(3rd Person POV)
Ilseveire was wholly devoted to Firfel now.
The change went deeper than her oath. The aura she carried — the thing people felt before she ever spoke, the cold, distant pressure that had made even seasoned courtiers measure their words around her — was gone. In its place was something warm. Something kind.
Her personality had not been rewritten. She was still herself, still sharp, still capable of the dry edge she'd always had. But she felt lighter. Cleaner. As if a weight she'd carried so long she'd stopped noticing it had finally been lifted off her chest.
Firfel watched the transformation with quiet pleasure.
"I, Ilseveire, am truly grateful for the gifts you've given me." Ilseveire bowed again, lower this time. "My Lady. My Goddess. Firfel."
"Mm." Firfel nodded, satisfied.
"What is the first command you would give me, my Lady?" Ilseveire lifted her eyes, and they were full of resolve. "Whatever it is, I'll see it done. No matter the cost."
Arthur glanced over from the side, curious despite himself what his wife's first order to a princess would be.
"First..." Firfel's smile turned a little wry. "Could you stop being so formal with me? Just speak the way you normally would. Like a friend."
"B — but..." Ilseveire looked genuinely distressed by the request. "You are my Goddess now. You freed me from being a puppet of the Goddess of Night. I can't simply —"
"Then make it my first command." Firfel's voice gentled, but there was an unmistakable weight beneath it. The kind a goddess could put on a single sentence without trying. "Comply. Please."
Ilseveire opened her mouth, found no room to argue, and closed it again.
"...All right." She exhaled. "My Lady — I mean. Firfel."
"Good." Firfel nodded, pleased. "As for an actual order — I don't have much for you right now. Just this: help my husband expand his business across the kingdom. The more reach he has, the more it helps me. And, by extension, you."
Ilseveire listened with full attention. "Your wish is my command, my La — Firfel."
Firfel's smile widened. "This is wonderful."
Arthur leaned back, amused. "You handled that beautifully, my dear wifey —"
The floor shuddered.
A low tremor rolled through the underground chamber, dust sifting from the ceiling beams. All three of them turned toward the door at once.
It swung open without a knock. Gerry stumbled through.
"F — forgive me for intruding —" He was breathing hard, one hand braced on the frame. "It's an emergency!"
Ilseveire's hand went up at once, drawing the hood forward over her face.
"What's the matter?" Arthur's tone didn't change.
"The representatives of the Legion Swords —" Gerry swallowed. "They're here. To 'collect' from the gang. Their dues."
He was shaking now.
"When I asked them to wait, they — one of them got angry and stomped, just once, right there in my office. The whole floor shook. That's what you just felt."
"Legion Swords." Ilseveire repeated the name quietly, turning it over.
Before Arthur or Firfel could respond, she stepped forward.
"I'll handle this." She said it to Firfel directly, then added, almost as a courtesy, "If you'll permit me."
Firfel studied her for a long moment.
"All right. But don't reveal your identity if it could bring trouble down on you."
"Worry not." A small smile touched Ilseveire's lips beneath the hood. "I find I rather want to feel out this new power you've given me."
"Then go ahead," Arthur said.
Gerry watched the entire exchange in baffled silence. A hooded woman, speaking to his terrifying boss as an equal — and being granted permission to deal with the Legion Swords as if it were nothing. He did not understand who she was. But he knew enough to keep his mouth shut. Whatever Arthur was, the man stood far above the Legion Swords; that much he had learned the hard way.
Ilseveire turned to him. "Lead the way."
"U — understood." He had no idea who this woman was. But anyone Arthur deferred to was someone he had no business questioning.
---
Up in Gerry's office, two men had made themselves at home.
The first sat sprawled in Gerry's chair, dark-skinned and lean beneath a finely tailored suit, a small snake tattoo coiling across one cheek. He turned a dagger over in his right hand, lazily, the way a man does when he's bored and wants everyone to know it.
The second stood by the wall, and he did not move at all.
He was tall — eight feet, easily — wrapped head to ankle in a dark green hooded robe that hid his face and left only his eyes visible. Those eyes were sharp enough to make a brave man's stomach turn.
He held himself with the stillness of a statue, his legs lost somewhere beneath the long fall of the robe, and that stillness alone was enough to set most people's nerves on edge.
"When did Granak lose his seat to that spineless idiot Gerry?" The seated man flicked the dagger and caught it. "Something about this stinks. I know internal squabbles are normal for a gang, but this one's got a smell to it." He tilted his head back. "You feel it too, Long-Long?"
The tall one answered in a voice that came from somewhere deep and unhurried.
"I trust your read, Clark-Clark." His gaze drifted slowly across the room. "Granak would not have rolled over for his little brother. Not like this."
"Right? Gerry's a coward through and through." Clark-Clark sat up a little. "Wouldn't shock me if this whole gang's dancing on somebody else's strings now. Somebody who isn't us."
Footsteps sounded in the corridor.
Both men turned toward the door.
A hooded woman stepped inside.
"Sharp ears." Ilseveire's voice carried a quiet, mysterious lilt. "You worked out that this gang no longer answers to the Legion. Most people wouldn't have."
"So I was right." Clark-Clark's mouth curved as he looked her over. "And who might you be? We weren't expecting company."
"Where's that worm Gerry?" Long-Long's eyes narrowed beneath the hood.
Ilseveire did not so much as shift her weight.
"Gerry answers to someone else now. As does this gang. As does every coin you came here to collect." Her tone stayed light, almost playful. "You've wasted a trip. Go home, deliver the bad news to your masters, and tell them the Magicless District is no longer theirs to bleed."
The dagger in Clark-Clark's hand went still.
"That mouth on you." His easy grin thinned into something colder. "You've got no idea who you're talking to, little bird."
"A pair of dogs sent to collect scraps." Ilseveire's smile didn't waver. "I know exactly what I'm talking to."
Long-Long moved.
His arm shot out from beneath the robe — stretching, unnaturally, far past the length any arm should reach, fingers splayed to seize her by the throat.
Ilseveire was no longer where she had been standing.
She slid sideways a half-step before his hand ever crossed the space, the motion so smooth it looked rehearsed. As if she'd known precisely where the strike would land before he'd decided to throw it.
Because she had.
«Threadsight» showed her the pattern half a breath before it happened — not the future exactly, but the likeliest shape of it, the way a current pulls a leaf one way rather than another. To her eyes, Long-Long's reaching arm had a faint thread of inevitability running ahead of it, and she simply was not standing where the thread ended.
Clark-Clark came off the chair fast, fist already cocked, putting his whole shoulder behind a punch aimed at her temple.
She tilted her head, and the blow whispered past her ear.
Then Ilseveire moved.
What followed did not look like a fight. It looked like a performance.
She flowed between the two men with a grace that bordered on captivating — every step landing exactly where their attacks were not, every turn a hair ahead of their reactions.
Long-Long's elongating arms lashed at her from impossible angles and she wove through them like a dancer threading ribbons. Clark-Clark threw blade and fist in furious combination and struck nothing but air, his frustration mounting with every wasted swing.
«Threadsight» kept her always one beat early. «Performer's Heart» told her, beneath their movements, the intent behind each one — the small tells of frustration, the moment Clark-Clark committed his weight, the instant Long-Long overextended.
And «Muse's Tongue» she did not even need to speak aloud; the sheer captivation of her movement alone seemed to draw the two men into chasing her, off-balance, further and further out of position.
She struck back in measured bursts. A palm to a wrist that turned a dagger thrust aside. A heel hooked behind a knee. A precise strike to the soft point beneath Clark-Clark's ribs that folded him forward, gasping.
It lasted perhaps two minutes.
Then Ilseveire stopped dancing.
She raised one hand, fingers spread, and the air between her and the two men seemed to catch — as if the threads she'd been reading this whole time had suddenly drawn tight in her grip.
"Be still."
Both men locked rigid where they stood.
Clark-Clark's dagger clattered to the floor from a hand that would not obey him. Long-Long's stretched arms snapped back to a frozen, half-extended pose, every muscle in his body refusing his commands. Neither could move so much as a finger.
It was a gift of Fate. Their threads, for the next hour, had been knotted shut. They would stand exactly as they were until it released them.
Their eyes — the only part of them still free — were wide with terror.
They stared at the hooded woman who had toyed with two enforcers of the Legion Swords like a cat with a pair of half-dead mice, and the same question burned in both their faces.
Who — what — are you?