Chương 111: OT - Virex Caelum: An Arcane Mercenary Novella

Talena Ren Imagawa left at the ninth hour and I watched him go from the upper gallery of the Aurion reception hall, which I realize is a completely undignified thing to admit, but here we are. He moved through the floor below with that particular ease of someone who had never once in his life wondered whether he was welcome in a room. Above average height, overtly composed, with a jawline belonging to someone who had taken the concept of "Picturesque Hero" far too literally.

He had so much confidence it might as well have been shooting out of his ass. He walked flanked by the Imagawa delegation in their formal blacks, moving toward the exit with the unhurried pace of people who had gotten what they came for. And the asshat had his fiancée on his arm. She was lovely because that much was always going to be obvious.

I want to be clear that I am not being catty when I say this — she was genuinely, objectively lovely, in the composed and purposeful way of a Takeda girl who understood that her appearance was a resource to be used and deployed. That alone burns my chaps a little. What really set them on fire was that she had clearly made peace with this inevitability a long time ago.

The part that actually made me sick was how she looked at Ren all evening — like she had figured out some sort of marriage arrangement that the rest of us hadn't gotten the briefing on. He, on the other hand, looked at her with pleasant regard. When he wasn't looking at his own reflection, of course. Certainly, his affairs were in order. What a dick. I had been standing twelve meters away with my glass, my composure, and my considerable beauty completely intact.

The expression of the First Princess of the Dominion of Vera attending a formal court function. My face was completely neutral as the Grand Chamberlain said the words of betrothal. We will ignore the fact that not three months ago he was trying to kick down that metaphorical door to my kingdom with the aggression of a blood-deprived red wolf. Yeah. We'll just ignore that. I was proud of myself for maintaining my composure, for which I was absolutely trained, even as I smiled and pretended everything was fine.

I am always one to keep my composure. I am extremely good at standing in rooms with my glass and my composure. It is genuinely one of my finer qualities. My mother appeared beside me with the silent efficiency she always deployed when she had something to say and had decided to say it quietly.

"Darling, you are doing amazingly. You are holding your composure not just like a princess — like a queen," she said.

"Mother, I'm not sure what you're complimenting me on. I always hold my composure."

"Except when you don't, my beautiful girl," she said.

"But tonight you are, and your mother couldn't be prouder of you." She studied me for a moment with the particular attention of a woman who had been reading my face since before I learned to control it.

"Fear not, child. He was not suitable," she said finally.

"He is exceptional and he knows it. More importantly, he's exceptional, he knows it, and he needs everyone else to know it as well. If you find a man who is exceptional, that is great. Find a man who is exceptional and understands that exceptional nature and the responsibility that comes with it — even better. If you find a man who is exceptional, understands how exceptional he is and the responsibility that comes with it, and then doesn't need to prove it to others — now, my dear child, that's a man that you love.

Men who are exceptional, know it, and need to prove it will always need to prove it. They are very tiresome to love." I wanted to say I was not in love. I did not say it because my mother would have looked at me like the silly deflection that it was. Though in all actuality, I wasn't in love with him. I'm not really sure what love is. At worst I would say I was infatuated — with Nigon culture and with Ren specifically. My mother was right. He was handsome and capable. I needed someone handsome and capable.

My mother gave me a kiss on each cheek and then moved on, but not without a swat to my backside that nobody saw. I yelped and gave her a glare. She gave me a warm smile. Then she moved on. I stayed and danced the next four sets with partners I could not have described ten minutes later. I smiled. I used my fan. I performed the remainder of the function as the Crown Imperial Princess with the composure the Aurion line expected. I'm not going to be so dramatic as to say it killed me.

I will be dramatic enough to say I wished it did, as it was the most tedious three hours I had spent in recent memory, and I had recently sat through a four-hour parliamentary briefing on grain tariffs. FOUR HOURS talking about tariffs on wheat. What is wrong with people?

"My lady, the transport is ready," Mira said, finding me near the colonnade as the function began to thin.

"Virex Caelum is ready for your arrival whenever you would like to leave."

"Oh, thank the goddess. Now," I said.

"Let's get the hell out of here."

"Language, Princess. And now, really?" I raised an eyebrow at her. She gave me a radiant smile.

"Now it is," she agreed, in the tone of someone who had expected exactly that answer and had the bags ready. The transport north took four hours. I sat with my hands in my lap and watched the capital fall away beneath us, the rings of Aurelion Prime giving way to the northern roads and then to open country and then to the mountains and the northern dark that had too many stars in it and no interest in being decorative about the matter.

"You could talk about it," Mira said, somewhere in the second hour.

"I'm fine."

"I didn't say you weren't fine."

"You were implying it."

"I was offering you a blanket. It is cold." I accepted the blanket. I did not say anything else. Mira settled back with her correspondence tablet and demonstrated the most useful quality she possessed, which was knowing when to shut her mouth. Ren Imagawa was going to be extraordinary for the rest of his life.

He was seventeen and already on par with the best of his generation, and he was going to keep getting better, and he was going to do all of it with a Takeda girl on his arm who had the good sense to stand next to him without having opinions he found inconvenient. I had opinions. I had expressed several of them directly to his face over four months of diplomatic functions, which he had found entertaining in the way that very capable people found resistance entertaining — as texture.

An interesting variation on the predictable landscape. He had told me once that I was the most genuinely interesting person he had encountered in Vera. I had been seventeen years old and had filed this under significant. It had apparently not been a proposal.

"You understand that the Takeda girl isn't even going to be the first wife." I raised an eyebrow.

"Mira, how on earth could you possibly know that?"

"The Takeda girl is lovely, a real peach, but peaches bruise easily, Highness. When they're easy to get, most don't cherish them — especially arrogant men." I smiled at that.

"He'll stay with the Takeda girl, for sure. But if you don't think he's going to pursue Akemi Yamato, then you are sadly mistaken, Highness. I think you dodged a bullet with this one." I was unsure about that. Mira glanced over her shoulder at the window. The clouds outside were dark and I had no idea what she could possibly see, but apparently she was satisfied, because she turned back toward me.

"Highness," she said.

"We're beginning descent." The lights of Virex Caelum resolved through the viewport — warm gold against the mountainous northern dark. The palace sat at the edge of the cliff with the severe rigidity that fortresses carried, especially those built for royal families. In the dark and the cold it was severe and honest and entirely indifferent to the weather. In summer it was beautiful in the way of things that had earned their beauty through hardship and work. In winter it was simply severe. I had always liked it.

The severity felt honest. The transport settled onto the landing platform. I stepped out into the northern cold, took a breath of air that tasted like salt and ice and the particular mana density of the far northern reaches, and felt the specific relief of arriving somewhere that did not require me to perform anything for anyone. The head of the palace staff met me at the platform threshold.

"Your Highness," he said.

"Your suite is prepared. The administrative files for the northern circuit review are ready for your attention in the morning."

"Good," I said.

"That's what I'm here for." Mira, behind me, made a small sound that was not quite a sigh. I ignored it and went inside.

Talena Virex Caelum in winter was exactly what I needed it to be. BLOODY quiet. The administrative circuit of the North was genuine work — function over ceremony, always important in the actual administration of the Dominion. Many of the royals, including my cousins, uncles, and others who coveted the crown, seemed to forget that.

The northern territories were vast, treacherous, and absolutely brimming with resources, so understandably they generated the kind of paperwork that capital functionaries preferred not to look at too closely.

A lot of the stuff was fairly mundane — resource allocation disputes between the three major settlements, infrastructure requests that had been sitting in queue for two years because nobody wanted to authorize the expenditure, a border dispute between two barons who had hated each other for 250 years and would probably kill each other off in another hundred. There was a mining rights conflict in the upper Caelum Variks region that had been escalating in small increments since before I was born.

Real, unglamorous, and totally necessary work. The kind that actually mattered and that nobody particularly wanted to do. It was the kind of work that made me want to drive a blade through my skull. But, and it is a big but, wanted to do it. That was one of the things people consistently got wrong about me. The King's daughter, they thought. The beautiful one. The one with the dramatic mana sensitivity and the unfortunate tendency to form loud opinions at formal functions.

That daughter couldn't possibly want to do the everyday Crown Princess things. Where's Rian when you need him? Well. They are wrong.

What they missed was that I had read every territorial governance brief produced by the northern circuit office for the past six years, that I had specific and documented positions on the mining rights conflict, and that I found the resource allocation disputes genuinely interesting because, unlike what dress I was going to wear or what soup I was going to sample, these problems were actually hard. Mira thought I was overcompensating for the Ren situation by throwing myself into work.

Which is absolutely crazy, by the way. I would never pace myself for a boy. I would never react to a boy. Boys are stupid. Boys should be reacting to me, not the other way around. So instead of thinking about stupid boys, I went to work. I worked in the mornings. The administrative suite in the east wing had a proper desk and good northern light and a view of the cliff face that I found more conducive to concentration than any palace office in Aurelion Prime.

The palace staff learned within two days that I meant it when I said I did not want to be interrupted before the midday bell. They adjusted accordingly, with the particular efficiency of a northern household that had been managing the royal family's eccentric preferences for three generations. The afternoons I kept for myself. All the Royal Children had their own wings in Virex Caelum.

Before the Dominion was even the Dominion of Vera, back when this place was something older and stranger, there had been a warlord here who kidnapped a princess. She told him stories — a thousand stories, or something like that — and a knight came for her, or maybe a thousand knights, I never could keep the versions straight. She was from a warm climate, apparently, and this wing had been built for her.

They called it the Seductress Sanctuary, which is either romantic or extremely concerning depending on your perspective, and I had chosen to find it romantic because it is my wing and I get to decide. The glass atrium was the centerpiece. It was magnificent — a garden enclosed in glass and ironwork, positioned at the southeastern corner where the cliff face met the main structure.

The glass was old and slightly imperfect, the kind that bent light at angles modern glazing did not produce, and in the northern winter it caught the afternoon sun and held it longer than the surrounding stone could comprehend. Climbing plants had been growing up the interior ironwork for hundreds of years. Someone had planted a flowering tree against the south-facing glass wall at some point in the palace's history, and it had grown into something entirely its own, spreading branches across half the ceiling.

It was, in the context of a fortified winter palace built into a northern cliff, absurd. I loved it completely. I spent my afternoons there with whatever I was reading — not administrative files, those stayed in the east wing — and the specific quality of silence that the glass produced, which was different from the silence of stone rooms. Outside the winter, inside the warmth. The light doing interesting things. The flowering tree dropping petals occasionally into my tea.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon. Mira had opinions about this too.

"The Foundation of Smoke and Steel. Really?" she said, on the fourth afternoon.

"You've read that five times. You cannot seriously be reading it again."

"Hush, Mira. I have to know if Vivian and Daniel end up together. She's the princess. They should end up together."

"Princess, I hate to burst your bubble, but Sophie is the princess, not Vivian."

"She's princess-adjacent. Stop making things difficult."

"I hate to point this out, but you're the one who got it wrong. And I'm not sure why we're even talking about this. You are hiding. We need to go back to Aurelion Prime."

"I'm sorry, Mira. I can't hear you. Can't you see that I'm reading?" I said with a dismissive snort — yes, dismissive, because that was exactly what I was going for.

"You are reading a book you've read the entirety of more than a dozen times, in a place where nobody can find you."

"The staff knows where I am."

"The staff has been instructed not to bother you."

"That is called privacy, Mira. It is a concept that exists." She sat down across from me with the expression of someone preparing to deliver an unwelcome truth and finding the truth too obvious to dress up.

"You are thinking about him," she said. I turned a page.

"I am thinking about how smart and handsome Daniel is. If this author ever writes a scene with both Ethan and Daniel in the same room, it's going to be spectacularly awkward."

"You know that writer is never going to do that. Stop it."

"I don't know. I love his work, but I've heard he's a little unhinged."

"You're unhinged." I looked at her over the top of my book.

"What was that, Mira?"

"Nothing, Princess. I didn't say anything at all."

"When you applied for this position," I said, "did the application ask whether you intended to be professionally annoying, or is that a quality you developed on the job?"

"I believe it came up in the interview," she said pleasantly. She was right on both accounts, which was the aggravating part. I was thinking about him. And yes, her being professionally annoying had genuinely come up in the interview. Let the record show. To be very clear: I had not been thinking about that particular clown continuously. That is not how I operate.

I had been thinking about him strategically — in the specific background way of something that had lodged in the wrong place and had no right being there. As far as I was concerned, Ren Imagawa could be exceptional and perfect and handsome for the rest of his life with his Takeda fiancée and his confirmed-by-the-herald future. Meanwhile I was going to stay right here in my glass garden, reading about mining rights, completely unbothered.

I was seventeen years old and I was the First Princess of the Dominion of Vera and I was going to be fine. I was absolutely going to be fine. The petals fell into my tea and I fished them out and kept reading.

Talena Okay, I'm not usually prone to notice men who wear all black unless it's in the context of a security risk. He was both secure and risky. I laughed at my own joke when I thought of that one. Getting serious — Cipher seemed to be everywhere. He was simply around. That was the only way I could describe it. Most security specialists picked an area and stuck to it, depending on how competent they were. The competent ones patrolled predictably.

The really competent ones were alert, moving, making themselves known in the way certain weather made itself known. The kind of presence you walked into rather than saw coming. Apparently Cipher was very good at that. The staff had no idea what to do with him. This became apparent within the first day. Virex Caelum was a long-standing royal property whose operations had been refined over three generations of royal visits.

The system ran on the assumption that every person in the palace had a function, a location, and a schedule. The household staff were excellent at their jobs precisely because they understood how to slot people into the machinery of the palace and keep everything moving without friction. Cipher was a circular piece in a square hole, except he was not even trying.

He simply existed outside the categories the system was designed to manage, and the system, faced with something it could not categorize, did what institutional systems always did with the uncategorizable. It handed him tasks. I first noticed this on the second day, when I passed the eastern corridor on my way from the administrative suite and found him walking in the opposite direction with what appeared to be a stack of requisition documents for the supply office.

He moved through the corridor with that seamless economy that made you suddenly aware of how much unnecessary motion everyone else produced. The documents sat in his hands with the faint air of confusion. He completed the task the way he completed everything. Assigned to the action, present for the action, done. The third time this happened I stopped and watched him pass.

He continued with the flat even attention that registered my presence, noted, cataloged, filed, and moved toward the supply office without a word. I stood in the corridor for a moment after he passed. My Resonance caught the edge of his signature again. Even in passing, even with nothing active, nothing deployed, the sheer ambient output of simply existing was enough to register on my sensitivity the way a fire registered in a dark room. The light of it, before the warmth.

I continued to the administrative suite and sat at my desk and read the same paragraph of the Caelum Variks brief four times.

The housekeeper found him the next morning and asked him to move a piece of furniture. I know this because I was in the receiving corridor when it happened, and what I witnessed was the palace's senior housekeeper, a woman of seventy years' service who had managed the household through two kings and was visibly impressed by nothing, approach a dangerous and completely unknown person and ask him to shift a cabinet that had been blocking the east passage since a minor structural adjustment two winters ago.

She spoke to him the way she spoke to everyone who worked in the palace. Directly. With the clear expectation of compliance. He looked at her. Sort of. He still had the mask on. She looked at him. As if she could see straight through it. There was a pause in which I held my breath. His shoulders dropped slightly. He moved the cabinet. She thanked him with the same brisk efficiency she used for everyone, made a note on her household crystal interface, and walked away. I watched Cipher look after her for a moment.

An expression I could not read through the mask, and could not read through the Resonance because the Resonance told me about mana, not feelings. Then he turned and walked in the opposite direction without comment. Mira appeared at my shoulder.

"Did he just—""Move the cabinet," I said.

"Yes."

"He said nothing."

"Not entirely sure the man can talk."

"The housekeeper just—""She asked and he moved it, Mira."

"Princess. That man is probably a straight-up killer."

"Most likely." Mira was quiet for a moment.

"I genuinely cannot tell if that is terrifying or the most domestic thing I have ever witnessed."

"Both," I said.

"I think it is genuinely both."

It became a pattern. The staff, having discovered that the silent masked figure would comply with reasonable requests without incident, began treating him as an available resource for tasks outside the normal household roster. He carried things. He moved things. He was handed messages to deliver when the regular couriers were occupied, which he delivered without commentary and apparently without error, because no complaints reached me and the household ran without disruption.

He passed through the glass atrium twice that I counted. The first time I was reading in the corner nearest the flowering tree, and he came through the connecting corridor that ran between the east wing and the residential quarters, crossing the atrium in a diagonal line toward the north exit. He had a delivery of some kind under one arm. He moved at the same pace as always. The mask gave nothing. My Resonance lit up like something had struck a bell.

In the open glass-enclosed space, with the afternoon light coming through at an angle and the warmth trapped inside, his mana signature was different than it was in the stone corridors. The same capacity. The same purity. Just cleaner, the way music sounded different in an empty room than a crowded one, every note arriving without interference. I set my book down. He was already through the north exit. I picked my book back up.

"You watched him the entire way across," Mira said, from somewhere behind my left shoulder.

"I was looking up."

"You were tracking him."

"My Resonance was tracking him. There is a difference."

"Is there."

"Yes," I said.

"One is involuntary." Mira made a sound that contained an entire editorial position in a single syllable. I ignored it and turned a page.

Aiden was less easy to ignore. He was in and out of meetings with the palace's intelligence liaison, with the northern garrison commander, with two officials I did not recognize who arrived on the third day and left the same evening. Whatever was coming out of the Caelum Variks intelligence, he was unhappy with it. I could see that clearly without being told anything.

The specific quality of Aiden's composure when he was managing information he considered dangerous was something I had learned to read over years of court functions. He brought it to me once, briefly, in the corridor outside the administrative suite.

"The northern situation is developing," he said.

"I want to move within the week if the intelligence stabilizes."

"The mining dispute or the contractor activity?" He looked at me for a moment.

"The contractor activity."

"Is it connected to the mining dispute?"

"Possibly. The picture is incomplete." I nodded. Everything hedged, everything conditional. The specific phrasing of someone managing what he told me as carefully as he managed everything else.

"Should I be concerned?" I asked.

"The palace security is solid," he said.

"And you have Cipher." I had Cipher in the sense that Cipher was currently somewhere in the palace moving furniture and delivering messages without comment. I was not entirely sure this was reassuring in the way Aiden intended it, but I accepted the answer because Aiden did not offer empty comfort and if he thought the security was solid, he had a reason for thinking so. I went back to the administrative suite.

I read the Caelum Variks brief through to completion and wrote three position papers and authorized two infrastructure requests and drafted a response to the barons who had been trying to kill each other for 250 years. That evening I went to the atrium and read until the light went. The petals fell into my tea. I fished them out. He passed through again just before I left, moving east this time, empty-handed, the stormglass violet eyes sweeping the corridor behind him as he went.

My Resonance registered the bell-strike of his passage and settled again when he was gone. I gathered my book and went to bed and thought about the purity of it, the absolute control underneath the scale, and the way his mana moved through the atrium's warm afternoon air like it already knew the dimensions of every room it had ever entered. I did not think about Ren Imagawa at all. This felt significant, so I made a note of it and went to sleep.

Aiden Virex Caelum had not been built to be comfortable. That was the first thing you understood about it, arriving from the south with the capital's architecture still in your eyes. The fortress was about as inviting as a public execution. Where most castles were designed to encourage, intimidate, represent, project, the fortress that was Virex Caelum was there to occupy, and occupy it did.

It had been cut into the northern ridge over six centuries of incremental addition, each generation of builders adding to what the previous had left, and the result was a structure that felt less constructed than accreted. Layers of mana-infused stone with an intricately designed ward lattice so seamless and proper that the magic itself was almost a work of art.

The whole thing became something that could not be easily categorized as either palace or fortification because it was genuinely both and had stopped apologizing for the confusion. It did not stop the place from being damn cold. Even with the rather impressive ward lattice and doming structure. From the northern gatehouse, which sat at the outermost point of the ridge where the cliff face dropped sheerest to the sea, you could see the full shape of it.

The main residential structure running east to west along the ridge line. The administrative wing tucked into the southern face where the rock offered natural shelter from the worst of the winter winds. The glass atrium catching the last of the afternoon light in a way that made it look, from this distance, like something warm had been preserved inside the stone against the cold's best efforts.

And above all of it, invisible to the eye but present to anyone with the sensitivity to feel it, the projected portion of the ward lattice. I had been briefed on Virex Caelum's defensive architecture before my first official visit almost ten years ago. The briefing had been thorough and had still not fully prepared me for the actual experience of walking through it.

Most palace ward systems operated on a horizontal plane, ground level barriers, perimeter detection, the standard Arcanum applications that any sufficiently funded household could maintain. Virex Caelum's system was special in that it was three-dimensional.

It extended upward from the ridge into the air above the fortress and outward from the cliff face over the sea below, a continuous field of detection and containment that covered approach vectors most systems simply ignored because most systems were designed for ground-level threats. The Royal Guard maintained it.

Had maintained it for generations, the knowledge passing from senior Arcanum specialists to their successors in the careful way that complex technical knowledge passed when the documentation was insufficient and the understanding had to be embodied through experience. Reading it was not going to cut it here. It was old work. There was also the added difficulty that the original fortress was older than the Dominion of Vera. The Royal family had expanded it over the centuries and found it easy to do so.

The intricate instructions woven into the ward lattice through a unique combination of Technica and Arcanum were damn near artistic in their build and approach, making everything connect like children's building blocks. The intricacy and beauty of the code was buried so deep within the ward lattice that the specialists tasked with maintaining it could not understand how to replicate it simply.

They were given instructions to maintain it, and an ancient Technica interface drew mana from the turbulent northern winds to correct and sustain itself, helping them do exactly that. Remarkable, actually. Too bad it did nothing for the cold. It kept hostile spells and hostiles from approaching. That was its function and it performed that function exceptionally. From a security standpoint the latent defenses were some of the strongest in the Dominion.

That was my honest assessment and most security specialists agreed. The actual physical presence of capable guards and fighters was thin, which was why I had felt comfortable bringing Cale. I did not know anyone more capable, and we had no clear picture yet of what sort of resistance we would find farther north. That was where my attention had been. The mission. Which was why the intelligence picture developing over the last several days had started to make me considerably less comfortable.

Dorlan found me at the gatehouse on the fourth morning with the expression he wore when the information he was carrying was worse than the information he had been carrying the day before.

"The contractor positioning updated overnight," he said.

"Show me." He laid the intelligence overlay across the gatehouse table. The projection showed the northern approach routes, the sea lanes, the ridgeline access points. The contractor signatures, the kind of mana trace that experienced intelligence analysts learned to read as professional mercenary presence, had been clustering for two days. Individual signatures were explainable. The pattern they formed together was not.

"They're not moving toward Caelum Variks," I said.

"No," Dorlan said.

"They stopped moving toward Caelum Variks approximately thirty-six hours ago." I looked at the projection for a moment. The clustering was centered on the ridge approach. On Virex Caelum.

"The timing of the repositioning," I said.

"When did it start?" Dorlan pulled up the timeline.

"Approximately eight days ago." Eight days ago was when the Princess had arrived at Virex Caelum.

"The supply movement anomalies from the northern circuit report," I said.

"The ones flagged as administrative irregularities."

"I pulled them this morning," Dorlan said.

"Three separate supply routes through the northern garrison showed access authorizations that don't match the duty roster for those dates. Someone used valid credentials at odd hours."

"Royal Guard credentials?" Dorlan looked at me.

"Royal Guard credentials." I straightened and looked out through the gatehouse window at the fortress running along the ridge. The glass atrium caught the morning light. Warm against the cold. Internal sabotage. Someone with Royal Guard access had been moving pieces for at least eight days, supply routes, access authorizations, the kind of preparatory work that professional contractors needed before they could operate against a target with sophisticated defensive architecture. The ward lattice.

If you wanted to compromise it, you needed someone who understood the maintenance protocols. Someone with guard-level access and specific technical knowledge of the anchor points and calibration sequences. Someone who had been present during maintenance cycles.

"Pull the maintenance logs for the ward lattice," I said.

"Last thirty days."

"Already requested," Dorlan said.

"The duty officer is—" He stopped. I had already stopped listening because one of the outer guards was coming up the gatehouse steps at a pace that was not running but was the specific fast walk of someone who had decided running would cause unnecessary alarm and was now regretting that decision. He reached the top and reported with the controlled efficiency of someone who had been trained for exactly this. Three contractor signatures had just resolved on the eastern aerial approach.

Inside the ward lattice perimeter. Moving toward the fortress from a vector that the lattice should have flagged and apparently had not. Then the eastern ridge lit. A flare, cold and precise. The specific blue-white of ward lattice Arcanum releasing under pressure at a single anchor point. One controlled shutdown. The kind of discharge that only happened when someone who knew exactly where the load-bearing joints sat cut one deliberately. The light lasted less than two seconds.

When it died, the lattice's aerial coverage above the eastern residential wing was gone. Above the glass atrium. The lattice had not failed. It had been opened. I was already moving before he finished the sentence.

"Dorlan."

"I'll take the outer perimeter," he said. He was already at the door. I pulled the communication crystal from my belt and keyed Cale's frequency. The crystal pulsed twice. No response. Cale did not always respond to communication crystals. Cale responded to communication crystals roughly as often as the situation required it and not one time more, which was a quality I had spent three months finding both useful and maddening in approximately equal measure. I sent the message anyway. They're inside the lattice.

Get to the Princess. Now. Then I ran. The fortress was four hundred meters along the ridge from the northern gatehouse. The eastern aerial approach would reach the residential wing in less than three minutes. The glass atrium was in the residential wing. I ran.