Anadar II/II

VII

Shara had known Anadar for as long as she could think, and that knowledge was not a loose remembering, but something that ran through her life like a firm thread, never fully visible and yet holding everything together. She still remembered exactly the day she had seen him for the first time, not because that day had been particularly loud, but precisely because it had not been. The school had been a place that smelled of order back then, of rules, of a world in which everyone knew their place as long as they knew where they stood. And she had had no place.

It had not been said out loud. No one had directly told her she did not belong. But she had felt it in the looks, in conversations that died the moment she came closer, in the way decisions were made without her name ever being spoken. A woman in training was not forbidden, but neither was it a thought anyone seriously pursued. It was easier to pretend the case did not exist at all.

And then there had been Anadar.

He had not argued at length, not tried to convince anyone, not even raised his voice in protest. He had simply spoken, and what he said had carried weight. Not because he was loud, but because he could afford not to be. Even then he was already master of four schools, and that standing was not only a title but a fact everyone in the room knew. When he said she would be accepted, it was not a suggestion. It was a decision.

He took her training on himself.

For Shara, in that moment, it had not only been an opportunity, but a promise she made to herself: that she would never disappoint him. She did not want merely to pass, merely to keep up. She wanted to show him his decision had been right. And from that desire grew something that carried her even when everything else became heavy.

The training was harder than she had ever imagined. Spells were not words you spoke, but states you had to endure. They demanded strength, concentration, control, and often pain. Not always physical, but always tangible. There were moments when she believed her body had turned against her, that her muscles would not obey, that her mind wanted to slip away precisely when it had to stay still.

The other students did not make it easier. Many of them were stronger, more robust, and above all more certain in what they were doing. They had never had to question whether they belonged here. And they made sure she felt that. Not always openly, often only casually, with remarks, with looks, with that quiet mockery that strikes deeper than open scorn.

In the evenings she was often alone.

She sat in the sleeping quarters or outside on the walls, hands still trembling from the exercises, her head heavy from the attempt to hold everything together, and in those moments the thought of stopping kept returning. Simply not showing up the next day. Simply disappearing before anyone said it officially.

And every time that thought grew too large, Anadar was there.

Not always physically, not always in the room, but in a way she could not explain. Sometimes he would suddenly be beside her, as if he had known when she needed him. Sometimes he said only one sentence, so unremarkable it would have slid off anyone else, but in her it landed exactly where it had to. He made no grand promises, no false encouragement. He spoke with a clarity that made her feel he saw her, not as a problem, but as a possibility.

So he became her mentor.

And at some point he became more than that.

She trusted him without thinking about it. Not because she was naive, but because in all that time she had never experienced a moment in which he led her in the wrong direction. That trust had not come lightly. It had been earned, through every hour, every correction, every silence that said more than words.

She became better.

Not suddenly, not through a single breakthrough, but through a steady shifting of boundaries. She surpassed her own level, then the one before it. She became better, better than all the others in the school, except him. He outshone all of them. She grew into a woman, and with her her standing grew. She worked her way through the two other schools faster than prescribed, not out of arrogance, but out of a single aim: to return. To the Fortress. To him. When she was finally named a master and Anadar himself handed her that distinction, it was not a moment of triumph in the classic sense. It was something quieter. Something deeper. An arrival.

But with that position came a new fight.

Her first class was not only students, but men who did not take her seriously. Half grown brutes who wanted to test her limits, who believed authority was measured in height or volume. Shara had to assert herself, not with violence, but with consequence. With control. With the ability not to lose her balance, no matter what was thrown at her. And she prevailed. Slowly, but irreversibly.

Respect did not come all at once, but it stayed once it was there. Even among the masters who had initially only tolerated her, something shifted. Not all of them liked to admit it, but they accepted her.

Then came the time without Anadar.

When he went to the Life School, the balance shifted again. Things that had been self evident suddenly became negotiable again. Small privileges disappeared. Decisions were made over her head. It was not an open attack, but a slow pushing back. And again she had to fight, this time not against students, but against structures, against what is not named because it sits too deep. And again she prevailed. Not because she was stronger, but because she did not give up.

When Anadar returned from the School of Mind, the relief was there before she could name it. Yet at the same time she noticed the change, already during their duel, a duel she had lost before it began. He was no longer the same man. Not weaker. On the contrary. He had grown, more present, in a way that was hard to grasp. His presence had become denser, as if something in him had condensed that had previously only been hinted at. He seemed less predictable, not in the sense of danger, but in the sense of depth and inscrutability.

And then came the fight, the binding of the demon. And in that moment Shara knew something had happened that went beyond what everyone believed they had seen. She felt it not as an observation, but as certainty. Inside him a battle had been fought that no one but he could have fought. Since then she watched him: the tension, the restlessness, the hunted look, and that craving that crept into his movements as if it were a second will.

And then came that slaughter.

That moment when he no longer paused, no longer weighed, no longer decided, but only acted. The scream for blood, which was not only a word but a state. The not stopping even when no danger remained. For the first time in her life Shara was afraid.

Not only for him. Of him.

When he turned, the sword black gleaming without a single drop of blood on the blade, and that grin sat on his face that was no longer only human, she did not know whether he still saw her, whether he could still distinguish. And she knew she could not stop him. Not anymore. He had become too powerful. And he was beginning to understand it.

Since then they rode in silence.

The days grew shorter, the cold sharper. Midwinter hung in the air as if the world itself were holding its breath. They rode fast, too fast, driven by an aim that was more feeling than plan: Zoordak. The Mother. Safety?

Anadar rode in front. Not out of habit, but out of distance and safety; they kept him in sight. He spoke little. And when he did, it was short, clipped, as if each word had to be fetched from another room. Miene and Siendra kept their distance, watched him, tested him in a way that was not obvious but precise. Shara knew they were searching. And she also knew they would find nothing as long as he did not allow it. Morgut often kept himself between them and Anadar, like a shield, as if he knew that if something happened he would have to be the first to catch it.

Shara did not seek conversation. She did not know how to reach him.

After many days they reached Zoordak. And the city was different, extraordinary in the already snow covered landscape. Not only larger or richer, but different in its nature. It lay under a gold gleaming dome that gathered light and threw it back as if it had decided darkness had no fixed place here. Towers rose from it, slender and calm, as if they were not only pointing into the sky but ordering it. The streets were warm. Thermal heat ran through the ground, invisible but palpable, as if the city itself lived from within. In the background inactive volcanoes rose, quiet but present, and a river of warm water, steaming in places, wound through the streets as if someone here had decided even the elements can be tamed.

At the edge of the city stood the Mother’s temple, a round shining building. And behind it a forest that did not belong here: tropical, dense, foreign, as if someone had anchored a piece of another world in this place. They stopped, and were invited in.

In the courtyard Miene and Siendra were received at once. Embraces, closeness, relief. The other daughters took them in as if they had never been gone. Morgut was greeted too, familiar and warm. Only around Anadar did everyone give him a wide berth.

Not obviously, but unmistakably. He radiated a presence that said: stay back. That aura lay around him, and he did not seem to notice it at all. They were led into the inner temple, into a small round room bathed in golden light.

In the middle sat the Mother.

Slender. Still. Beautiful in a way that needed no explanation. When Shara saw her, something fell away from her. Miene and Siendra stepped forward. The Mother rose, kissed them, held their hands, and both of them looked as if they had finally found support again. Then she greeted Morgut.

And finally she stepped toward Shara, leaned in, kissed her gently, and whispered:

“My daughter.”

VIII

Slonda had grown restless. The library, which for so long had been a place of clarity to him, began to change, or perhaps it was only he who was changing, and no longer perceived the same rooms in the same way. The catacombs, where he had spent almost every waking hour before, felt narrower than they used to, damper, heavier, as if the stone itself were holding something back that did not belong on the surface. The smell of old parchment and wet rock, which had once soothed him, now lay on his tongue like something bitter you cannot spit out.

He kept going down.

Not out of hunger for knowledge anymore, but out of discipline. Because he knew someone had to do this work. Roll after roll, parchment after parchment, he took them in hand, unfolded them carefully, deciphered the crumbling signs, compared, sorted, set aside, only to find at the end of the day that hardly any of it fit together. It was knowledge without context, fragments without time, thoughts without origin. And yet there was that one document.

It was not on the shelves. It did not belong with the others. It lay with him, on his table, in the evenings, when the work was done and the day withdrew. Then he would sit there, the lamp turned low, the light steady, and stare at that parchment as if mere looking might eventually become understanding. It eluded him. He recognized individual words, splinters of meaning that fell apart at once the moment he tried to connect them. The rest was foreign. Not only old, but different. As if the script had not been made to be read, but to be remembered.

It became a puzzle that would not let him go.

He began to develop theories. Simple ones at first. That the letters were laid over one another, that you had to layer them to see the sense. He traced the signs, transparent on transparent, turned them, shifted them, until his eyes hurt. Nothing. Then he tried it in his mirror. He held the parchment up, a candle behind it, then the candle in front, pressed it against the light. For a moment he believed he saw something, a structure, an order that had not been there before, and in that moment he was convinced he was on the verge of finding the key. He sat down, spread everything out, copied, checked.

And failed. Again and again.

Once he turned the parchment completely over and read it from bottom to top, word by word, as if direction itself were part of the spell. Another time he broke the script into individual signs and tried to rearrange them, as if they were not words at all, but a construction.

He dreamed of it. Not like a text, but like a door. A gate that would not open no matter how often he pushed against it. And in his dreams he knew that behind it lay something important, not for the world, but for him. Sometimes he would jerk awake from those dreams, convinced he had understood. He would leap up, run barefoot through the corridors of the library, the stones cold under his feet, and search for confirmation, for a hint, for anything that could hold the thought in place. And every time, in the end, there was only disappointment.

Meanwhile, life went on.

He took part in conversations because people expected it of him. With the king, with the administrators, with those responsible for the refugees who were now arriving in ever greater numbers in Tandor. They were conversations full of numbers, full of organization, full of questions about food, shelter, work. More and more people had to be provided for, with no clarity on how long they would stay. Slonda listened, answered, proposed solutions. But part of him was not there. Part of him was still sitting over that parchment.

In one of those conversations, as it once again turned to distribution and capacity, the thought of Drinda came to him, suddenly, without warning. He saw the boy in his mind, seated at the desk, unremarkable, focused, and wondered when he had last seen him. He meant to say it aloud. But in that very moment a new question was asked, someone expected an answer, and the thought slipped out of his hands as if it had never been there.

Later, as he rose, it came back. And vanished again. As if something inside him prevented him from finishing that question. He had another conversation with Tranda and Isidre. The room was warmer than the catacombs, dry, orderly, and for a moment everything felt normal again. Tranda said that messages had arrived from the other schools. Wind, Water, and Life had written, unusually direct, unusually interested.

They asked about Anadar. Not in general. Specifically. They wanted to know where he was, what had happened, how exactly the events were to be classified. Tranda spoke of it calmly, almost casually, as if it were only a formality, but Slonda heard the undertone. Something was moving.

“The next conclave will probably take it up,” Tranda said. “Something in connection with the Code. I do not yet know in what direction it will go.”

Isidre listened only halfway. Her gaze rested on Slonda. “And you,” she said at last, “you still spend your days in the catacombs.” It was not a question.

Slonda gave a slight shrug. “Someone has to create order down there.” A small smile passed through the room.

“Then you are exactly the right one for it,” Isidre replied.

“You could help,” Slonda suggested, dryly. “My eyes are not the best anymore.”

Isidre laughed softly. “I prefer to deal with things that do not resist being healed.”

It was a light moment. Almost trivial.

And yet Slonda suddenly asked, without having planned it: “Have you seen Drinda lately?”

Both shook their heads. “No,” Tranda said. “But that is not unusual. Perhaps he is in a meditation phase. It is nearly the Midwinter Solstice.”

Slonda nodded. It sounded plausible. And yet something remained.

The conclave itself grew more restless when it finally met. At first the mood had been almost relieved. The demon had been destroyed, stabbed down by Anadar. A threat had been removed, and for a moment it seemed the world had stabilized, that piece of unleashed magic bound. But the calm did not last.

The representatives of the Wind School, the Water School, and the Life School introduced a motion to investigate the events. Not generally, but aimed specifically at Anadar. His power, his actions, his position. Six circles. Aspiration to power. The Code.

These were words you did not place next to each other lightly. They wanted a tribunal. An interrogation. Possibly an inquisition. Fire, Mind, and Earth opposed it. Manador and the Fiery Fortress in particular were angry, indignant, almost furious.

Slonda said little, and when he did, not loudly, not emotionally, but clearly. There was no cause, he said. No basis. His brother did not strive for power. Tranda and Isidre supported his view, though they added that if there was nothing to hide, at least an interrogation could do no harm. But of course they yielded to Slonda’s wish.

And then the Mother spoke. As always calm. As always without a clear position. And yet it was a position. A sentence that, for some, was assent, and for others, postponement. A decision that was not a decision, and precisely because of that, it worked.

The vote ended three to three.

The investigation was not decided. For now. But the resentment remained. Especially among the fire mages, who could not accept that one of their own, Master Anadar, was even being questioned. Especially Anadar, who stood above it all.

While all this happened, Slonda’s thoughts kept returning to his parchment. Weeks passed. He made no progress. Finally, one day, he rose, left everything lying where it was, and went back to the scribe’s room. He asked for Drinda.

No one had seen him. Not yesterday. Not the day before. Not in recent times. It was as if he had simply vanished.

Back in his chamber, Slonda sat at the table again. The parchments lay before him, ordered and yet chaotic, and that one piece was once again in his hand, heavier than it should have been.

There was a knock. Soft. Then again.

“Come in,” Slonda said. The door opened.

Unremarkable as always. Perhaps a little pale, perhaps a little unsure.

“You had them looking for me,” he said.

Slonda looked at him, a moment too long.

“Yes,” he said at last. “I was worried.”

Drinda fumbled, searched for words, stumbled over them.

He had fallen asleep, he explained. Instead of finishing the copies. He had been tired, ashamed, and when he came back, everything was gone. He could not explain it. He was sorry.

Slonda looked at him. Then he laughed quietly. Not mocking. More relieved.

He explained, calmly and simply, that he had taken everything himself. Drinda visibly relaxed. He looked relieved, almost too relieved, and as he turned to go he said casually, almost as an afterthought:

“I thought I’d lost the roll with the spell that goes through time.”

Slonda nodded. Casually. He did not think anything of it.

As he left, Drinda hardly backed away from the door, as if he were afraid he might have to enter the room again if he stayed in it too long. His hand rested a moment too long on the wood, as if he needed to make sure the world outside was still the same, and only then did he close it quietly behind him. His footsteps faded in the corridor, first clear, then muffled, then no longer audible at all, and with them vanished the immediate presence of that conversation, which in the moment had still felt harmless.

Slonda remained seated.

The lamp cast a steady light over the table, over the parchments, over the disorder that was no real disorder, only the visible result of a mind that had pursued too many paths at once. His hand still lay on the edge of that one document, almost by accident, as if it had touched it without consciously deciding to. And for a moment nothing happened.

He took the quill in hand without really knowing why. Habit, perhaps. Or the attempt to pick up the thread again where he had left it before Drinda entered. The tip touched the parchment, drew a line that made no sense, a sign without meaning, and in that very moment he realized his mind was no longer with the movement.

Something had shifted.

Not loudly. Not suddenly. But like a thought that makes itself felt with delay, because it first has to find a place where it can stay.

He set the quill down again, slowly.

The room was quiet, but it was not an empty quiet. It was the kind of quiet that forms when something has been said that has not yet been processed, when the words themselves have already faded, but their meaning is only just beginning to unfold. Slonda sat there and let his gaze wander over the parchments without truly seeing them, as if he were searching them for something he had already heard without understanding.

A spell that goes through time.

The words did not appear at once as a thought, but as an echo. First indistinct, almost like the memory of a conversation too unimportant to keep. Then clearer. Sharper. And finally so distinct that they could no longer be ignored.

Slonda lifted his head.

His gaze stayed on the parchment before him, that one stubborn piece that for days, perhaps weeks, had resisted every attempt, as if it had no intention of being understood, only the patience to wait until someone found the right access. He laid his hand on it, not accidentally this time, but deliberately, and felt the material beneath his fingers, the slight roughness, the small unevennesses that were nothing special and yet in that moment seemed to carry more weight than they should.

A spell.

Through time.

He did not repeat the words aloud, but they were there, complete, with a clarity he had not allowed himself before. And with them came not immediate understanding, but something else, something closer to unease than to insight. Because if Drinda was right, even by chance, even only in a half sentence he had not meant seriously, then it meant this parchment was not merely a fragment, not merely a piece of old knowledge, but something that did not submit to his usual order.

Time was not an element you simply described.

Time was something you accepted.

And if it was different here, if there truly was a spell that did not move within a moment but along something that itself never stands still, then it was no longer a matter of translation, no longer a matter of script and language. It was a matter of understanding that he might not even be able to possess.

Slonda leaned back slightly, without taking his eyes off the parchment. In his head, thoughts began to arrange themselves, not fast, not hectic, but slowly, carefully, as if he wanted to avoid losing them again. He remembered his attempts to turn the script, to mirror it, to break it apart, to put it together anew. He remembered the moments when he believed he had seen a structure, only to lose it again as if it had never existed.

And suddenly that thought no longer looked like failure.

But like a hint.

The thought was still unfinished, hardly more than a direction, and yet it had weight. It did not settle at once, but neither did it vanish again like so many others before. Slonda felt something in him tighten, not like panic, but like concentration gathering before it takes hold.

His gaze slid over the signs again.

And for the first time he did not feel that something was missing.

But that he had overlooked something that had been there all along.

Not because it was hidden.

But because he had been searching for it in the wrong way.

He leaned forward slightly, fingers still on the parchment as if he had to hold it even though it did not move. Inside him no clear image formed, no solution, no finished thought. But there was something else. He opened the door and went looking for Drinda again. Drinda should explain what he had just said. Slonda strode quickly down the corridor and searched. He did not find him. He asked after him. Drinda? No, no one had seen him lately. Perhaps he was meditating during the Midwinter time.

IX

The silence of the North was not true silence.

If you lived in it long enough, you learned that. You learned that quiet here came in layers. There was the dull weight of snow on roofs and branches. There was the distant crack of frozen trunks when cold drives into wood and splits it from within. There was the soft spill of powder from a limb when a bird lands or when something heavier brushes past beneath it. And under all of that, deeper, almost like a second floor to the world, lay what Xiodri listened for.

Hunger.

It was not always there. Not so clear. Not so close. But in these days she could hear it again.

She sat as an owl on a black branch, tight against the trunk of an old pine, her head turned into the wind, her feathers drawn close, and looked down at the hut on the edge of the abandoned village. Smoke rose from the chimney. Not much. Just enough to show there was life inside, warmth, fat, stores, breath. Two people.

Nigk stepped out the door, shoved it open with his shoulder, and stood a moment in the snow. He carried wood in his arms, more than a single trip required, because people in cold countries learn quickly to hate unnecessary walks. His breath hung white in front of him. Behind him came Xian, taller, straighter, with a bundle of dried furs she had shaken out. She said something. Nigk answered. Even at this distance, Xiodri could tell from the movement of their mouths that it was not worry. Only routine. Only that strange, almost insolent way of settling into a place where others had only passed through and vanished.

They had settled in.

That was what was strange.

Most who saw the North like this understood quickly that it did not want them. These two had understood it and stayed anyway. They had stacked more wood. They had stuffed the worst gaps in the hut with fur and cloth. They had stamped a snow path from door to shed. They had checked traps, hung meat, melted water from ice, as if all of that were not desperation but order.

They knew they were snowed in. Xiodri saw it in the calm of their movements, in the way people behave when they stop waiting for tomorrow to be an escape. Another month at least, perhaps longer. The forest had taken them and would not give them back soon.

And still they went outside.

Again and again.

To hunt, to read tracks, to look around, out of duty, out of habit, perhaps also because a human cannot sit for days in a hut without their thoughts beginning to gnaw at the walls.

Xiodri could have been indifferent to it.

She had seen many winters. She had learned not to take death personally. Up here, those who were careless died. Those who were too loud died. Those who believed a roof and a fire meant safety often died most surprised of all.

And yet she watched them.

Not only out of curiosity.

There was something about them that argued against her experience.

They did not smell like mages, not really. Not like the Schools. Not of ink, ordered words, ritual smoke, and that clean iron measure that clings to magic when it is taught and supervised in halls. These two carried leather, fur, sweat, smoke, animal fat, cold metal. Humans, in other words.

And still there was that other layer.

On them. Around them. Above all around the things they carried.

The young man’s sack was wrong. Quietly wrong. Deeply wrong. Not evil, but made by a hand that could do more than hands should. The bows were wrong too. They lay unremarkable and yet Xiodri could feel their tension even when no string vibrated. And the amulet the woman wore under her clothing. It was small, hidden, but when Xiodri opened her senses wider at night, there was a cold sheen around it, a density, as if someone had poured a thought into metal and made it durable.

You did not find such things.

You did not get them by accident.

Someone had made them. Someone with a great deal of power. Not raw power, like an animal has or like a storm takes, but power with form, direction, intent.

It unsettled her.

Not because she believed these two were her enemies.

Because power laid into objects always brings a story with it. And stories of that kind rarely end kindly for witches.

Xiodri knew the words the Schools used for beings like her. Wrong. Unbound. Forbidden. She knew the old tales of villages where women were tied to stakes because milk soured and children ran fevers. She also knew the other tales, the worse and truer ones, where mages arrived cool and polite and took away what did not fit their order.

She had lived long enough to know a pyre does not always need to be made of wood.

Sometimes a look and a judgment are enough.

Sometimes a single word, spoken in the right circle, is enough.

That was why she should have left. Or never looked in the first place. Let the two meet their fate as she had let others meet theirs. People die. The forest eats what goes into it. That is not cruelty. It is geography.

But then there was the bear.

She knew him.

Not the way humans know an animal by giving it a name and pretending they understand something because of it. She knew him because she had seen his tracks for years. The old scars in his coat from the one time she had seen him by the river in summer. The left ear, torn at the top. The way he tested the ground, not frantic, but with that slow decisiveness of old animals that no longer have to play because they have already won or survived the game.

He was old.

And old did not mean weak. Not up here. Old meant he had learned what hunger allows.

In a good year he ate fish, carrion, roots, berries, a young stag if luck or rage gave him one. In a bad year he ate whatever could be eaten. And in a winter like this, with so much snow, so little movement, and a forest no longer in balance, hunger became something else.

Malice was perhaps the wrong word.

But people often use malice when they mean something no longer knows a boundary.

The bear was like that.

He had picked up the scent.

Not only the scent of humans, but the other one clinging to them: metal, leather, blood, smoke, magic. Something in it made him restless. It drew him and repelled him at once. Xiodri felt it whenever she crossed his trail. He did not circle the village like a cautious animal. He ranged wider through the forest, stopped, rose sometimes, tested the air, then moved on again, as if thinking.

The first time she drove him off at night.

Not openly. No light, no word, no sign that would make the two in the hut lift their heads. Only a shift in the forest. A sound from the wrong direction. The snap of a branch where no branch should have snapped. A trace of foreign smell she laid the way others lay snares. The bear stopped, snorted, grew huge in the dark, and for a moment she thought he would push on. Then he turned away.

The second time she flew ahead of him as an owl, so low through the trees that snow fell from branches into his face. He swiped at it, rumbled, rose, searched for something he did not understand, and withdrew.

The third time she had to do more. In the undergrowth she briefly took another form, not fully, only enough to seem larger, and sent a growl through the forest that was not her own and yet came from her. The bear backed off, unwillingly. Not defeated. Only cheated out of another day.

Each time she drove him off, he grew hungrier.

And each time she returned and found the hut still standing, she asked herself why she was doing it.

For herself.

For these two strangers.

For humans who might, once they recovered, go south and tell the wrong people what they had seen.

Often she sat on her branch and argued with herself in the silence.

Let them die, said the cautious part of her, not out of hardness, out of reason. Two humans are two tongues, two memories, two chances that one day fire will come through the woods and someone will say there was a witch.

Another part, older perhaps or more tired, said: And then.

Then you are alone again, as before, as in all the winters, as after all the faces that passed by only from afar.

She hated that part.

Because it was right.

Loneliness does not make you soft. It makes you sharp. But past a certain point it only cuts inward.

Xiodri had grown used to her loneliness like a scar. You live with it. You build around it. You call it freedom because that sounds more dignified. But when she watched the two down there in the evening, sitting close to the fire, how Xian cut meat into thin strips with a steady hand and Nigk patched a strap with cramped fingers, how they barely spoke and yet constantly registered one another, Xiodri felt something she hated to admit.

Envy.

Not of their warmth. Not of their food. Not even of their youth.

Of what was effortless for them.

That they were not alone and did not even notice it because to them it was as normal as breathing.

She, by contrast, had been her only echo for years.

That did not make decisions easier.

Days passed.

The two hunted. Not successfully every day, but with discipline. A rabbit, a fox, once a scrawny deer that had turned the wrong way in deep snow. They grew more cautious because they kept hearing the bear. Deep in the forest, sometimes nearer, sometimes farther. A rumble that traveled through trunks. A scrape at bark. A heavy step that did not hurry because it knew haste is for the young.

“He’s around a lot,” Nigk said once at the door, his face turned into the wind.

Xian nodded without turning. “Yes.”

“Maybe he’s just looking for food.”

“Maybe.”

Nigk lingered. “You sound like you don’t believe that.”

Xian set the bow aside and looked at him. Her eyes were dark in the narrow light. “I believe that things that watch you eventually stop only watching.”

Nigk twisted his mouth. “That’s unpleasant.”

“That’s the North,” she said.

They knew there was danger.

But they did not know how close it already moved past them. Not how often at night a third watch stood outside between trunk and snow. Not that eyes watched over them, suspicious and unwilling, and that they were still alive because a witch could not decide.

Then came the day when that was no longer enough.

Morning was leaden. No storm, but a sky hanging so low it seemed it wanted to sink into the forest. Nigk and Xian went out because they needed meat and because the weather was just good enough to make that kind of decision that later looks like hubris. They followed a track west, deeper between the trees, where snow in hollows reached past the knees and elsewhere had been pressed hard by wind.

Xiodri followed from above.

Not close. Not openly. Only far enough to read the forest ahead of them.

And she saw him too late.

Not because he was well hidden. An animal of that size does not hide like a fox. It disappears by sheer weight, by silence big enough that you expect noise and therefore do not understand the absence of noise.

He lay in the wind shadow of fallen trunks, half under snow, only a dark back if you knew what to look for. Nigk walked past first. Xian two steps behind. Then the bear lifted its head.

There was no warning sound.

No threat, no scraping, no theatrical rising like in stories people tell around a fire. He simply came.

With a speed that made his mass an insult.

Xian shouted Nigk’s name already turning, already with the bow in hand. The first arrow struck the bear in the chest. The second grazed the shoulder. Nigk yanked his own bow up, shot too low, the arrow driving into snow. Then the bear was there.

They jumped apart. Only that kept them from dying in the first heartbeats.

The bear surged between them, turned on a hind leg as if the snow were water and he had been born in it. Nigk tore a knife from his belt, too small, too human for what stood in front of him. Xian had drawn her sword, and the metallic sound in that white quiet was so sharp it was as if someone had cut a tear into the day.

“To the trees,” she shouted.

They did not flee. They fought backward, shooting, shouting, steering, making space. Another arrow hit the throat. Another stuck somewhere in the fur as if the animal had simply taken it along. There was blood, but too little, too dark, too meaningless. The bear shook itself, roared now, and the sound was so deep snow burst from branches.

Nigk climbed onto a low pine, more reflex than hope. Two breaths later the bear was at the trunk, paws against wood, starting up. Not clumsy. Not blindly furious. With the terrible, practical determination of a creature that does not accept that height should be protection.

Nigk jumped down in time, landed wrong, buckled, came back up. Xian stepped between them, sword held in both hands, and landed the first real hit. The blade drove sideways into the base of the neck. The bear whipped around. A paw caught her at the shoulder, not full, more a glancing blow, and still she was thrown aside as if the forest itself had struck her away.

After that there was no clean plan.

Only time breaking into fits.

They ran. The bear chased. They turned, shot, stabbed, dodged. Once Nigk lured him through a narrow snow channel between rocks and Xian put two arrows into his face. One went into the mouth. The bear retched, blew blood and foam, only grew more enraged. Once they lit dry resin and hurled burning branches at him. Fire ate into fur, smelled for a horrific moment like victory, and then the animal came on anyway, hair burnt, hatred burning in its eyes.

Hours passed.

Not in one continuous fight, but in waves of flight, flaring contact, renewed pursuit. Again and again they believed they had gained distance. Again and again they heard him again. That breaking of underbrush, that snorting, that heavy, relentless coming. It was no longer an animal you can escape. It was a verdict catching up step by step.

When they reached the hunting hut it was already afternoon, gray light that would soon turn to early dusk. The hut was small, rough, old. A shelter, not a home. They threw themselves inside, slammed the beam across the door, dragged a table in front, then a bench. Nigk sagged against the wall, pale, breath like knives. Xian could barely stand straight. Her left shoulder hung lower. Blood seeped through her sleeve. The sword trembled in her hand, not from fear, from exhaustion.

Outside there was scraping.

Then silence.

That silence was worse.

Nigk looked up. “Maybe…” he began.

The door shuddered so hard the sentence died before it finished.

Another blow.

Wood splintered, the beam sprang half out of its bracket. Xian tore a burning log from the firepit and held it in front of her. Not because she believed it would be enough, but because humans fight as long as what they hold still looks like a means.

The third impact broke the door open.

Cold slammed in. Snow. Wood shards. And behind it the bear, bigger than the opening because everything looks bigger when it breaks through what should have been shelter.

Nigk tried to get up and sank again. The bear rose on its hind legs, filled the room, black fur, blood, steam, burned stink, arrows still in him like mockery. Xian stood between it and her brother, sword across her body, feet too far apart because she was tired and had to force herself not to fall.

In that moment Xiodri saw everything.

She sat outside on the low edge of the roof as an owl, snow on her talons, and knew that now a decision would be made.

Not in theory. Not later. Now.

If she did nothing, they died. Maybe both. Maybe one first. After that it would be quiet. Safe. Simple.

If she intervened, she would be seen.

Not as a shadow. Not as a vague miracle. As what she was. A witch. A shapeshifter. A woman of the forest who works without words and therefore is a problem in any ordered world.

She thought of fire. Of men’s eyes. Of the cool, horrible way mages can judge when something does not fit their code. She thought of how many years she had survived precisely because she did not show herself. And she thought of how sick she was of those years.

Being alone is easier when you have no choice.

When you do have a choice, it becomes unbearable.

Inside she heard Xian’s breathing, harsh, broken, stubborn.

She heard Nigk’s half choked groan from the floor.

She saw the bear, that old hungry piece of winter, and knew she could drive him off again, perhaps, someday, if there were space. But there was no space anymore. Only this hut, these few heartbeats, this woman with a sword and this man on the floor.

Xiodri hated the world in that moment.

Because it demanded exactly what she feared most.

To be seen.

She pushed off.

As an owl she flew through the broken door, soundless, fast, a dark beat in the smoky half light. For a tiny absurd moment the bear looked up at her, irritated, as if something so small could not matter in this room.

Xiodri landed directly in front of him.

And changed.

It was not a beautiful process. No smooth magic, no dance. It was tearing, a shove through flesh and form, a breaking open from small to large, from bone to another order of bone. The air pressed against the walls. Where an owl had stood a breath ago, a second bear now stood, not quite as large as the old one, but quicker, younger in anger, clearer in intent.

They hit each other like falling trees.

The hut groaned. The table exploded into splinters. The firepit burst apart, sparks jumping into snow at the door. Xian was crushed against the wall, caught herself with the last of her strength and dragged Nigk a little out of the immediate line. Then there was no room left for thinking. Only fur, blood, claws, teeth, growling so dense you felt it in the chest.

Xiodri did not fight elegantly.

She fought the way creatures fight who know that technique is a polite word for survival. She went low for the throat where the bear was already injured. She accepted bites to land better bites. One swipe tore across her side and ripped fur and skin. Pain flashed white through her. She held on. He caught her by the scruff and shook her as if to break her into pieces. She found purchase with her hind legs in the broken boards and drove forward again.

Blood sprayed dark against the wall.

The old bear was stronger.

Xiodri was faster and had more to lose.

That made her crueler.

At last she sank her teeth deep into his throat, not fatal, but close enough that his roar collapsed into a wet, furious gurgle. He tore free. For a moment they faced each other, wavering, steaming, red in the fur, heads low. Then he did the only thing the last scraps of instinct still allowed.

He backed off.

Not from fear. From calculation.

He turned, crashed through the doorframe into snow, and vanished between dark trunks, bleeding, heavy, but alive. One more sound. Then nothing.

Xiodri stayed a heartbeat longer in bear shape. The pain pulsed with every breath now. It would have been smarter to remain like that. Safer. A bear carries bear wounds better. She knew it.

Then she saw Nigk.

He lay half under Xian’s arm, and now, with motion finished, the extent was clear. The paw had struck his ribcage. Not torn fully open, but deep enough. Cloth shredded, beneath it flesh, blood, a wound where the body already begins to give itself up.

Xiodri changed back.

The return was worse. Too fast. Too forced. She nearly dropped to her knees, caught herself against the shattered wall, gasping, her face gray beneath the blood. Her left side burned. A bite on her shoulder gaped. Her breath came in jolts.

Xian stared at her.

Not like someone who does not understand. Like someone too tired to decide which of her many incomprehensions comes first.

“No words,” Xiodri rasped. “Later. If there is a later.”

Xian opened her mouth, shut it again.

Good, Xiodri thought, dazed. Sensible. The woman was sensible.

“He dies if we stay here,” Xiodri said. “Put him on a stretcher. It isn’t far. You follow me. Now.”

Xian looked at Nigk, then at the stranger in front of her, blood smeared, shaking, impossible. Then she nodded once.

It was not agreement. It was surrender to urgency.

They tore boards from the hut’s remains, stretched fur between them, bound it with straps whose knots Xian could barely manage with numb fingers. Nigk came only halfway around when they lifted him. A sound tore out of him, so thin, so stunned by pain that Xian had to close her eyes for a second. Then she lifted again.

She was at the end of her strength.

Now you could see it clearly.

Her face was colorless under grime. Blood clung to her throat, partly her own, partly not. Her right arm trembled under every load. Her shoulders stood rigid with exhaustion. She no longer moved like a fighter, but like someone convincing her body by sheer will to take the next step.

And still she heaved her brother onto the stretcher.

Not cleanly. Not lightly. With a strangled sound, teeth clenched, with the last forcing of everything she had learned over years, because giving up in this world is only another word for dying.

Then she pulled.

Xiodri went first.

The forest was almost dark now. Snow began again, fine at first, then thicker. The trail was narrow, half hidden, one of those paths only someone finds who does not want it found. Xiodri stumbled once, caught herself. Blood ran warm down her side and froze almost at once. Behind her she heard the scrape of the stretcher, Xian’s heavy breathing, sometimes the dull knock of wood against roots under the snow.

More than once Xiodri thought the woman would collapse.

More than once Xian likely thought so too.

But she kept going.

Head down, hands cramped around the pull straps, whole body pitched forward. Every step was work. Every step said fatigue comes later. That care is stronger than pain. That a brother on a stretcher can weigh more than an entire winter.

Once Nigk went utterly still.

Xian stopped so abruptly it was like hitting a wall.

“Nigk.”

No answer.

Her voice did not break. It only sharpened.

“Nigk.”

Xiodri was there at once, cold bloody fingers at throat and breath. Weak. But there.

“Go,” she said. “If you stop now, you lose him.”

Xian nodded again. Once. Silent. Then she pulled on.

The witch’s house lay deeper in the woods, on a slope almost swallowed by snow and firs. From outside it looked smaller than it was. Low walls, heavy roof, stone foundation, wood above, bundles of herbs under the eaves now frozen and dark. No smoke, because Xiodri never let smoke rise if she could avoid it. Safety often lives by being unremarkable.

Inside it smelled of resin, old wood, herbs, animal, and something bitter that came from draughts.

Xiodri flung the door open. “There.”

Xian dragged the stretcher to a broad bench by the fire place. Then, for the first time, the coherence of her movements broke. Not because she wanted it to. Because the body collects its debt when you ignore it too long. She grabbed at air as she tried to reposition Nigk, found balance again, drew in a sharp breath, and helped anyway.

Xiodri worked immediately.

Not elegantly. Not calmly. Quickly.

She cut cloth away from Nigk’s chest. Washed blood from the wound with something that stung the nose. Put a hand on ribs, felt, tested, cursed under her breath. Not broken enough to kill at once. Open enough to do it later. She brought bowls, dark jars, bundles of dried plants. Ground, mixed, dropped some into water, dripped other directly into the wound. Then she spoke.

Not a mage’s language.

No written formulae.

Something older. Rougher. Words more about breath and rhythm than about books. Xian understood none of it. But she felt the room shift. Not bright, not dramatic. Only denser, as if the hut itself were listening.

“Lift his head,” Xiodri said.

Xian did.

“Not like that. Careful.”

Xian adjusted.

Xiodri forced bitter draught down Nigk’s throat. At first half ran out again. Then he swallowed. Again. Once more. His eyelids fluttered without opening. The breath stayed shallow, but it stayed.

Xiodri pressed a hand to the wound and kept speaking. Sweat beaded on her brow though she was freezing. Her lips were pale. Blood from her own side dripped onto the floor. Xian saw it and saw how the stranger ignored it.

Minutes passed. Or an hour. In that exhaustion, time goes soft.

At some point Nigk’s breathing changed.

Not healthy.

But less distant.

Less like someone already letting go.

Xiodri felt it first in her fingertips, that minimal retreat of death when you just miss it. She exhaled, truly exhaled, and in that breath was nearly everything she had left.

“He isn’t safe yet,” she murmured. “But he doesn’t slip away from me immediately.”

Xian had sat beside them the entire time, upright by will, not energy. Her eyes were red, her gaze dull with exhaustion and worry. She had not asked who this woman was, what she was, why she had been there. All those questions stood in her like shadows behind cloth, visible but not pushing forward. There was something else that mattered more.

Only when Nigk’s breath found a rhythm that no longer sounded like farewell did Xiodri notice the black creeping at the edges of her vision.

She tried to straighten.

A mistake.

The room swayed. Pain she had shoved aside flooded back at once. The bite at her shoulder was deep. Her side torn. One of the blows had likely damaged more inside than she had wanted to feel. She understood it the same moment Xian did.

“Sit down,” Xian said.

Xiodri gave a short almost unbelieving laugh. “Do you give orders in every house.”

Then she simply folded.

Xian was too tired to catch her fully, but not too tired to break her fall. With the last of her strength she got the stranger to the floor, dragged her a little away from the fire, turned her carefully so the injured side lay free. Then she sat there, two wounded bodies, a strange house, a winter forest outside, and in herself only that thin stubborn line that says: not yet sleep.

She tended Xiodri as best she could.

Not with witch craft. With what she had. Water. Clean cloth. Pressure on the worst places. A salve whose smell was strong enough that it probably could not be wrong. She bound shoulder and side tight enough to slow bleeding, gentle enough not to yank the unconscious back into full pain. Then she hauled Xiodri step by step to a bed in the corner. It cost her nearly the last of her strength.

When it was done she stood a moment between the two places.

Nigk on the bench, pale, bandaged, breathing.

Xiodri in the bed, unmoving, her face unexpectedly young without the hardness of wakefulness.

Xian looked from one to the other.

It was too much for a day. Too much for a human. Too much for a sister who had only meant to hunt and now stood in a hidden house in the woods with an almost dead brother and a fainted witch who had saved their lives.

At last she sat on the floor beside Nigk.

Only for a moment, she told herself.

She leaned her head against the edge of the bench.

She checked his breathing once more, as if she had to convince herself he was still there.

Then she closed her eyes.

And fell asleep, close to her brother, in the house of the woman she knew nothing about except that she had come when everything looked lost.

X

The ride to Zoordak moved in a peculiar calm that was not calm at all. From the outside it might have looked as if Anadar had grown quieter. Perhaps even more composed. Since the fight, that open, pressing urge had weakened. The blade no longer demanded blood with every breath. That alone should have brought him relief. Instead there was something else now, something harder to grasp. The voice had changed.

It was no longer only hunger.

It had become a person.

Not fully. Not yet the way a human is a person. But enough to give itself a name.

Naaarstr.

Anadar rode in front as always, but his attention lay only half on the road. The reins rested in his hand, the horse found its own footing on the cold, hard ground, and behind him, at intervals, he heard the creak of saddles, the snorting of the animals, the low murmur of Shara or Morgut when they had to trade something. He registered it, but only as sound at the edge. The real thing played out beneath his skull, at that place where fatigue and thinking can no longer be cleanly separated.

Where do you come from.

The answer did not come at once. Naaarstr loved pauses. He never spoke as if he had to explain anything. He spoke as if every piece of information were a coin he held between two fingers and only let fall when he liked the tension.

From where they forgot us, he said at last. From where they locked us away and then believed the slam of a door made the world orderly again.

Anadar pressed his teeth together. The sword lay at his side like a second spine, too close, too familiar. For days the voice had not fallen silent, it had only sunk deeper. It waited instead of screaming. That made it more dangerous.

You were summoned.

Yes.

A laugh slid through him. It did not sound in his ear, but in his chest.

That fool, Naaarstr said. That vain, greasy little king of his chambers. He wanted to speak words no one spoke anymore. He wanted to open doors whose hinges had rusted fast in blood ages ago. And he did it with hands that shook, with a mind that was not enough, and with a caution that would not even live in a rat.

Anadar kept riding, his gaze fixed on the road. Cold lay over the land. The light was dull, already winterlike, and frost sat in hollows, laying the ground over like a pale pelt. Behind him someone said something, perhaps Shara, perhaps Miene, but he did not listen. Unease stirred in his head.

What did he do.

Ah, Naaarstr said, and in that ah was a pleasure that made Anadar shiver. What humans do when they reach for power and no longer have boundaries. He found an old book. Not in a library, not in venerable halls where at least you understand what you touch. No. Bought. From a merchant who did not even know what he carried. Traveled far, with chests full of brass, spices, salt, stolen prayers, and things that for better reasons should have stayed sealed. Frantor bought the book because he thought himself cleverer than all the ones before him who had not touched it.

Images crowded Anadar’s inner eye. Not clean. Not coherent. Only scraps. Candle soot on a low ceiling. Metal on stone. A table you did not want to call a table. Cloths washed too often and never clean. Bowls. Circles. Dark traces in grooves, as if fingers had tried again and again to scrape something out of wood that would not come out.

Anadar swallowed.

Stop that.

If you ask, you must see, Naaarstr said gently.

The images did not stop. Hands, Frantor’s hands, too soft for what they were doing. Gold rings on his fingers. Carefully tended nails. And still blood under them. Not much, never enough, it seemed. Frantor had read and imitated, spoken words that did not belong to him, copied signs whose sense he did not understand. But plain blood had never been enough for him. Not because it was necessary, but because he was of that disgusting kind of person who mistakes cruelty for depth.

Naaarstr did not show a full scene. He suggested. A cellar too dark. A whimper behind wood. Iron heated. A voice begging. Not loud. Already too weak. Frantor, groomed even there, with an expression of greedy concentration, as if it were all only work, an unpleasantly filthy manual step on the way to greater knowledge.

Anadar felt sick.

Enough.

The demon fell silent for a moment. When he spoke again there was something like disgust in his voice.

He was revolting, Naaarstr said. Do not think I generally overestimate humans, Anadar. I have known your kind long enough. But that one. That Frantor. Blood would have been enough. Blood is always enough. Warm, fresh, given or taken. Nothing more is needed. Yet he took pleasure in terror. In humiliation. In drawing it out. He did not only want to open, he wanted to rule, even inside suffering. Even I felt nausea.

Anadar exhaled sharply through his nose. He wanted to push the images away, but some things remain once they have been planted in the mind. Since the fight he had become stronger, he knew that. More ordered too. But against this kind of inner access he still had to fight as if against a blade at the throat.

And you, he asked. What did you do.

Waited.

The word came without ornament.

He was bad, Naaarstr said. Untrained. Undisciplined. He spoke formulas wrong, swapped bindings, left gaps in circles where there must never be gaps. Above all he did not understand that invocation is not conversation. Whoever calls always also opens himself. A crack at first. A thought. A dream. An impulse that nests. Frantor believed he was steering the exchange. Meanwhile I had already begun to read him from the inside.

Anadar no longer saw the road even though his eyes were open. In front of him now lay Frantor’s face, tired but stoked, nights over parchments, over notes, over failed signs. Then the same man weeks later, already altered. Only slightly. A shadow at the corners of the eyes. A moment of silence too long. A smile that came too late. Greed that was no longer only ambition, but something that devoured.

You took him over.

Gradually, Naaarstr said. First wishes. Then suggestions. Then the way you repeat a thought so often you eventually no longer know who it came from first. He called for knowledge, so I gave him knowledge. Small things. Useful things. Enough that he trusted. Enough that he wanted more.

Images again. Frantor going deeper. Rooms no one must see. A child’s shoe in a corner, too small to lie there. A metallic smell, old and sweetish. A basin. Chalk mixed with a dark liquid. A knife, not ornate, almost matter-of-fact, and for that very reason obscene. Words spoken not loudly, but with that false intimacy bordering on madness. Frantor believed he was gaining control. In truth he was building step after step for something climbing through him.

Anadar pulled the reins a little harder than necessary. The horse threw its head and snorted in irritation. Behind him Morgut asked something, but Anadar only raised a hand briefly without turning. It was fine. Still.

How did you free yourself.

Naaarstr seemed almost to smile.

By letting him. Greed opens humans like wounds. He wanted to understand the first circle without grasping the second. He wanted to overtake the old summoners without ever truly studying a boundary. He did not only want to call. He wanted to bind. And when he tried, he already had too much of me inside him.

The flashback came sharper this time. Frantor stood in a circle of black lines. The air was heavy. Several lamps burned, but the light looked sick, as if it no longer came through air, but through filth. Frantor spoke, first confident, then more hurried. Something answered not with words but with pressure. His mouth faltered. His fingers cramped. You could see the moment he realized the circle is not only a boundary but also a mirror, that every binding reaches back for the one who lays it.

Then he looked up.

And what looked back out of his eyes was no longer quite him.

He did not die at once. That was the bitter part. He lasted a while longer, long enough to understand his own loss. Long enough to fear. Long enough to beg. Then he grew quieter. Softer inside. Thinner. Until in the end there was more memory than will in him.

Naaarstr let the scene fade like someone letting a curtain fall.

I did not kill him in one blow, he said. I replaced him. That was easier. And useful. And I made him suffer the way he made others suffer.

Anadar was silent for a long time.

Then he asked, “And in Sontor.”

I played him.

You did not know what was happening there.

The answer came at once, without any play.

No.

Anadar frowned. He had assumed all darkness was connected, as if somewhere in the night there were an order, a shared intent. Naaarstr snorted with contempt.

Do not believe every shadow has the same master. I had nothing to do with your expulsions from the North. Back then I wanted no attention. I had to learn first. Your world. Your roads. Your lies. Your hierarchies. Frantor’s memories were enough for me to wear his role. I wanted no more at first. Only later did I go to the Fiery Fortress. Only later did I dare more.

And the North.

This time Naaarstr stayed silent so long Anadar believed he would get no answer. Then it came after all, soft, almost satisfied.

Things buried for a very long time have apparently decided the time of sleeping is over. Like me. Like certain others. Aeons are not long for the world. Only for you.

Anadar felt something in him tighten. Not fear alone. More the sense of standing at a threshold and knowing that beyond it there is not a single enemy, but a space larger than anything you have prepared for.

Tell me how I can send you back.

Naaarstr did not respond immediately. When he spoke his voice was almost mild.

Why send me back when you could learn.

I want no lesson from you.

Everyone who carries power says that at the start.

I mean it.

Of course, Naaarstr said. And that is exactly why you would be suitable. You resist. Frantor never did. He only devoured. But you test. You would be different. I could show you what lies behind your circles. A new circle, a legend brought back to life. I know the summoners who fell under the Inquisition. I have seen their city. Their halls. Their bindings. Their end.

Anadar felt his heart strike harder.

Blood, Naaarstr said then, almost casually. Blood again and again, as if the word had its own rhythm.

You are unpleasant in your temptation, Anadar thought, and only in the next moment realized he had not formed the sentence clearly. It had been only raw resistance.

Naaarstr continued as if enjoying that resistance.

Not much. Not always. One only needs to know how to take without losing everything. How to open without tearing. How to make a trail from a drop, a gate from a trail, knowledge from a gate. There are ways to lead a sacrifice cleanly. Without needless torment. Without screams. Frantor was perverse. He mistook lust for technique. You would not have to be like that.

Images again. Not exact hand motions, more arrangements, possibilities, circles on stone, bowls whose contents shone darkly, voices spoken in the right measure. Anadar tore himself away as if from a current.

No.

You do not even know what you are saying no to.

Yes I do, Anadar said inwardly, and this time so hard it startled even him. To you.

Naaarstr fell silent. For several miles.

But the silence did not help Anadar. It left room for the rest: the pounding of blood at his temples, the aftertaste of images, the dark temptation that knowledge always looks most beautiful when you tell yourself you want it only to understand the danger.

When Zoordak finally lay before them, Anadar was scraped out inside. The city rose beneath its golden shimmering dome like something that did not entirely belong to the world, warmed by hidden heat, ordered, calm, almost shamelessly intact in a time when elsewhere walls burned and roads were full of refugees. He had known that sight, had once called it home, at least for a while. Now Zoordak seemed like a memory of a man he had been, a man he perhaps had never fully understood.

They rode in. Warmth rose from the streets. Steam drifted in fine threads through the air. In the temple courtyard there was already movement. Daughters of the Mother, lightly dressed despite the cold outside, moved soundlessly between columns and basins, carried bowls, cloth, lamps. Everything was prepared for Midwinter, and suddenly Anadar remembered.

Midwinter in Zoordak.

The nights, the lights, the music, the wine, the laughter, the far too permeable boundaries between celebration and ritual. He grew hot, and it was unpleasant that precisely now an old, half youthful embarrassment rose in him.

The Mother was already waiting.

She did not stand elevated, did not sit enthroned, and yet it was immediately clear the space around her belonged to her. Golden hair, that strange youth in her that never looked childish but timeless, and that gaze in which comfort and cutting clarity could lie at once. Miene and Siendra stepped forward first. The Mother kissed them, held their faces a breath longer between her hands, as if reading there what had happened to them. Then Morgut: warm, brief. Then Shara.

Anadar watched it more closely than he wanted.

When the Mother kissed Shara there was, for a tiny moment, a shift. So slight you could have blamed it on the light in the next breath. And yet Anadar thought he saw Shara in profile grow a hint older. Not old. Not visible to everyone. Only the faintest ripening. At the corners of her mouth an implication of lines where smoothness had been before. Not loss, more densification, as if what she had lived through showed itself in a single kiss for the fraction of a heartbeat before vanishing back into hiding.

Then it was gone. Shara was simply Shara again. Only the impression remained.

The Mother turned to Anadar.

Her gaze did not fall first on him, but on the sword.

“That loathsome thing,” she said calmly, and pointed to the center of the courtyard.

There stood a plain chest of dark wood, iron-bound, unremarkable except for the fact that everyone in the courtyard avoided it without making it obvious. There was no mage’s gesture on it, no glow, no runes, no pomp. For that reason it looked trustworthy. Or dangerous.

In that moment the sword stirred again.

Blood.

It was not Naaarstr’s voice. That had become rarer in the last days, buried deeper, and yet never wholly gone. This was only the singing of the blade itself, blunter, more primitive, demanding. Tribute. Warmth. Cut. It went through him like an old pain, instantly familiar, instantly unpleasant.

“Into the chest,” the Mother said.

Anadar did not hesitate long. Perhaps because he had no strength left for pride. Perhaps because something in him had already understood that he could not step into Zoordak with that thing at his hip as if it were merely a weapon.

He stepped forward, unfastened the blade, and the instant his hand fully closed around the hilt, the pressure in his head swelled. Blood, it sang again, sweeter this time, almost pleading. He lifted the lid. The chest was lined with a dull metal whose surface threw no light back. No depth, only blunt absorption. He laid the sword inside.

The lid fell shut.

Quiet.

Not slowly, not gradually. It was immediate, like a droning tone stopping after weeks and only then realizing how tense your body has been against it the entire time. Anadar stood still. He had nearly forgotten what silence in his head feels like. No pressing. No whispering. No hungry echo. Only his own breath.

The Mother stepped closer, kissed his brow, and said softly, “Welcome, Anadar.”

He closed his eyes for a moment.

“You will have to take that loathsome thing with you again when you leave,” she went on. “But as long as you are here, it stays there. It will not leave the chest. And you will not miss Midwinter this time.”

She said it with a hint of amusement, as if she had already seen the memory that had just risen in him.

Anadar wanted to answer. Perhaps thanks. Perhaps protest. Perhaps the question of how unpleasant it is that she reads him so effortlessly. Instead the courtyard suddenly seemed too bright, or too far away. His knees gave out before he could have felt shame about it.

When he woke, it was warm.

Not merely warm, safe warm. He knew this room. The ceiling, the pale wood, the narrow niche with the round window, the bowl of water, the scent of herbs and clean cloth. Here he had once learned, slept, doubted, hoped. Here he had been younger and already believed himself grown.

The Mother sat by his bed as if she had never been gone.

“You haven’t changed,” Anadar murmured hoarsely.

“Have you,” she smiled.

Against his will he had to smile. Then he remembered abruptly, sat up too fast, and reached for what was no longer there.

His side was empty.

“The sword is gone and safe as long as you are here,” the Mother said. “And no, you do not get it back just because you look so startled.”

Anadar let his shoulders drop. “I hadn’t thought I would arrive here at Midwinter, of all times.”

The Mother smiled. “That explains your coloring.”

He actually blushed. He hated that she was right. Midwinter in Zoordak was not just any feast. It was a boisterous, permeable, dangerously beautiful event in which, in the halls of the School of Mind, some things began as play and ended as revelation, and others began as revelation and spilled into arms, laughter, and wine. He remembered it well.

“Calm yourself,” the Mother said. “You are not the student you were then. And my daughters are no longer the girls who stole your sleep.”

It did not help at all.

She waited until the red in his face had faded. Then she became serious.

“Tell me about Naaarstr.”

Anadar did. Not prettily. Not neatly. He told of the fight, of the binding, of what he had heard on the ride, of Frantor, of the hints about old summoners, of the temptation that kept coming in different clothing. Knowledge for blood. Power for yielding. Images shown to him. Stories of ancient Inquisition times, of imprisoned demons, of hunger in darkness. He also said that Naaarstr never told him how to send him back, only offered more.

The Mother nodded several times, not surprised, more confirming, as if something were fitting into a picture she had been examining for a long time.

“You did the only right thing,” she said at last. “Forcing that being into an object was likely the only way. You could not kill it. Not in that state, not under those conditions. It had to be bound, or it would have anchored itself anew.”

Anadar looked at her. “It wasn’t a textbook spell.”

“Thank the gods,” the Mother said dryly.

He snorted softly.

“Truly,” she continued. “Textbooks are useful, but they rarely save you at the decisive moment. What you did was precise, brave, and independent. Under pressure you developed something that worked. That is rare. And it says more about your power than you might like.”

Anadar twisted his mouth. “Power. Always that word.”

“Because it applies.”

She leaned forward slightly. Her gaze was soft, but unpleasantly clear.

“You have grown stronger, Anadar. Not only in how much you can hold, but in the manner of it. Many already felt it at the last conclave. Some now say it openly.”

“What do they say.”

“That you might reach for power.”

He laughed once, without joy. “Nonsense.”

“Perhaps,” the Mother said. “But nonsense that is believed is never politically harmless. The Schools of Life, Water, and Wind are watching you. Some want to bind you. Not necessarily with chains, with alliances, expectations, proximity, obligations you cannot simply step out of again.”

Anadar shook his head. “Talk. One can talk to them. It’s nonsense.”

“Certainly,” the Mother said. “Nonsense you can talk away, or nonsense you take seriously too late. I only advise caution.”

He wanted to protest, but she raised her hand.

“Not now. Not in your state. We will speak further. There are things you must know, and others I still want to consider. For the moment you should regain strength. A festival awaits you.”

She rose with the same calm inevitability with which she always rose, as if she had not gone anywhere, only the room had briefly rearranged itself around her.

In the doorway she paused.

“And Anadar.”

“Yes.”

“Try to enjoy yourself at least a little. Zoordak takes offense when one enters Midwinter only with duty.”

Then she was gone.

Hardly had the door closed when it opened again. Shara stepped in.

Not in armor. Not in travel leather. Not in that taut readiness in which he had seen her on the road, in battle, in the fortress courtyard, almost everywhere else. She wore a simple robe, soft-falling, belted dark at the hip, her hair bound differently, and in that first instant something struck him that arrived late, perhaps years too late.

She was a beautiful woman.

Not because she had changed, but because for the first time he was not forced to see her as weapon, ally, fellow rider, shared responsibility. The robe took nothing from her strength. It only showed that strength had a body, a face, a calm, a beauty that did not need to be made.

Shara noticed his look at once. The corners of her mouth twitched almost imperceptibly.

“You look as if someone has only just explained to you who I am.”

“That would be accurately put,” he said.

“Then at least you’re honestly ill.”

She sat at his bed. Not too close. Not far away. Exactly as she always sat when she wanted to hear something serious.

For a moment both were silent.

Then Anadar said, “I have to tell someone before I no longer know what spoke in me and what did not.”

Shara only nodded.

And so he told it again. This time differently. Less report, more confession. Of the fight and the intoxication. Of the craving for blood that had frightened him because it had not come like rage, but like a second nature. Of the guest in his sword. Of Naaarstr, of Frantor, of the images he had seen, of the way the demon had seemed both revolting and almost reasonable when it set itself apart from Frantor’s perversity. He spoke of the temptation to learn knowledge only out of caution. Of the shame that part of him understood how seductive power sounds when it disguises itself as necessity.

Shara listened without interrupting him once.

Only once, when he spoke of the blade’s urging and of how easy it would have been at the worst moment simply to stop distinguishing between enemy, target, and mere obstacle, did she quietly lay her hand on the bed edge between them. Not on his. Only close enough that he saw the gesture.

“I was afraid of you,” she said softly at last.

Anadar lifted his eyes.

She held him.

“Not only for you. Of you. You need to know that.”

He nodded slowly. It hurt because it was fair.

“I know,” he said.

Outside, somewhere in the temple courtyard, music began. First distant, only a flute and something like bright bells. Midwinter began to move.

Inside the room they still sat in silence, and for the first time in a long time Anadar had the sense that silence was not working against him.

XI

The ride to Zoordak moved in a peculiar calm that was not calm at all. From the outside it might have looked as if Anadar had grown quieter. Perhaps even more composed. Since the fight, that open, pressing urge had weakened. The blade no longer demanded blood with every breath. That alone should have brought him relief. Instead there was something else now, something harder to grasp. The voice had changed.

It was no longer only hunger.

It had become a person.

Not fully. Not yet the way a human is a person. But enough to give itself a name.

Naaarstr.

Anadar rode in front as always, but his attention lay only half on the road. The reins rested in his hand, the horse found its own footing on the cold, hard ground, and behind him, at intervals, he heard the creak of saddles, the snorting of the animals, the low murmur of Shara or Morgut when they had to trade something. He registered it, but only as sound at the edge. The real thing played out beneath his skull, at that place where fatigue and thinking can no longer be cleanly separated.

Where do you come from.

The answer did not come at once. Naaarstr loved pauses. He never spoke as if he had to explain anything. He spoke as if every piece of information were a coin he held between two fingers and only let fall when he liked the tension.

From where they forgot us, he said at last. From where they locked us away and then believed the slam of a door made the world orderly again.

Anadar pressed his teeth together. The sword lay at his side like a second spine, too close, too familiar. For days the voice had not fallen silent, it had only sunk deeper. It waited instead of screaming. That made it more dangerous.

You were summoned.

Yes.

A laugh slid through him. It did not sound in his ear, but in his chest.

That fool, Naaarstr said. That vain, greasy little king of his chambers. He wanted to speak words no one spoke anymore. He wanted to open doors whose hinges had rusted fast in blood ages ago. And he did it with hands that shook, with a mind that was not enough, and with a caution that would not even live in a rat.

Anadar kept riding, his gaze fixed on the road. Cold lay over the land. The light was dull, already winterlike, and frost sat in hollows, laying the ground over like a pale pelt. Behind him someone said something, perhaps Shara, perhaps Miene, but he did not listen. Unease stirred in his head.

What did he do.

Ah, Naaarstr said, and in that ah was a pleasure that made Anadar shiver. What humans do when they reach for power and no longer have boundaries. He found an old book. Not in a library, not in venerable halls where at least you understand what you touch. No. Bought. From a merchant who did not even know what he carried. Traveled far, with chests full of brass, spices, salt, stolen prayers, and things that for better reasons should have stayed sealed. Frantor bought the book because he thought himself cleverer than all the ones before him who had not touched it.

Images crowded Anadar’s inner eye. Not clean. Not coherent. Only scraps. Candle soot on a low ceiling. Metal on stone. A table you did not want to call a table. Cloths washed too often and never clean. Bowls. Circles. Dark traces in grooves, as if fingers had tried again and again to scrape something out of wood that would not come out.

Anadar swallowed.

Stop that.

If you ask, you must see, Naaarstr said gently.

The images did not stop. Hands, Frantor’s hands, too soft for what they were doing. Gold rings on his fingers. Carefully tended nails. And still blood under them. Not much, never enough, it seemed. Frantor had read and imitated, spoken words that did not belong to him, copied signs whose sense he did not understand. But plain blood had never been enough for him. Not because it was necessary, but because he was of that disgusting kind of person who mistakes cruelty for depth.

Naaarstr did not show a full scene. He suggested. A cellar too dark. A whimper behind wood. Iron heated. A voice begging. Not loud. Already too weak. Frantor, groomed even there, with an expression of greedy concentration, as if it were all only work, an unpleasantly filthy manual step on the way to greater knowledge.

Anadar felt sick.

Enough.

The demon fell silent for a moment. When he spoke again there was something like disgust in his voice.

He was revolting, Naaarstr said. Do not think I generally overestimate humans, Anadar. I have known your kind long enough. But that one. That Frantor. Blood would have been enough. Blood is always enough. Warm, fresh, given or taken. Nothing more is needed. Yet he took pleasure in terror. In humiliation. In drawing it out. He did not only want to open, he wanted to rule, even inside suffering. Even I felt nausea.

Anadar exhaled sharply through his nose. He wanted to push the images away, but some things remain once they have been planted in the mind. Since the fight he had become stronger, he knew that. More ordered too. But against this kind of inner access he still had to fight as if against a blade at the throat.

And you, he asked. What did you do.

Waited.

The word came without ornament.

He was bad, Naaarstr said. Untrained. Undisciplined. He spoke formulas wrong, swapped bindings, left gaps in circles where there must never be gaps. Above all he did not understand that invocation is not conversation. Whoever calls always also opens himself. A crack at first. A thought. A dream. An impulse that nests. Frantor believed he was steering the exchange. Meanwhile I had already begun to read him from the inside.

Anadar no longer saw the road even though his eyes were open. In front of him now lay Frantor’s face, tired but stoked, nights over parchments, over notes, over failed signs. Then the same man weeks later, already altered. Only slightly. A shadow at the corners of the eyes. A moment of silence too long. A smile that came too late. Greed that was no longer only ambition, but something that devoured.

You took him over.

Gradually, Naaarstr said. First wishes. Then suggestions. Then the way you repeat a thought so often you eventually no longer know who it came from first. He called for knowledge, so I gave him knowledge. Small things. Useful things. Enough that he trusted. Enough that he wanted more.

Images again. Frantor going deeper. Rooms no one must see. A child’s shoe in a corner, too small to lie there. A metallic smell, old and sweetish. A basin. Chalk mixed with a dark liquid. A knife, not ornate, almost matter-of-fact, and for that very reason obscene. Words spoken not loudly, but with that false intimacy bordering on madness. Frantor believed he was gaining control. In truth he was building step after step for something climbing through him.

Anadar pulled the reins a little harder than necessary. The horse threw its head and snorted in irritation. Behind him Morgut asked something, but Anadar only raised a hand briefly without turning. It was fine. Still.

How did you free yourself.

Naaarstr seemed almost to smile.

By letting him. Greed opens humans like wounds. He wanted to understand the first circle without grasping the second. He wanted to overtake the old summoners without ever truly studying a boundary. He did not only want to call. He wanted to bind. And when he tried, he already had too much of me inside him.

The flashback came sharper this time. Frantor stood in a circle of black lines. The air was heavy. Several lamps burned, but the light looked sick, as if it no longer came through air, but through filth. Frantor spoke, first confident, then more hurried. Something answered not with words but with pressure. His mouth faltered. His fingers cramped. You could see the moment he realized the circle is not only a boundary but also a mirror, that every binding reaches back for the one who lays it.

Then he looked up.

And what looked back out of his eyes was no longer quite him.

He did not die at once. That was the bitter part. He lasted a while longer, long enough to understand his own loss. Long enough to fear. Long enough to beg. Then he grew quieter. Softer inside. Thinner. Until in the end there was more memory than will in him.

Naaarstr let the scene fade like someone letting a curtain fall.

I did not kill him in one blow, he said. I replaced him. That was easier. And useful. And I made him suffer the way he made others suffer.

Anadar was silent for a long time.

Then he asked, “And in Sontor.”

I played him.

You did not know what was happening there.

The answer came at once, without any play.

No.

Anadar frowned. He had assumed all darkness was connected, as if somewhere in the night there were an order, a shared intent. Naaarstr snorted with contempt.

Do not believe every shadow has the same master. I had nothing to do with your expulsions from the North. Back then I wanted no attention. I had to learn first. Your world. Your roads. Your lies. Your hierarchies. Frantor’s memories were enough for me to wear his role. I wanted no more at first. Only later did I go to the Fiery Fortress. Only later did I dare more.

And the North.

This time Naaarstr stayed silent so long Anadar believed he would get no answer. Then it came after all, soft, almost satisfied.

Things buried for a very long time have apparently decided the time of sleeping is over. Like me. Like certain others. Aeons are not long for the world. Only for you.

Anadar felt something in him tighten. Not fear alone. More the sense of standing at a threshold and knowing that beyond it there is not a single enemy, but a space larger than anything you have prepared for.

Tell me how I can send you back.

Naaarstr did not respond immediately. When he spoke his voice was almost mild.

Why send me back when you could learn.

I want no lesson from you.

Everyone who carries power says that at the start.

I mean it.

Of course, Naaarstr said. And that is exactly why you would be suitable. You resist. Frantor never did. He only devoured. But you test. You would be different. I could show you what lies behind your circles. A new circle, a legend brought back to life. I know the summoners who fell under the Inquisition. I have seen their city. Their halls. Their bindings. Their end.

Anadar felt his heart strike harder.

Blood, Naaarstr said then, almost casually. Blood again and again, as if the word had its own rhythm.

You are unpleasant in your temptation, Anadar thought, and only in the next moment realized he had not formed the sentence clearly. It had been only raw resistance.

Naaarstr continued as if enjoying that resistance.

Not much. Not always. One only needs to know how to take without losing everything. How to open without tearing. How to make a trail from a drop, a gate from a trail, knowledge from a gate. There are ways to lead a sacrifice cleanly. Without needless torment. Without screams. Frantor was perverse. He mistook lust for technique. You would not have to be like that.

Images again. Not exact hand motions, more arrangements, possibilities, circles on stone, bowls whose contents shone darkly, voices spoken in the right measure. Anadar tore himself away as if from a current.

No.

You do not even know what you are saying no to.

Yes I do, Anadar said inwardly, and this time so hard it startled even him. To you.

Naaarstr fell silent. For several miles.

But the silence did not help Anadar. It left room for the rest: the pounding of blood at his temples, the aftertaste of images, the dark temptation that knowledge always looks most beautiful when you tell yourself you want it only to understand the danger.

When Zoordak finally lay before them, Anadar was scraped out inside. The city rose beneath its golden shimmering dome like something that did not entirely belong to the world, warmed by hidden heat, ordered, calm, almost shamelessly intact in a time when elsewhere walls burned and roads were full of refugees. He had known that sight, had once called it home, at least for a while. Now Zoordak seemed like a memory of a man he had been, a man he perhaps had never fully understood.

They rode in. Warmth rose from the streets. Steam drifted in fine threads through the air. In the temple courtyard there was already movement. Daughters of the Mother, lightly dressed despite the cold outside, moved soundlessly between columns and basins, carried bowls, cloth, lamps. Everything was prepared for Midwinter, and suddenly Anadar remembered.

Midwinter in Zoordak.

The nights, the lights, the music, the wine, the laughter, the far too permeable boundaries between celebration and ritual. He grew hot, and it was unpleasant that precisely now an old, half youthful embarrassment rose in him.

The Mother was already waiting.

She did not stand elevated, did not sit enthroned, and yet it was immediately clear the space around her belonged to her. Golden hair, that strange youth in her that never looked childish but timeless, and that gaze in which comfort and cutting clarity could lie at once. Miene and Siendra stepped forward first. The Mother kissed them, held their faces a breath longer between her hands, as if reading there what had happened to them. Then Morgut: warm, brief. Then Shara.

Anadar watched it more closely than he wanted.

When the Mother kissed Shara there was, for a tiny moment, a shift. So slight you could have blamed it on the light in the next breath. And yet Anadar thought he saw Shara in profile grow a hint older. Not old. Not visible to everyone. Only the faintest ripening. At the corners of her mouth an implication of lines where smoothness had been before. Not loss, more densification, as if what she had lived through showed itself in a single kiss for the fraction of a heartbeat before vanishing back into hiding.

Then it was gone. Shara was simply Shara again. Only the impression remained.

The Mother turned to Anadar.

Her gaze did not fall first on him, but on the sword.

“That loathsome thing,” she said calmly, and pointed to the center of the courtyard.

There stood a plain chest of dark wood, iron-bound, unremarkable except for the fact that everyone in the courtyard avoided it without making it obvious. There was no mage’s gesture on it, no glow, no runes, no pomp. For that reason it looked trustworthy. Or dangerous.

In that moment the sword stirred again.

Blood.

It was not Naaarstr’s voice. That had become rarer in the last days, buried deeper, and yet never wholly gone. This was only the singing of the blade itself, blunter, more primitive, demanding. Tribute. Warmth. Cut. It went through him like an old pain, instantly familiar, instantly unpleasant.

“Into the chest,” the Mother said.

Anadar did not hesitate long. Perhaps because he had no strength left for pride. Perhaps because something in him had already understood that he could not step into Zoordak with that thing at his hip as if it were merely a weapon.

He stepped forward, unfastened the blade, and the instant his hand fully closed around the hilt, the pressure in his head swelled. Blood, it sang again, sweeter this time, almost pleading. He lifted the lid. The chest was lined with a dull metal whose surface threw no light back. No depth, only blunt absorption. He laid the sword inside.

The lid fell shut.

Quiet.

Not slowly, not gradually. It was immediate, like a droning tone stopping after weeks and only then realizing how tense your body has been against it the entire time. Anadar stood still. He had nearly forgotten what silence in his head feels like. No pressing. No whispering. No hungry echo. Only his own breath.

The Mother stepped closer, kissed his brow, and said softly, “Welcome, Anadar.”

He closed his eyes for a moment.

“You will have to take that loathsome thing with you again when you leave,” she went on. “But as long as you are here, it stays there. It will not leave the chest. And you will not miss Midwinter this time.”

She said it with a hint of amusement, as if she had already seen the memory that had just risen in him.

Anadar wanted to answer. Perhaps thanks. Perhaps protest. Perhaps the question of how unpleasant it is that she reads him so effortlessly. Instead the courtyard suddenly seemed too bright, or too far away. His knees gave out before he could have felt shame about it.

When he woke, it was warm.

Not merely warm, safe warm. He knew this room. The ceiling, the pale wood, the narrow niche with the round window, the bowl of water, the scent of herbs and clean cloth. Here he had once learned, slept, doubted, hoped. Here he had been younger and already believed himself grown.

The Mother sat by his bed as if she had never been gone.

“You haven’t changed,” Anadar murmured hoarsely.

“Have you,” she smiled.

Against his will he had to smile. Then he remembered abruptly, sat up too fast, and reached for what was no longer there.

His side was empty.

“The sword is gone and safe as long as you are here,” the Mother said. “And no, you do not get it back just because you look so startled.”

Anadar let his shoulders drop. “I hadn’t thought I would arrive here at Midwinter, of all times.”

The Mother smiled. “That explains your coloring.”

He actually blushed. He hated that she was right. Midwinter in Zoordak was not just any feast. It was a boisterous, permeable, dangerously beautiful event in which, in the halls of the School of Mind, some things began as play and ended as revelation, and others began as revelation and spilled into arms, laughter, and wine. He remembered it well.

“Calm yourself,” the Mother said. “You are not the student you were then. And my daughters are no longer the girls who stole your sleep.”

It did not help at all.

She waited until the red in his face had faded. Then she became serious.

“Tell me about Naaarstr.”

Anadar did. Not prettily. Not neatly. He told of the fight, of the binding, of what he had heard on the ride, of Frantor, of the hints about old summoners, of the temptation that kept coming in different clothing. Knowledge for blood. Power for yielding. Images shown to him. Stories of ancient Inquisition times, of imprisoned demons, of hunger in darkness. He also said that Naaarstr never told him how to send him back, only offered more.

The Mother nodded several times, not surprised, more confirming, as if something were fitting into a picture she had been examining for a long time.

“You did the only right thing,” she said at last. “Forcing that being into an object was likely the only way. You could not kill it. Not in that state, not under those conditions. It had to be bound, or it would have anchored itself anew.”

Anadar looked at her. “It wasn’t a textbook spell.”

“Thank the gods,” the Mother said dryly.

He snorted softly.

“Truly,” she continued. “Textbooks are useful, but they rarely save you at the decisive moment. What you did was precise, brave, and independent. Under pressure you developed something that worked. That is rare. And it says more about your power than you might like.”

Anadar twisted his mouth. “Power. Always that word.”

“Because it applies.”

She leaned forward slightly. Her gaze was soft, but unpleasantly clear.

“You have grown stronger, Anadar. Not only in how much you can hold, but in the manner of it. Many already felt it at the last conclave. Some now say it openly.”

“What do they say.”

“That you might reach for power.”

He laughed once, without joy. “Nonsense.”

“Perhaps,” the Mother said. “But nonsense that is believed is never politically harmless. The Schools of Life, Water, and Wind are watching you. Some want to bind you. Not necessarily with chains, with alliances, expectations, proximity, obligations you cannot simply step out of again.”

Anadar shook his head. “Talk. One can talk to them. It’s nonsense.”

“Certainly,” the Mother said. “Nonsense you can talk away, or nonsense you take seriously too late. I only advise caution.”

He wanted to protest, but she raised her hand.

“Not now. Not in your state. We will speak further. There are things you must know, and others I still want to consider. For the moment you should regain strength. A festival awaits you.”

She rose with the same calm inevitability with which she always rose, as if she had not gone anywhere, only the room had briefly rearranged itself around her.

In the doorway she paused.

“And Anadar.”

“Yes.”

“Try to enjoy yourself at least a little. Zoordak takes offense when one enters Midwinter only with duty.”

Then she was gone.

Hardly had the door closed when it opened again. Shara stepped in.

Not in armor. Not in travel leather. Not in that taut readiness in which he had seen her on the road, in battle, in the fortress courtyard, almost everywhere else. She wore a simple robe, soft-falling, belted dark at the hip, her hair bound differently, and in that first instant something struck him that arrived late, perhaps years too late.

She was a beautiful woman.

Not because she had changed, but because for the first time he was not forced to see her as weapon, ally, fellow rider, shared responsibility. The robe took nothing from her strength. It only showed that strength had a body, a face, a calm, a beauty that did not need to be made.

Shara noticed his look at once. The corners of her mouth twitched almost imperceptibly.

“You look as if someone has only just explained to you who I am.”

“That would be accurately put,” he said.

“Then at least you’re honestly ill.”

She sat at his bed. Not too close. Not far away. Exactly as she always sat when she wanted to hear something serious.

For a moment both were silent.

Then Anadar said, “I have to tell someone before I no longer know what spoke in me and what did not.”

Shara only nodded.

And so he told it again. This time differently. Less report, more confession. Of the fight and the intoxication. Of the craving for blood that had frightened him because it had not come like rage, but like a second nature. Of the guest in his sword. Of Naaarstr, of Frantor, of the images he had seen, of the way the demon had seemed both revolting and almost reasonable when it set itself apart from Frantor’s perversity. He spoke of the temptation to learn knowledge only out of caution. Of the shame that part of him understood how seductive power sounds when it disguises itself as necessity.

Shara listened without interrupting him once.

Only once, when he spoke of the blade’s urging and of how easy it would have been at the worst moment simply to stop distinguishing between enemy, target, and mere obstacle, did she quietly lay her hand on the bed edge between them. Not on his. Only close enough that he saw the gesture.

“I was afraid of you,” she said softly at last.

Anadar lifted his eyes.

She held him.

“Not only for you. Of you. You need to know that.”

He nodded slowly. It hurt because it was fair.

“I know,” he said.

Outside, somewhere in the temple courtyard, music began. First distant, only a flute and something like bright bells. Midwinter began to move.

Inside the room they still sat in silence, and for the first time in a long time Anadar had the sense that silence was not working against him.

XII

Even in the desert, Midwinter was drawing near, and although nothing there suggested snow and even the nights rarely turned truly frosty, this time carried its own weight. By now Gudi had learned that the festivities in the desert city were not simply a celebration. They were an event that changed the city. Days beforehand the streets began to fill. Caravans arrived from the west and south, from the salt flats, from the rock cities, from the oasis realms, and from farther still. Traders rode in with dusty pack animals piled high with cloth, resins, spices, dried fruit, oils, metals, pigments, and strange little treasures that often seemed valuable only because they had come from very far away. The gates stood almost continuously open during the day, and as soon as the sun sank, lamps already burned in many places, as if the city wanted to remind itself that the longest nights of the year did not bring only darkness, but also meeting.

Gudi watched all of it with a mixture of curiosity and growing familiarity. The city still was not quite home, but it had become far less foreign than before. She hardly got lost anymore. She knew the hours when the wells were crowded, the alleys where you could find shade, and the places where merchants grew careless just before evening and you could catch the most. Above all, though, something else had happened, something only she herself truly noticed.

She could control the whirl better.

At first it had been nothing but a rough reflex, an unpredictable tug of sand, dust, and dry air that obeyed her whenever fear or anger called it up. Now she could summon it more and more often without anything inside her having to tear first. Not for long yet. Not with the ease she secretly longed for. But enough that she felt it in her fingertips before it came. A circling at the edge of her hand. A faint tremble in the air. If she gathered herself completely, she could make sand rise in a tight space, in a narrow twist that was more than a game and less than a weapon. Sometimes she held it for a few breaths. Sometimes even longer.

It made her proud, even though she told no one.

Other things she learned more slowly.

By now she had been given her own small plot in the garden, in the oldest section of the city, where the walls were darker and the stone held a coolness in the morning that you sought in vain elsewhere. It was not a large strip of earth, only a narrow patch between an old fig tree, a crumbling wall, and two beds where herbs already grew whose names Gudi kept forgetting. But it was hers. Her ground. Something they had not given her only to sweep, carry, or watch, but to preserve.

She took it seriously.

More than seriously.

Every morning she hauled water. Bucket after bucket, often before the first real noise of the day. The water was heavy, and the paths with full containers did not grow easier just because you walked them more often. Of course she knew you could bring water to plants with magic. Others could. She still could not. Not cleanly, not reliably, not in a way that nourished life instead of endangering it. So she had only the strength of her arms and the daily walk with the buckets. No one had forbidden it. On the contrary. That was part of the spur. One day she wanted to tend her plants not only with effort, but with skill. Until then, what was true for all living things applied: no growth without patience, no thriving without work, no spell that could simply replace the rhythm of root, water, and sun.

So she carried.

And perhaps it was exactly that that made her so watchful in the end. She knew how much effort lay in every green blade. In every small plant that pushed through dry earth. She checked leaves, turned the soil with her fingers, picked off little beetles as if they were enemies of a fortress, and guarded her bed against dust, against greedy hands, against animals, and against all the accidents that kill faster in a dry world than in other regions. If someone passed too close to her plants, she was already lifting her head.

The garden lay quieter than the rest of the city. Not empty, never entirely, but quieter. The oldest parts had something settled about them, as if time had not vanished there but seeped into deeper layers. Low walls, half overgrown. Narrow paths between beds and trees. Water basins of faded stone. Corners where you heard the market noise only as a distant hum. Gudi liked this part of the city most. It was old without being abandoned. Significant without making itself important.

That afternoon she was just loosening the earth carefully around one of the young plants so the water could sink in better when she heard hoofbeats.

Not the usual chaotic clatter of merchants, not the heavy plodding of caravan beasts.

Something else.

More rhythmic. Clearer. Nobler.

She straightened, wiped dirt from her fingers, and stepped out from the narrow entrance of her garden section onto the path that led to the outer arch. There she saw them.

A small group of riders was entering the city.

At first glance it was obvious they did not belong to the usual visitors. Their horses were tall, slender, and possessed of that dry, sinewy beauty that does not look groomed, only inevitable. Proud animals with narrow heads, finely set ears, and movements that held something dance like even at a walk. Their hooves struck stone not heavily, but precisely, almost soundless for such large beasts.

The riders themselves felt the same.

They were tall, almost all of them, and strikingly slim without weakness. It was the kind of slimness that comes from life in heat, wind, and open distance, not from lack. They sat straight in the saddle, but not rigid. Their movements were calm, economical, and completely sure. When one turned his head or corrected the rein only slightly, it happened with a grace that immediately held Gudi. Many faces were veiled, only the eyes visible, dark and alert beneath the cloth. Where a face remained uncovered, she saw fine features, high cheekbones, smooth brows, and that peculiar mix of severity and beauty that gives some people something almost untouchable. Across their foreheads they wore broad bands, artfully made, not ostentatious, but clearly meaningful.

All of them were armed.

Daggers at the hip, curved swords, bows whose wood looked precious even from a distance. Nothing about it was decorative. It was the armament of people who live with weapons and do not merely want to be seen with them.

Gudi knew at once who they were, or at least she believed she did.

The people of the Sondra.

She had heard of them the way you hear of things that belong to the world but rarely enter your own sight. Desert nomads, hard to pin down, proud, reserved, bound to their own paths and laws. They hardly ever came into the city. If they did, it was for significant occasions, official festival times, or matters that carried weight even in the desert. That they now appeared for the Midwinter turning seemed to make even the people around Gudi more attentive. No one stared openly, but people looked. Sidelong, from the corners of eyes, in reflections.

Gudi, however, did stare.

Not rudely. Not on purpose. But with that honest, almost childlike admiration she could not hide when something struck her imagination. These riders seemed to her as if they had not simply come from the desert, but from another kind of story. Something about them was strict and beautiful and distant, as if they still carried the wind of their origin in their clothes.

She should have gone back to her plot.

Instead she followed them.

At first only for a short stretch. Then farther.

It was easy enough to remain inconspicuous in the crowd. The city was full of people, full of noise, full of reasons not to notice a single girl who happened to take the same route as a group of rare guests. Gudi kept her distance, changed sides, paused once at a stall as if she were interested in dates, then again beneath an archway as if she only wanted to make room. But her attention never left them.

She watched them ride through the outer courtyards, saw how people made space without being asked. How they greeted with barely perceptible nods. How they were never hurried, not even where streets narrowed and children darted between legs. Once one of them dismounted, and even that simple motion had such smoothness that Gudi stopped without meaning to. He did not merely set a foot down. He was suddenly there, on the ground, as effortlessly as if the change from riding to walking were none at all.

Hours passed.

The sun sank. The city grew louder, more festive, more colorful. Lamps were lit, music rose over squares and courtyards, the smell of roasted meat, herbs, incense, and hot oil hung in the air. Merchants shouted, children ran, priestesses and servants carried bowls and cloth from place to place. But Gudi kept to her secret pursuit.

It was no longer reasonable curiosity.

It was fascination.

Deep into the night she kept the group in view. Never truly close, never so that she gave herself away, but with the stubborn patience she could summon when she truly wanted to know something. At last the Sondra’s paths led them to a place that made Gudi tense.

Into the old part of the garden.

Not into the open, often walked sections, but farther in, where the walls grew lower and older, where some paths ended in darkness and others were known only to those who had lived here a long time or had good reasons to know such corners. Gudi became more careful. Her steps slowed. She ducked behind a wall, slipped to the trunk of a fig tree, waited until the group moved on.

Then suddenly she was near her own plot.

Her heart began to beat faster.

The Sondra had dismounted. Someone held the horses. Three of them stepped deeper between the old walls, exactly into that place where the garden was most winding. Gudi crept closer and stopped behind a dense shrub, scarcely ten paces away. She could hear them, but not see everything.

They were speaking to one another.

The language was soft and melodic, full of bright and dark curves, as if it were sung more than spoken. Gudi did not understand a single word. Not even a root sounded familiar. And yet she listened with held breath, as if pure hearing might eventually produce meaning. The voices were calm. No agitation. More something measured, almost ceremonial. A short exchange. Then silence. Then a few more sentences.

Gudi leaned a little farther forward.

In that moment she heard it.

A click.

Small. Metallic. Dry.

Not loud enough to echo from the walls, and yet it was there, clear and wrong amid earth, roots, and old stone.

Gudi blinked.

The voices had stopped.

She took another half step forward, very carefully now, her heart high in her throat.

No one was there anymore.

No riders. No horses. No shifting cloth. No step, no shadow. Only night, wall, dark plants, and the narrow strip of ground before her.

And there, almost right at the edge of her own plot, Gudi stopped.

She looked down at the ground, then into the darkness ahead, then down again, as if some trace had to remain that explained the disappearance.

But the place was empty.

So empty, as if the Sondra had never existed and as if she had spent the whole day following nothing but a mirage.

XIII

Master Grot hated Midwinter.

Not the festival itself. Festivals meant nothing to him. People gathered, drank, sang, held their own misery for warmth for a few nights, and called it tradition. What Grot hated was the side effect. The streets grew fuller. The inns grew louder. The merchants grew more shameless. And everywhere it smelled of spice, animal, wet wool, smoke, and that unpleasantly excited mixture of expectation and irrationality that hangs over cities when they believe they stand at the center of the world for a few days.

The Great Market was once again the center of the world.

Caravans pushed through the streets like moving landscapes. Camels with brass bells. Mules under bales of cloth and salt. Wagon wheels grinding through the mud of the main roads. Traders from the south, north, and west, from mountain realms, river cities, and coastal towns. Everywhere people shouted, haggled, laughed, cursed. Everywhere space was claimed that no one actually had. For Grot it was the hell of a civilized world.

He sat bolt upright on his horse and despised everything.

Above all he despised his assignment.

Son rode to his right, Indra to his left. Both silent, both alert, both wrapped in dark travel clothing, as was proper for members of the Water School who preferred not to be recognized for what they were on this journey. Son looked as she always did, narrow and cool, with a posture that looked like readiness even while sitting. Indra sat deeper in the saddle, quieter, but no less dangerous. They were not merely companions. They were the best Soont could spare at the moment. Warriors, mages, women who knew when you asked and when you simply did what was necessary.

Grot valued that in them.

It was, in truth, the only thing about this journey that was not irksome.

Because everything else was irksome.

The search was irksome. The cities were irksome. People anyway. But most irksome of all was the fact that he was supposed to find Anadar.

Anadar.

The name alone was an annoyance.

Grot had never liked fire mages. Not a single one. They were suspicious to him from the ground up. Too quick. Too proud of movement, destruction, and effect. Too eager to be seen, even when they believed they were behaving modestly. Fire was the most childish of powers. Loud, hungry, dramatic. An element for people who wanted to feel their own greatness by watching something burn.

Water was different.

Water was measure. Patience. Form. Control. Water did not thrust itself forward. Water waited, so that in the right place it could undermine everything.

Fire mages did not understand such things.

And Anadar least of all.

Grot had not been able to stand him even when he was younger, already a self assured mage with eyes that always looked as if he were seeing the room from above. Even then people had granted him too much. Too much indulgence. Too much support. Too much astonishment. It had always enraged Grot how people, when faced with power, did not see danger first, but beauty.

Anadar was one of those cases where both joined, in an unpleasant way.

Six circles.

The thought alone was enough to harden Grot inside.

No one should be allowed six circles. It was not written that way in the Codex, he knew that. The Codex was imprecise in certain questions, precisely where it should have been sharpest. Nowhere did it explicitly state that a single mage must not grow to that height. But some things did not need to be written in order to remain right. One should not do everything simply because one can. Above all, one should not gather power whose mere existence shifts the balance of everyone else.

The School of Life had made it hard enough for Anadar to reach the fifth circle. Rightly so, in Grot’s view. If someone had to push that far, then at least under resistance, under scrutiny, under the weight of trials that made it clear the path was not self evident.

And then the Mother had taught him the sixth.

The Mother of Zoordak. That strange, golden instance hovering above everything, who never held herself to the limits that applied to everyone else, and was adored by far too many precisely because of that.

Grot still did not understand it.

Or rather, he understood it too well, and despised it for that reason. Zoordak loved the exceptional. Loved depth, exception, edge cases, ambivalence. There they called things insight that elsewhere were still labeled risk. And now they had given a fire mage, already unpleasantly strong, a sixth circle, as if the world were yearning for men like that.

Grot did not yearn for men like that.

He considered them a structural problem.

No one should strive for power. Every school publicly agreed on that. People spoke of responsibility, service, order, discipline, balance. Yet in truth nearly all schools strove for power in one form or another, only always under different names. The Fiery Fortress did it openly and called it necessity. Zoordak did it elegantly and called it insight. Life did it in the garment of care. Wind did it out of delight in motion. And Water, Grot thought with a remnant of self righteousness, was at least honest enough to see the danger in it.

Perhaps that was why it was always unpleasant to work with the others.

And now he was not to confront Anadar.

Not interrogate him.

Not hunt him.

Not watch him closely in order to finally prove cleanly that a man of this kind had become too powerful.

No.

He was to ask him for help.

Help.

The word itself was an insult in Grot’s head.

Originally, only a few days earlier in Soont, he and Son and Indra should have been given the assignment to find Anadar on their own, detain him and bring him back, or at least put him under enough pressure that he talked. The information from the last conclave had pointed in a clear direction. So that foolish warlock had indeed defeated the creature, or at least subdued it, run it through with his sword, bound it, killed it, broken it, whatever Anadar had done in his improvised way. That alone had already been an interesting message. It said two things. First, that Anadar was now even more dangerous than before. Second, that perhaps precisely because of that he might be usable for certain matters.

Grot already hated that logic.

But then the situation at sea escalated further.

And priorities changed.

Grot and his two companions were summoned, not to a large council, but to that smaller kind of conversation that is usually worse because that is where things are decided before they are officially resolved. The Dean had spoken calmly. Too calmly. About developments. Adaptation. Necessity. Pragmatism. All reasonable words behind which hid the fact that they needed a fire mage.

A water mage had failed.

One of their own.

A renegade. A man who had experimented with things one must not experiment with. Summonings. Old forms. Forbidden knowledge, or at least knowledge that for good reasons had never become part of open teaching. The details were unknown. Perhaps because too little remained. Perhaps because those who knew preferred silence. Perhaps because shame, even in schools, produces a kind of censorship.

They had only fragments.

A tower on the coast. Shielded. Independent studies. Then the Water School’s intervention. A confrontation. A fight. The renegade had resisted. Not long enough to win, but long enough to complete or to break something that should never have been touched. The tower had exploded. And since then there was the monster.

Rumors, people at the Great Market called it.

Grot knew the truth.

They were not rumors.

It was real.

Something moved at sea, attacked ships, smashed hulls, tore masts, devoured or sank them, often without pattern, often without cause. Worse, it did not stay in the water. Several times it had come to the Islands of the Winds like a gigantic worm, shimmering, unfathomable, wrong, winding over sand and rock as if land belonged to its territory as much as the sea did. Each time they had been able to drive it off. Not bind it. Not injure it. Not kill it. Only drive it off.

With a sound.

A specific, shrill, magically produced signal made from conch horns, metal, and the slap of water, to which the creature reacted as if someone were driving a memory into its body. It withdrew then. Vanished for hours, sometimes for a day, rarely longer. Then it came back.

Annoying, some masters said.

Annoying.

Grot found that description pathetic. A monster that sinks ships, attacks coasts, and has bound the islands for weeks is not annoying. It is a defeat that simply has not yet been openly named as such, because the admission is missing.

And so the assignment had shifted.

No longer: Find Anadar, take him, interrogate him.

But: Find Anadar, ask him for help.

With the careful addition that observation might not hurt in the process.

Of course not.

Grot had been observing Anadar inside his own head for years.

At the Great Market they waited.

Two days. Then three. Then another half of a fourth, because rumors often arrive late and hope is unpleasantly stubborn when you do not want it. They checked inns, stables, questioned merchants, made gate guards more compliant with small incentives. They asked about a fire mage with a hard bearing, about a woman at his side, about people from the Fortress, about a small group that might be heading north. Nothing.

Only rumors.

About the sea monster, naturally. Again and again that. Stories grew bigger the farther inland they traveled. Here the creature now had teeth of silver, elsewhere eyes like towers, elsewhere a voice that drove men mad. People loved embellishment because truth is usually not grand enough for them.

Grot listened to it all with growing rage.

He did not want stories. He wanted Anadar.

And he did not want to have to ask him.

On the fourth morning he stood in the cold before the stable yard while the horses were being saddled and looked north. The sky was colorless, the land ahead wide and unpleasantly open. If Anadar truly rode north, then probably for one reason. Slonda. His unkempt brother in Tandor. Or at least on the way there. Anadar was predictable in such matters. Men who otherwise perform strength can almost always be found most easily at the old soft places.

Son stepped beside him.

“We’re wasting time here,” she said.

“I know.”

“Then we ride.”

Grot nodded.

Indra came with the reins in her hand. “The road to Tandor will be fuller than the side routes.”

“Then we don’t take the main road.”

“If he rode past the market, we still could have missed him.”

Grot looked at her. “Yes.”

It was unpleasant to say out loud. Not only because it was possible, but because it meant the search had now truly become a needle in a haystack. The Great Market had at least been a place where everything surfaced eventually. North of it the routes branched into caravan roads, river crossings, small farms, hamlets, hunting trails, winter detours. A single rider or a small group could slip through easily if they meant to, or simply had the luck for it.

And Anadar often had luck.

Or the next thing that replaces luck in men like that.

Grot mounted.

He did it with the expression of a man mounting a personal affront. The horse under him was good, strong, dark, reliable, and still he hated the saddle today more than usual. He hated the journey. He hated the assignment. He hated the necessity. He hated the monster at sea. He hated the renegade whose stupidity had set all of this in motion. He hated the Codex for only ever being read sharply when something had already gone wrong. And above all he hated Anadar for the fact that they now needed him of all people. And he hated Anadar.

They rode out.

The Great Market fell behind them like a dirty thought that clings to boots for a long time. Ahead lay the North, broad and cool, with bare trees, hard roads, and the knowledge that somewhere up there rode a fire mage Grot had disliked for years and whom he now, if everything went badly, would have to meet with courtesy.

He pulled his cloak tighter around himself.

How he hated all of it.

How he hated this assignment.

How much he hated Anadar.