore the same braids that he’d had since Liv first met him, each tipped with an etched metal charm, bone, or piece of mana stone. She knew that every one could, with a whisper of his intent, be used to deadly effect in a fight. Rather than a thick parka, Valtteri ka Auris wore something closer to a Lucanian winter cloak of wool, trimmed with white fur. Though the land around Kelthelis was never truly warm, the summer was the most temperate time of year, when the sun didn’t set even at night.

  Just to his right, on her own mare, Liv’s grandmother, Eila t?r V?inis, pulled her hood back from where it had sheltered her face, letting the long, silken strands of her blue hair out to be caught on the wind.

  “Welcome back!” Liv called down from atop the wall. The arrival of her family brought a smile to her face that she didn’t even try to hide.

  “Livara!” her grandmother called up. The older woman swung down from her saddle, and Liv rushed around to the stairs so that she could meet them as they got off the waystone. For a moment, when she allowed herself to be swept up first in her grandmother’s arms, and then into her father’s embrace, she didn’t have to be the queen any longer: she could just be herself.

  “Where’s that granddaughter of mine,” Valtteri demanded, with a smile on his face. “I expected her to be down here waiting for us.”

  “Rianne’s at her lessons,” Liv told him. “Because I knew the moment the two of you arrived there’d be no point trying to get her to do anything useful for the rest of the day.”

  “Of course not,” Eila muttered. “You don’t send her north often enough, and she grows too quickly. You should really give her a brother sooner, rather than later, before they get too far apart.”

  Liv bit her lip. “We’ll see. You can hand your horses off to the guards, here, and I’ll take us all up to the peak,” she said.

  “And where’s your daiverim?” Valtteri asked. “I want to see these new alchemist’s siege engines out of Freeport he’s written me about.”

  “They’re called cannons,” Liv told her father, taking him by the arm the moment he’d passed off the reins of his horse. “We have two of them with the army, and I’m certain he’ll be happy to show them to you, and to give you an entire tour.”

  “We will fire them together,” Ghveris promised. “They make a most satisfying sound.”

  “Anyway, I sent Keri down to the Temple of the Trinity in Whitehill,” Liv explained. “They’ve finished their statue of Pandit Sharma, and wanted one of us to look at it before they have a dedication ceremony.” She waved her hand, and a disc of blue mana coalesced, hovering perhaps the width of a finger above the cobblestones of the street.

  Together, the four of them stepped onto the disk, which took them flying up into the air toward the palace at the summit of Bald Peak.

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  Dramatis Personae

  Livara t?r Valtteri Kaen Syv? - Archmage, former scullery maid at Castle Whitehill, the bastard daughter of Maggie Brodbeck and Valtteri Ka Auris. Queen of the Alliance and Lady of Winter. Already certain that she has made a mistake in agreeing to this nonsense... [38 Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]

  Eila t?r V?inis - Mother of Valtteri, widow of Auris, grandmother of Liv. Has come to spoil the children. [30 Rings of Mana]

  Ghveris, the Beast of Iuronnath - Formerly a Great Bat in service to Ractia, now the remains of his body form the heart of an Antrian juggernaut. Has something of a...militaristic view on how to solve problems. Probably should never be put in charge of anything but soldiers. [Mana Battery: 10 Rings]

  Henriette Summerset aka Ettie- Daughter of Matthew and Triss, niece of Liv and Keri, cousin of Rei and Princess Rianne. Heir to the Duchy of Whitehill. Apprentice of the Mages Guild. Did not expect to get that angry. [12 Rings of Mana]

  Ira Buckler - Mayor of Bald Peak. Trying so, so hard to keep Liv from killing everyone.

  Larimer - Mayor of Gold Creek. Orator.

  Madeline Saltner - Mayor of Newport. Refraining from poking the bear - for the moment.

  Valtteri ka Auris - Father of Liv, son of Auris and Eila. "Show me the explosions!" [37 Rings of Mana]