I came back to Rimelion standing on Lucy’s deck with the world tilting gently under me and the firm private conviction that I was about to be seasick, except now the Tork village was somewhere behind us, the swamp had given up its career in drowning people, and the river had remembered it was a river.
South.
Still south, upstream the entire way, because the world fragment had chosen to spawn at the one spot on the map the current took personally.
“Good morning!” I yelled to my team, and I got half-hearted responses. Especially Phèdre looked as if she had an evening out, and judging by how Yuki wasn’t energetic, they were together.
“Mornin’!!!” Lucy was in her full Captain mood, though, and we sailed on.
The forest had been dense since we left the village, and it stayed dense; trunks crowding both banks, roots clawing down into the black, the canopy laced so tight overhead that what daylight reached us arrived green and secondhand, like we were sailing along the bottom of an aquarium nobody had bothered to clean.
Then the land climbed.
The banks just got taller, and then they kept getting taller, and then the trees thinned at the top of all that height and the canopy split open and let down a wide, clean slab of actual sky, and there they were.
Mountains.
Big, serious, unbothered mountains, standing up out of the treeline on both sides of us, their shoulders gone gray with bare stone and their crowns white with snow, the green dim of the river had been hiding from us all day.
By the time we had sailed here, Yuki had finally woken up, and she was narrating before I’d finished looking at them. “These are old,” she said, tails straight up, leaning so far over the rail that Phèdre had drifted in beside her with one hand hovering near her collar, watching the historian instead of the view. “Older than the river—much older, you can tell from how the strata fold back on—”
“They’re our walls,” I said.
Her ears swiveled. “Our what?”
“The walls.” I nodded east, then west, at the two ranges hemming us in. “That’s the whole eastern and western length of the kingdom right there. Mountains nobody gets across. Too high, too cold, and too much living up in the passes that has no business living anywhere, there are not-a-dragons in those peaks.”
Llama was paying attention now. “Real ones.”
Lucy didn’t care about my explanation at all, and she kicked a wind mage for some reason. “Not-a-dragons a kingdom evacuates from, not the kind that turns out to be a sad little bag of eyes in the mud.” I said. “Which means nobody comes at us from the side. They’d freeze before they crested, and if the cold got bored with them first, something with teeth would finish the job.” I shrugged. “And yes, before anyone says it—I know exactly how I sound, and I’m right anyway.”
Phèdre’s mouth curved.
We ground upstream for half a day after that, and it was slow, ugly work; the current leaned on the hull the entire time like it bore a personal grudge against the concept of forward motion, and Lucy, naturally, took the river’s resistance as a direct insult to her command.
“PUT YER BACKS IN IT!” The shouting ring snatched her voice up and threw it at the mountains, and the mountains, having no say in the matter, threw it back. “I got four wind mages aboard this vessel an’ a breeze me dead gran could outpace! Fill them sails! FILL ‘EM PROPER! Ye call that a gale? That’s a yawn with delusions of weather!”
The two pairs of wind mages leaned into it. The sails bellied. The ship gained perhaps half a knot. Lucy pronounced it a triumph and demanded more, on principle.
It was past midday when the river forked.
A second channel came down out of the western range to join ours, narrower and clearer, its water a paler blue than our churned-up brown, and where the two braided together the canopy pulled back far enough to hand us a clean view straight up the smaller river. It ran maybe twenty minutes off our heading; no more than that, not in Lucy’s flagship with four wind mages being yelled into early retirement. And at the far end of it, set into the foot of the mountain where the trees gave way to bare gray rock, sat a lake.
A small one.
A cute one, even, round and an impossible cornflower blue, ringed with pale smooth stones, fed by a thin ribbon of waterfall stitching down the slope behind it. It looked like somewhere that existed to be painted. It looked, frankly, like nothing in this entire swamp-adjacent stretch of map had earned the right to look.
I was still squinting at it when Luminaria left the deck.
One moment Lady Luminaria stood at the rail in her immaculate robes, composure buckled on like plate, not one strand of that enchanted braid out of place. The next she lifted clean off the boards, lightning ticking faint under her heels, and risen to the crow’s nest without so much as troubling her hem.
Lucy, already up top, watched the mage float gently into her workspace and weirdly held her tongue.
“Charlie!” Luminaria called down, and the porcelain had a hairline crack through it; she was lit up, genuinely lit up, one hand thrown out toward the little blue lake at the mountain’s foot. “Charlie—the lake. Can we go? Can we see it? It’s barely off the river, twenty minutes, maybe less, look at it —”
Luminaria came back down to the deck.
Feet to boards, lightning tucked away, the composure sliding back over her face like a visor easing shut. She kept looking at me, though, and the hope hadn’t gone anywhere; it had only put its coat back on. “Queen!”
“We’ve already lost time,” I said, as gently as a person can say no to a hopeful Luminaria, which is roughly the experience of declining a cathedral. “The Torks cost us the better part of two days. I’d love nothing more than to go poke at a pretty lake, but we secure the capital first. Fragment cleared, dock built, the place properly ours. Then we can go investigate every shiny puddle between here and the sea.”
Llama had come to stand beside her while I talked.
He said nothing.
He didn’t grade the structural integrity of the crow’s nest or rank the lake’s geological hazards, or do any of the small administrative things Llama did to fill a silence. He just put himself at her shoulder and let her have whatever she was working up to.
What she was working up to was a glow.
“I’ve been watching the whole way south,” Luminaria said, and the regal cadence thinned into something younger. “Every bank. Every break in the trees. I wasn’t sightseeing, Charlie, I mean Queen, I was looking. For the place you promised me.”
I blinked.
I had, with total confidence, no memory of promising Luminaria a place. I have promised a great many things across a great many meetings, most of them mid-pencil-throw, and my records on the matter hold up about as well as Llama’s least favorite dock.
I opened my mouth to stall for time.
I didn’t get the chance and didn’t need it. Lumi wasn’t watching my face; she was watching the water, and she filled the quiet herself, the words tumbling out warmer and faster than I’d heard from her in all the time I’d known her.
“That one. That’s it. The water, the stone, the falls coming down behind; I want it to be ours. Mine and Llama’s.” Her hand found his without looking; his closed around it without comment. “A promised land to rule.” The porcelain tried to set itself back over her face and gave up halfway. “And someone wanted it before us, did you see? There are ruins on the western shore. Someone tried to claim it once. So it’s worth claiming.”
The warm thing in my chest cooled by about two degrees.
“Ruins?” I said.
“AYE, RUINS.” Lucy had been listening from the nest, because Lucy considered eavesdropping a core duty of command. “An’ I’ll tell ye my professional read on ‘em, Yer Cute Majesty—nefarious. Got a nefarious cut to their jib. Towns don’t just stand up an’ leave a lake that pretty. Somethin’ run ‘em off, or somethin’ et ‘em, an’ either road it’s the makings of a grand story an’ a rotten afternoon.”
A dead town. Luminaria looked at me as if I held the deed to the rest of her life. And a royal pirate calling all of it nefarious.
“Fine,” I said. “We look. We do not move in, we do not name it, we do not start picking out curtains.” Lumi’s face came up like sunrise. “We look. Lucy—take us up the channel.”
“NOW we’re sailin’!”
It took closer to half an hour because the side channel ran a current of its own, and Lumi’s twenty-minute estimate had been produced by a woman who badly wanted it to be twenty minutes.
But we got there, and, credit where credit’s owed, the lake delivered.
It was every bit as gorgeous up close as it had been from miles off, which almost never happened to anything. The water broke the afternoon into pieces, cornflower shading to hammered silver where the falls stirred it, the pale stones laid around the shore so clean and even they might have been set there by hand.
Yuki made a sound like a kettle reaching temperature.
Phèdre, beside her, had gone quiet. Her eyes tracked slowly along the far shore, half-lidded, the lazy focus she only ever spent on things that held her, and Phèdre finding something that was interesting was never good news for the rest of us.
Because the far shore was where the ruins were.
They began at the waterline and climbed the slope; broken walls, the stubs of buildings, a grid of streets still legible under a few decades of moss and the saplings that had moved into them since. A town. A real one, and from how far it sprawled up the mountain’s foot, not a small one.
Yuki stopped being nervous the instant she saw a stone that used to be a wall.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, that’s a whole town. Look at the streets—they all run uphill, toward the rock face; see how they funnel together up there? You don’t lay a town out like that for farming. You don’t cluster against bare stone unless the stone has something in it you want.” Her ears were practically humming. “Mining. I’d bet anything on it. They came here to dig the mountain.”
A shape detached itself from the rail-shadow at my elbow and resolved into NightSwallow, who’d been standing there the whole time and would have gone on being invisible if it had suited her. She was looking at the ruins.
“I don’t like the streets,” she said flatly. “Too many corners still standing. Too many roofs.”
Lucy brought us in slowly toward the western shore, and that was when we all saw the dock.
There was one, there had to be, for a lakeside town that size, a long timber pier running out from the dead streets into the bright water.
Well, or there had been one.
Half the pilings had rotted out from under it, and the survivors leaned at angles that would have reduced Llama to tears; the planking sagged green and gap-toothed, the whole length of it held up mostly by habit and the lake’s good manners.
Lucy studied it for a long, long moment. Then she studied her ship. Then she went back to studying the dock, and her face turned solemn about carpentry.
“We’re not dockin’ there,” she announced to me, to the deck, to the ruins, to whatever gods handle lakes. “Don’t care how nefarious the place is. That pier wouldn’t hold a seagull, never mind my girl. We tie up to that an’ we’ll be wadin’ into a haunted minin’ town with the ship sat on the bottom behind us.” She leveled the hammer at the rotten pier like an accusation.
“So somebody’d best dream up another way in. ‘Cause that won’t work.”