The dock was a lost cause, so I made us a new one.
It was a useful thing, being a mage who didn’t have to ask the water’s permission. I didn’t freeze lakes; that was slow, and the water argued back.
I pulled the cold out of nothing; I told it where to be, and it went.
So I told it to be a bridge: a clean, pale-blue span arcing off the ship’s flank, out over the shallows and the rotten pier and the entire sad question of the dock, down to a flat landing on the western bank.
“There,” I said. “A dock that won’t eat the ship. Lucy—you’re staying with her.”
“Aye, someone responsible’s got to.” Lucy, not by any measure a responsible person, took the wheel as if she’d been handed a crown. “Go poke yer haunted town, Yer Majesty. I’ll keep me girl off the rocks.”
NightSwallow had stopped being on the deck at some point. I hadn’t seen her cross, which meant she was already over there, somewhere in the corners she’d told us she didn’t like, doing the thing she did, where the rest of us only found out what she’d found whenever she decided we needed to.
I started down the bridge, and Llama fell in ahead of me; shield up, weight forward, taking point as if the matter had been settled in a meeting I hadn’t been invited to.
“I’ll lead,” he said.
“Will you?” I stopped on my own ice. “When did that get decided? I made a dock. I don’t recall the dock coming with a change of command—”
He didn’t break stride, only he tipped his head back toward Luminaria.
Lumi, coming down the bridge behind me, smiled. Small, and a little smug, and it told me the whole story: somewhere, quietly, she’d asked him to keep her promised land from killing her on the first afternoon.
“Right,” I said. “Lead on, Sir TechiLlama.”
“Wait—am I exploring?” Yuki had caught up at my shoulder, ears high, tails already in open revolt. “Am I on the party? Is this a real ruin? Charlie, is this a real ruin with a real—” She caught my face. “I’m on the party. Right. I’m being completely normal about this.” She was not.
Her tails were going wild.
We came up off the ice onto solid ground, and the town closed around us.
It had been dead a long time, fifty years at least, that was what Yuki announced. Long enough for moss to take the cobbles and saplings to set up house in the doorways, for the fallen roofs to let the rain in and finish what was started, but it hadn’t gone quietly into that half-century.
It had burned.
Once you saw it, you couldn’t stop seeing it: the black tide-line of soot climbing the standing walls, timbers charred to coal and never cleared away, whole rows of houses folded in on themselves where the fire had eaten their bones out from under them. Fifty years of green had grown up through the char and softened its edges, but it hadn’t hidden it. Someone had put this place to the torch, and no one had ever come back to mourn it.
Phèdre drifted up alongside Yuki, coat hanging loose off her shoulders, picking through the rubble. “One does not need a historian, mon cœur,” she murmured, mild as milk, “to guess what happened here.”
Yuki shot her a glare.
Phèdre returned an angelic smile, the one she kept polished for precisely these Yuki moments.
Yuki turned to me and mouthed, with enormous feeling, she’s impossible.
Phèdre, who had absolutely seen it, simply kept smiling and walking.
The street bent and opened, and we came out into what had been the town square. Luminaria stopped at the edge of it.
The square had been fought over. Scorch-marks fanned across the flagstones in patterns no honest fire would have left; directional, bloomed outward, the unmistakable handwriting of spells. Stone lay cracked where something heavy had come down hard. A whole stretch of the far wall hadn’t burned out; it had been blown out. Whatever had happened to the rest of the town, this was where it ended, and it had not ended kindly.
Yuki went still.
Then the fear slid off her, and the worry slid off her, and the whole haunted weight of a murdered town slid off her, and what was left was a historian with a thread to pull. She crossed the square in three quick steps, dropped to one knee on the scorched stone, and pressed her hand flat against a mark in the flagstones.
“Oh,” she said, lit up. “This is interesting! Charlie—” she still didn’t look up. “I found something. Give me a moment. Maybe several moments.”
I shook my head and tipped it toward the rest of them. “She found something. Lumi wanted to explore the place anyway, so let’s scatter. Look around, don’t touch whatever looks like it bites, and let Yuki figure out what she’s holding.”
So we scattered.
The square gave everyone something to do.
Yuki had committed entirely to her pile of rubble, both hands buried in it to the wrist with the focus she usually reserved for ancient murals; and Phèdre had folded herself down at Yuki’s shoulder, close enough that her breath stirred the pink hair, murmuring a low running commentary in French that I was fairly sure had stopped being about archaeology several sentences earlier.
Yuki’s ears were caught between annoyed and pleased, and she couldn’t commit to either.
Lumi and Llama had drifted to the middle of the square, and they weren’t looking at the ruins at all. They were looking at the empty air above the flagstones, planning a building that didn’t exist yet.
“Town hall here,” Llama said, one hand measuring nothing. “Center of the square. Visible from the water.”
“It needs columns,” Lumi said. “Pale stone. Something that catches the light off the lake in the afternoon.”
I left them to it. It was a good argument to have. It meant Lumi had stopped seeing a dead town and started seeing a home, which had been the entire point of letting her come.
On the far side of the square, a shadow that hadn’t been a shadow a moment before crouched over a stretch of collapsed wall. NightSwallow turned a piece of scorched timber in her hands, studied the break, set it down, and was gone again before I’d fully seen she’d been solid.
A hand landed on my shoulder, and since it didn’t belong to anyone I could account for in the square, I turned with my pulse already climbing.
“Lucy.” I let the pulse go back down. “You were supposed to be on the ship.”
“Ship’s fine. Anchored, quiet, nothing to run her aground for a mile.” Her voice had dropped the entire pirate register too; every rolled R and swallowed G gone. “I wanted to check on you.”
“Check on me.” I blinked. “I’m fine. I’m standing in a burned town.”
“That’s not what I meant.” She looked at me, and there was none of the performance left in it. “It’s a strange thing, Charlie. Not that long ago you were John, and John was at the bar every night after boss finally let us out, and now you’re a queen with an ice bridge and a fox historian and a girl who builds you brunches when you’re late.” A small shrug. “I keep getting whiplash.”
“Do you still go?” she asked after a moment. “To your bar?” I shook my head. “Mm.” She nodded slowly. “That’s a flaw that needs correcting.”
I stared at her. “Do you want me to be an alcoholic again?”
She grinned and held both hands up. “Fair. Fair. Bad phrasing.” The grin gentled into something more honest. “You can drink water, Patrick’s watter is good. Also, we’ve got Clock Tower. We should do that again,” Lucy said. “You and I. Just be ourselves somewhere for an hour.” She waited a moment, and then the grin came back. “Without your girlfriend.”
Heat climbed my face before I could head it off. “I mean, we’re, uh—”
“Lola’s cute,” Lucy went on, cheerfully driving straight over me. “And the two of you together are disgustingly cute, and we have not talked about it, not once, and I have feelings about being left out of the loop on the best thing to happen to you since you stopped being miserable.” She tilted her head. “So. We’re talking about it.”
“I haven’t talked about it with anyone,” I admitted. “Not really.”
“Is this what you want?” she asked, and she meant it all the way down. “All of it. Her. I have to ask, because I’ve watched it from the outside, and from the outside it can look like Lola decided how she felt and you’ve just been going along with it. Is she putting it onto you, and you’re being too kind to say otherwise?”
I blinked at her. “What—no.” My voice came out certain, and the certainty surprised me as much as it surprised her. “No. That’s not it at all. Lucy, no. I love her.”
The words were out before I’d run them past any committee.
They hung in the burned air between us. Lucy grinned as if she’d landed a fish the size of the ship. “There it is,” she said. “That’s what I wanted to hear.” She clapped my shoulder. “So you’re already at that phase. Good. Glad we’re caught up.”
I realized, about one second too late, that she’d walked me directly into saying it and my face went hot all over again. “You—”
“YES!”
The shout came from the rubble, pure triumph, and before I’d finished turning toward it a shadow tore loose from the wall on the far side of the square and resolved into NightSwallow at Yuki’s elbow, daggers half-drawn, dropping into a crouch with her eyes snapping across the rooftops.
“Who attacked.” Less a question than a request for a target.
Yuki shrieked and nearly went over backward into her own excavation, one hand flying to her chest, tails puffed to twice their size. “Don’t—when did you—I didn’t even hear—”
Phèdre, still seated elegantly at Yuki’s shoulder, laughed. “Mon dieu. You have frightened the historian half to death, ma chérie. Both of you. Such jumpy company I keep.”
NightSwallow straightened, sheathed the daggers, and looked faintly put out that nobody had needed killing. “No one attacked,” she informed the square, and dissolved back toward the wall she’d been studying, dignity intact through sheer effort of will.
I crossed to the noise.
Yuki had gone right back to glowing the instant the fright wore off, knelt in the rubble with both hands black to the wrist, Phèdre arranged beside her like a cat that had located the warmest spot in the room, and the rest of them drifting in; Lumi and Llama abandoning their imaginary town hall, Lucy ambling over with her hands still in her pockets.
“Tell me you found teeth,” Lucy said.
“Better!” Yuki held something up between two fingers, and it caught the light: a single curved plate the length of my thumb, deep glossy red shading to black at its edge, hard and bright as lacquer. “Scales. There’s a whole seam of them through this slag, dozens, fused right into the melt. Something with red scales was in this square when it burned—and a lot of it.”
“Oh,” I said, and the answer arrived whole and obvious. “Fire salamanders.” I nodded sagely. Then I looked past the broken walls, out of the town and up the slope, to where the trees gave out against bare gray rock and a darker seam cut down into the mountain’s foot. “They dug too deep, hit a nest, and the nest came up to discuss it. Whole town gone in a night.”
“Queen.” Yuki sat back on her heels, and her tone grew careful. “That’s a good hypothesis. But we’re working from one scale and a burn pattern, and a burn pattern can be a lot of things. I don’t think we can rule out that people did this. An attack.”
“Both can be true,” I said, but I was already turning, already looking up the slope toward that dark seam in the rock, and then past all of it, south, to where we still hadn’t been. “We’ll come back to it. Right now, we need to go.”
“But, Queen—” Lumi started, the half-built town hall still shining in her eyes.
“Mission first.” I said. “We clear the fragment, we secure the capital, and then we come back. None of it’s going anywhere. It waited fifty years; it can wait a few more days.” I caught her eye and let myself smile. “And when we come back, maybe I’ll show you what a world fragment can actually do. You’ll want to see that before you start picking columns.”
That did it. Lumi’s face lit up at the promise of a demonstration, Llama set a hand on her to steer her toward the bridge, and we left the dead town to its silence and walked back out across my ice to the ship.
We made the rest of the run in a little under three hours.
The river let us go without a fight, for once, the current easing, the channel opening, the dark dense forest that had closed over us since the swamp finally, slowly beginning to thin. The trees stepped back from the bank.
The canopy lifted.
And then the forest simply stopped, and we slid out into the open, and there it was. Near the bank of the great lake, alone in all that green, stood the obelisk. It wasn’t there anymore because I claimed it.
But there was a distortion in the air, waiting for us to enter.