Mitchell stared at the sprawling medieval metropolis before him. He imagined it was what London or Paris must have looked like in the Middle Ages. Or maybe even Rome since Mitchell knew that, at its peak, there were roughly a million people in the city whereas London in the Middle Ages didn’t even have a tenth of that. And Lorivin definitely held more than fifty thousand people.

  Their frantic pace through the forest had gone largely without incident after that first encounter with the patrol. With Vras to scout ahead, they had come across a few others, but opted to avoid them in favor of speed since it seemed to be more frequent. Word had obviously gotten out that they’d tracked her to that part of the country and being somewhere else became a priority.

  The real trouble had been the bridge that they’d crossed yesterday. There was a guard station at the bridge, just as Allora had suspected there would be. With Vras’s help, though, they had been easy enough to distract.

  The shadow cat was getting better at his illusions and, in the small camp on the far side of the river, he had created visions of several truly terrifying creatures that had sent the people into a panic and Mitchell had given him permission to leave a guard’s corpse somewhere to be found to add to the fear and confusion. This had drawn the handful of guards away from the guard stations at the bridge as people swore they were under attack from demons, and the trio had been able to creep across under the cover of darkness without being detected. They’d had to stop and let Vras find some food after they’d put enough distance between them and the bridge as using his illusion so much apparently took a lot out of him, but other than that, the journey was unhindered. Moving at speed had proved to be their best advantage.

  The city was roughly circular, with a diameter of four to five miles as near as he could tell. Mitchell could also see walls constructed at various intervals inside the settlement itself. Dominating the skyline was, of course, the palace. It sat on a rise near what counted roughly as the center of town, given its irregular shape. Maybe it had once been a proper circle but over the years it looked as if it had grown in fits and starts to meet the demands of the rising population and so that led to some interesting bulges here and there in walls that were constructed later.

  The palace wasn’t some grand edifice with spires every fifty meters, but there were a few towers. It was hard to gauge the height since they were still a few miles from the city itself and the whole area sat in the bottom of a small depression that wasn’t quite deep enough to be called a valley. Still, the string of hills that encircled the urban center did allow him to get a good view.

  Even from this distance, the translucent dome that shielded the palace was evident. It was almost like a soap bubble that enclosed the whole structure. In the bright light of the afternoon, he could just make out the high walls that encircled it and the buildings of the palace compound itself. He could see one large central building that was maybe eight or ten stories high, and then around that, many other smaller buildings, some clustered, and some set apart but still enclosed within the protection of the bubble. It reminded him quite a bit of a university campus from this distance.

  “Wow,” was all he could say.

  Mitchell started to study the surrounding city, and he thought he could detect where districts might be based on the building sizes and orderliness of streets. Things closer to the palace looked grander, with more even lines indicating streets, and the more his eyes tracked out farther, the smaller the buildings became, the more varied in their designs, and the more disorderly the grid. He could make out market squares at various points and then the outer walls themselves, which seemed to have undergone some construction as of late. There were scaffolds erected at various points, and some parts of the walls were higher than others.

  Then, just outside the walls, there was a whole other city with little thought given to planning outside the main avenues going in through the main gates. It was like the haphazard market that he’d seen outside Besari, only substantially larger. He could also see what were clearly homes and even apartment blocks outside the walls themselves. And, just as the gnome had said, there were long lines of people, carts, and goods, waiting to make it through the gates as things and people were searched.

  “Lorivin,” Allora said, a note of both love and dread in her voice. “We have finally made it.”

  “I knew it was big,” Lethelin said, “But I didn’t know it was this big.”

  “How does it compare to Varset,” Mitchell asked her.

  “About double the size, I’d say.”

  “At the last census, the population of Varset was estimated to be just under three hundred thousand people,” Allora intoned as if reading from a fact sheet. “The population of Lorivin is around eight hundred thousand permanent residents. So more than double.”

  The pride in Allora’s voice at this fact was obvious, and she said it without taking her eyes off of the splendor of her home. And Mitchell had to admit, there was a majesty about the place.

  Lethelin, never one to let something like that slide, made her “little miss know-it-all” face and mouthed mimicking the numbers behind Allora’s back, but didn’t reply. Mitchell grinned. They really were so much like sisters at this point, with their snipes at one another, but also a fondness that seemed to grow by the day. Even though their bickering could be a little frustrating, he still found it adorable.

  “That is the Onyx Gate,” Allora said, pointing to a large structure off to their right opened out towards the east. “The road swings north and enters the Shadow Glen about three days ride from here. One can take it to the northern sections of Awenor and eventually to Kazig, either by boat across the Hartik Sea, or via passage through the northern section of the Skybreaker Peaks.”

  She indicated the gate to their left and the road it serviced, which arced away from the city and pushed through the western ring of hills.

  “That is the Sapphire Gate and that road heads towards the coast and,” Allora glanced at Lethelin, “Eventually all the way to Varset. The other three gates are the Blood Stone Gate, the Opal Gate, and the Obsidian Gate.”

  Mitchell and Lethelin watched where she indicated and, while the Opal and Obsidian gates were on the far side of the city from their vantage point, he could still make out the roads that led away from them.

  Allora continued with her geography lesson.

  “The Onyx Gate is reserved for official traffic only. That is people or merchants traveling on diplomatic missions, goods meant for the palace or one of the many embassies inside the walls, government business, the Knights, or high level city or military officials.”

  Mitchell nodded his understanding and Allora continued.

  “The Sapphire Gate is for non-official merchants and people with business in the Cloud District.” She glanced at her two students. “That is the district just outside the palace proper.”

  “The snobby rich folk, right?” Lethelin remarked, as her eyes followed the road where it tracked into the city and up the gentle slope towards the palace.

  “The people there are considered the wealthy of Lorivin, yes,” Allora answered, her voice a little tighter. “The rest of the gates are open to any traffic except for Opal Gate. That is the smallest and reserved for foot traffic, or for individuals, merchants and tradesmen with no more than a pull cart.”

  “Do you know where the inn is that we’re supposed to report to?”

  “It is in the Kethend District…” Allora’s voice trailed off as her eyes scanned the city. “Roughly there.”

  She indicated a section of the city west of the Onyx Gate but off from the main road about halfway up the slope towards the palace.

  “It is a mix of residential and trade shops.”

  “Which gate do you think you’ll use,” Mitchell asked Lethelin.

  “Hmm?” she said distractedly as he pulled her out of her thoughts. “Oh, probably none of them.”

  “But how will you get us into the city?” Allora demanded.

  She’d brought up her finger to twirl around a ring of coppery red hair as she studied the buildings and people outside the walls.

  “I don’t know yet,” she said as she pursed her lips, her eyes calculating.

  “You said you can get us in!” Allora said, the pitch rising enough that Lethelin was finally pulled away from her deliberations.

  “Oh, unbunch your armor, woman!” Lethelin retorted. “I don't know right now. I need to look around first. I have to make contact with the guild, and that will take me at least an hour. I’ll have you in by nightfall or tomorrow morning at the latest. Stop worrying! What you need to do instead is figure out how you’re going to get Vras in through all of that. Getting people through will be easy. I can’t do anything about our resident hell beast.”

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “I have a plan for that,” Mitchell said. “But I don’t think Vras will like it. Can you get us in with some supplies?”

  “I can get you in with a dancing goblin troupe,” she said. “But no one will let a shadow cat in without screaming to the two moons and back about it. So you deal with him and I’ll deal with getting us in.”

  Mitchell explained what he wanted and she frowned.

  “That will make it harder, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  With that, Lethelin set off towards the city with their mounts in tow to sell them and then make her contacts. Once she was on her way, Mitchell and Allora retreated to a copse of trees well out of sight of the roads and the occasional patrol that passed by and awaited her return.

  “Are you nervous,” he asked her as she leaned into where he sat with his back to a low tree.

  “Yes. I have not been back to the city since I fled shortly after the coup. It is my home, and I hate that I am afraid to enter its walls. And I am afraid of what will happen if we are caught. My whole life has been leading to this moment for two years. And we are only a few miles away from the throne. I wished so often to be in this exact position and, now that I am, I am terrified of it all going wrong.”

  “I think we’re going to make it,” Mitchell said.

  Allora turned and looked up at him.

  “Why is that?”

  Mitchell recalled that night in the cave with Lethelin when they’d discovered they’d been trapped with no way out. Lethelin had been panicking, only a heartbeat away from full-blown hysteria at having a mountain pressing down on her, and he’d needed to calm her down.

  “Because I’m just too pretty,” he told Allora, echoing what he’d told Lethelin in the cave. “I’m too pretty for Stollar to let me die.”

  “What?!?” Allora demanded. Then she saw the teasing look on his face and she laughed.

  The knight twisted, sat up, and then straddled his legs and placed her arms over his shoulders. Her hair was free, and it fell in long black waves past her shoulders as she leaned in.

  “I love you,” she said as her eyes locked onto his.

  “Love you more,” he told her back and kissed her.

  ***

  As the sun approached late afternoon, Lethelin emerged from the stable, her purse a bit heavier from the sale of the jivis, and began to head to what the stable master had called the Maka. A sort of unofficial district near the Opal Gate where she could find shadier dealings. Even though Lorivin wasn’t her territory, she found she walked easier among the warrens of the outer city than she did in the wilds. The noise, the smells, the bodies, the mix of languages and races, all of it was like home to her.

  Lethelin exited the stable and all its foul odors, and stepped back onto the road. She immediately spotted the young pickpockets already sizing her up. They would have seen her go in with three jivis and almost no gear, and come out with none. That indicated a sale, which meant heavy pockets. Before they even started their approach, she flashed a quick hand sign and all but one of them, the youngest, halted and tried to look busy doing other things.

  “Move on,” it signaled to them. “I’m not a mark and you don’t want to fuck with me.”

  The youngest one apparently didn’t pick up on the signal and was still working to get into position when an older boy cuffed him on the back of the head and whispered something in his ear, and then yanked him off somewhere.

  Lethelin grinned and tried to remember when she’d been that young. Not that it was that long ago, but it felt like a dragon’s age when she thought about how far she’d come as a gangly teenage girl rebelling against her mother and the memory of her father, and thinking she could be in a gang. She remembered those first fights she’d had when one of the older boys thought she was an easy target, either to rob or to bed, and how quickly she’d disabused them of that notion. At fourteen high suns, she’d been small, but she hadn’t been weak, nor had she been a fool.

  The leader of the first gang she’d tried to join had been one such boy. Narder, he called himself. The arrogant river slug actually tried to claim the title of Edrokii with his little gang of six boys who barely had hair on their sacks yet and one girl who was missing a leg. She was surprised one of the more established gangs didn’t kill him on principle for trying to claim he was a true boss.

  Narder been sixteen high suns old at the time, although she found out later he’d never made it to seventeen. But the moldy crotch stain had claimed that any girl that wanted to join up with his gang had to bed him. Lethelin played along, acting too scared to resist, until his confidence was up, and he took his filthy pants down. Then she’d buried her rat sticker in his nethers and punched him in the nose so hard that he had breathed with a whistle up until the day he’d been killed trying to steal some cargo from a boat crew.

  Needless to say, she’d found a better gang after that. And the boys in that one had heard about what had happened to Narder and left her alone. At least when it came to trying to bed her. She’d still had scraps when they wanted to steal some of her coin to make them look better for their Edrokii. Some she’d won, some she’d lost, but once Alvi found her, no one bothered her again.

  “Balls, but I miss that gnarled old skitterback,” she thought to herself with a sad smile.

  As Lethelin picked her way across the sprawling outer city, she spotted several more pickpockets but only needed to signal one of them. The others were otherwise occupied. She came across a handful of patrols but, thanks to Mitchell’s decision to leave no witnesses, she was unknown to the city watch and had no fear of being recognized.

  She was glad that he had found his mettle. The way he often talked about things back on the human home world, life there seemed incredibly soft. At least in the part that he lived in. He had shared some stories of the scale of conflict that the humans had and, honestly, she still wasn’t sure if she believed him. The way he described the weapons and the machines, she found it hard to fathom such mechanized death. But his life, it seems, had been free from war and deprivation. Killing seemed to trouble him, even when the bastards were out to kill him. She had been prepared to argue for the surrendering members of the squad’s execution, but she didn’t have to, much to her relief.

  Oddly enough, she could tell when she’d crossed that imaginary line into what the locals called the Maka. Something about the mood changed almost immediately. Glances were a little more furtive, people walked a little more on their guard, and stares were more hostile. The buildings were roughly the same, but the atmosphere was seedier and the smells slightly riper. This was the place, all right.

  She prowled around, looking for the subtle signs of gang territory markers. Some were obvious, like a dagger stuck into the lintel of a door at the start of one street, a weathered and crumbling drake skull driven onto a pike. The streets seemed much the worse for wear, though so she kept looking. Gangs that couldn’t even maintain the look of their front businesses likely wouldn’t have the connections she needed.

  As Lethelin stepped around something unpleasant in the road, she ended up coming close to a few barrels that had been placed near the wall of an apothecary. She felt the shift in her clothing immediately and her hand shot out like a scorpion’s tail and seized the offending wrist. There was a muffled screech and Lethelin turned her head to see the wide eyes of a girl, face grubby and hair unkept, staring at her as though Denass herself was weighing her soul. She was wedged tightly between two of the barrels, and Lethelin could see the small-pointed ears and vibrant eyes that marked her as a half-elf child. Full elves had eyes that almost seemed to glow, but half-elves didn’t have that same quality. Instead, they were merely richer in color, more crystal-like in appearance.

  “Clumsy, girl. The last one who tried to take what was mine lost the offending hand.”

  The girl’s grubby face paled noticeably.

  “I’m sorry, m’lady!” she said in that smooth Lorivin accent. “Please don’t take my hand! I need it!”

  Lethelin yanked and the child came sprawling out from her hidey-hole, all set to fall on her face but she pulled the sloppy pickpocket up to her feet.

  Lethelin got a good look at her then. She was a gangly thing, all knees and elbows, her clothing patched, her honey-blonde hair filthy and greasy. Dirt under her fingernails, scratches and bite marks on her arms that Lethelin recognized all too well, and a fading bruise on her cheek.

  “You’d rather I turn you into the guard?”

  The girl wobbled her head so hard that Lethelin thought she heard bones clattering. Tears began to well-up in her hazel eyes.

  “What’s your name?”

  The girl looked around, perhaps thinking someone would come to her aid. She’d have better luck finding true love in a dockside brothel. The few people on the road all had better things to do than worry about some gutter rat who was too clumsy to snatch a purse.

  “Speak, girl!” Lethelin barked.

  “Eraphys, m’lady,” the girl squeaked. “Eraphys Ne Silvalorin. Please let me go, m’lady. I’m sorry I tried to pick your pocket. I won’t do it again.”

  “How old are you, Eraphys Ne Silvalorin?”

  “I’m… I’m twelve high suns old, m’lady.”

  “When is the last time you had a hot meal?”

  “M’lady?” Eraphys said, her tone uncertain.

  “Don’t make me repeat myself, gutter rat, or I’ll cut off the hand and feed that to you.”

  “Two days ago, m’lady!” Eraphys blurted. “Madam Sarry at the Dancing Moons Tavern let me clean the stables for a meal.”

  “You fancy another one?”

  “Another one?”

  “A meal, you silly girl. Do you want something to eat?”

  “Y- Yes, m’lady,” she said, her eyes wide and hopeful.

  “Listen up, Eraphys. I’m new in the Maka and I need to find some people. You point me in the right direction, and I’ll see to it you’re fed and some coin in your pocket besides. How does that sound?”

  “You won’t turn me into the guard, m’lady? Or take my hand?”

  “If you keep your word –and stop calling me m’lady –I won’t. Do we have a deal?”

  The girl nodded enthusiastically and Lethelin finally released her scrawny wrist. The girl rubbed at the joint, trying to work the feeling back into it, and for a second Lethelin thought she would make a run for it. Just then, however, the girl’s stomach rumbled, and Eraphys still had the manners to look embarrassed.

  “Could we, um, maybe eat first, m’l– mm, miss?” Eraphys asked gently, those too-bright hazel eyes pleading.

  “Yeah, come on,” Lethelin said, shaking her head. She’d seen fatter cloud addicts after a week-long binge. “Is there a spot close by that you like?”

  Lethelin began to walk, and the girl immediately moved beside her.

  “The Drake Rider two streets over has good athi pies,” she said. “They aren’t too spicy. I heard people from Varset can’t eat spicy food.”

  Lethelin eyed her curiously.

  “Who told you I was from Varset? And who said we couldn’t eat spicy foods?”

  “Your accent. I’ve heard people like you before in my father’s shop. They were merchants that came all the way from the coast to buy his paper. They said it was the best in all of Awenor. And everyone knows people on the coast can’t eat drake peppers.”

  Lethelin snorted at the notion. How silly. But then again, a lot of people in Varset said that the people in Lorivin were all afraid of the sea and wouldn’t come within a kilometer of water they couldn’t see the other side of.

  Eraphys indicated that they should take a left at the next corner.

  Lethelin felt her brow furrow at the other things the girl said.

  “Eraphys, if your father sells the best paper in all of Awenor, why are you hiding between barrels in the Maka trying to steal coin?”

  “He… he was killed when the soldiers came. My mother, too. They had gone to the palace to deliver paper and,” the girl swallowed. “And they never came back out.”

  “Well, balls and taint,” Lethelin said to herself.

  “Excuse me,” A harsh voice said from behind them, and Lethelin heard Eraphys gasp. “But where do you think you’re going with my git?”