“Our best linguist?” Drisa said. Her apologetic smile softened her doubtful tone. “I don’t think we even have one of those, Marshal Cole.”

  Ana suppressed a scowl. It couldn’t just have been easy, could it? “Whoever is familiar with the most languages, then?” she suggested.

  “That would be Captain Pirta, but… well.”

  Drisa gestured toward the stairs that would lead them up to Pirta’s office. Ana felt no desire to take them. “Right. Probably not the kind of issue she’ll want to be dealing with right now.”

  Jisha stood between Ana and Messy, looking as resignedly confused as ever, and Messy was looking at the girl with concern. “I know this shouldn’t be a high priority,” Messy said, “but we can’t ask Ana to take care of her at every hour of the day. And leaving her without anyone she can even speak to just feels wrong.”

  “I understand your concerns,” Drisa said kindly, looking at Jisha. “But she’s just one girl. A week or two… she’ll survive. Once everything calms down, we can make a real effort. Marshal Cole, are you absolutely sure no one else here would speak the language you share with her?”

  “Can you even guess at what language I’m speaking now?” Ana asked in French, then repeated the same in English.

  Drisa blinked at her. “Right. I see your point.”

  “Here’s an idea,” Messy said. “Ana, didn’t you find some odd coins that you traded in here?”

  “I did…” Ana said thoughtfully. “Mistress Drisa, do you still have them?”

  “We don’t, but I see where Miss Mestendi is going with this. And we do have a record of which currency they were. Let me just bring it up!”

  “You think there’s a connection?” Ana asked Messy as Drisa retrieved a ledger.

  “You found some weird coins on a Summoner, and you say Jisha understood the one who summoned her. Seems worth the effort, at least.”

  “Here we are,” Drisa said, laying the ledger on her desk and flipping through it. “Two gold coins, twelve silver, and eight bronze, exchanged by weight. Later identified as Wanteul currency. And I do believe that we have several people in this outpost who speak Wanteul Common! One moment!”

  Drisa went up the stairs, leaving them to wonder for a minute or two, before returning with Dilmik Ters, the archer from Ana’s Delve.

  Dilmik’s confused expression melted into a wide smile when she say them. “Oh, hello Messy! And Ana, too! And who’s this? Hi, I’m Dilmik!”

  The large woman extended her hand toward Jisha, who looked at it, took it, shook it once, and gave her name.

  “She’s why we’re here,” Ana said as Dilmik looked at her own hand. Right. Jisha gave the wrong handshake. “She doesn’t speak the local language, and we were hoping she might understand, what was it? Wanteul?”

  “Oh, I see! In that case—”

  Dilmik turned to Jisha again and let off a stream of long vowels and nasal sounds, seemingly without breaks for separate words.

  Jisha’s face lit up then broke into a wide smile as she answered in the same language. She stopped with a look of surprise, then continued, sounding confused.

  Dilmik laughed, answered something, then turned to Ana. “Well, she speaks Wanteul better than I do. She doesn’t seem to know how, though, but I’ll leave that to you officers.”

  “Afraid not, Dil,” Ana said, and Dilmik’s face froze. “She’s in your care now.”

  “What?”

  “Jisha,” Ana said, switching to French as she turned to the girl, “You’ve already introduced yourselves, but this is Dilmik. She’s a friend. I’m asking her to get you settled in, alright? Get her to introduce you to her sister, too.”

  Jisha’s face fell. “I can’t go with you?”

  “Sorry. I’ve got a lot of work to do, and you need to learn how things are around here. I simply don’t have time. I’ll try to find you tonight. And, Jisha?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t tell them about home. Pretend you don’t remember anything, and that you don’t know why you’re only Level 1 when you should be Level 10 at least. I’ve been trying to be selective with who I tell what. Okay?”

  “Alright, I guess.” Jisha turned to Dilmik and left off another incomprehensible stream of sounds, her expression apologetic. Dilmik answered, quickly finding a smile again and inviting Jisha to join her on the other side of the reception desk.

  “I’ll show her around,” Dilmik said, all traces of apprehension gone. If anything, she shone with anticipation. “Don’t you worry!”

  The rest of the day was filled with planning and preparation, with a spontaneous afternoon training session thrown in to both help the volunteers and let Ana blow off some steam. The officers had been running regular sessions ever since the militia was organized, but the large-scale exercises had really paid off when they relieved the farms. Best that everyone get as many of those as possible.

  After a few more hours of doing things she really didn’t have any business having a say in, Ana practically snuck off with Tellak for a combined Shaping and aura-suppression practice. Messy ran interference to cover for their departure, and Tellak was only too happy to oblige; she was as out of her depth as Ana was.

  “I understand that you’ve been appointed martial commander in Captain Falk’s absence, and I understand Captain Pirta’s reasoning,” Tellak said as they made their way to Touanne’s, “but is discussing labor schedules while we move really a good use of your time? Or mine, for that matter?”

  “Thank you!” Ana said emphatically. “I think I said a dozen words that whole meeting!”

  “Tomorrow, just leave it to the clerks and have them give you a report. They’ve done a fantastic job keeping this outpost running. Why should we interfere, when they’re the ones doing all the planning?”

  “Yeah, I’ll definitely do that.”

  At Touanne’s they were met with a pleasant surprise: the Healer was sitting with Jancia in the front room, drinking tea and having a conversation that Ana had been able to hear indistinctly from outside but which died when the door opened. Neither of them looked happy, exactly. Their auras were murky, for lack of a better word, and the way they looked up told Ana that she was intruding to some degree, but they were there. Jancia was up, and they didn’t object to Ana and Tellak coming in.

  Jancia sitting there with a steaming mug in her hands was a relief; she was a mage, strong by all accounts, and they needed strong mages. Every edge would help, and Ana had been worried that Jancia wouldn’t be able to leave the bed, no matter how willing she’d claimed to be to fight. If she could channel her shame and grief into violent anger instead of despair, they'd all be better off for it.

  Well. Short term, at least. But if the short term didn’t work out, the long term wouldn’t matter.

  “Telly! Ana!” The cheer in Touanne’s voice was forced; she looked tired. “I wasn’t sure if you’d come around tonight.”

  “Lots of meetings where we had little or nothing to add,” Tellak said. “We both needed a break. Is this a bad time?”

  Touanne looked to Jancia, who was staring into her mug. “It’s fine,” the Lumimancer said weakly. “I don’t think I have it in me to continue anyway.”

  “Are you sure, Jay?” Tellak said. “We can—”

  “No, I’m sure. But I’d like to stay, if you don’t mind.”

  “Ana?”

  “It’s Touanne’s shop. But I don’t mind.”

  So Jancia stayed. Occasionally she and Touanne would leave to tend whatever Touanne had bubbling in her lab — healing potions, Ana guessed. She spoke little, and then only to answer when Tellak or Touanne asked her a direct question. Ana left her alone, focusing on her exercises. She needed to be able to cover more of her skin at a time, in case she got mobbed again and couldn’t fall back, so that was what she focused on.

  When she arrived, she’d been able to reliably toughen the skin of one arm and shoulder, halfway up the neck. By the time Tellak declared that it was time to stop and switch to aura suppression, Ana could do both her shoulders, her whole neck, and one arm. Real progress. She even got a Level of Shaping out of it, bringing the Skill to 2, and gaining her a Crystal.

  “You’re talented.”

  It was the first time Ana had heard Jancia speak before being spoken to. It came as Ana was sitting at the table with a mug of some cold herbal drink that was supposed to help with mana depletion — whatever that was.

  “Thanks,” she replied. “Though I prefer to think of it as working hard.”

  “Oh. Of course. That’s what I meant, no offense intended. You learn quickly, then. You practice well. You pay attention. And your visualization must be very good.”

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  Jancia put a little extra emphasis on that last part. It might not even have been conscious, but Ana picked up on it. “Why do you say that? About the visualization.”

  “Your constructs are very… stable, I suppose. Not just while you hold them, but between Shapings. They’re very regular.”

  “You can see them?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s one of the less common Connection Enhancements.”

  “Wish I could do that. It would help a lot.”

  “I’d have preferred something like Mana Conduit, but I won’t deny that it’s very useful for complex Shapings. And when we find the bastards who caused this whole disaster, it should help me see what they’re trying to do. Easier to kill them that way.”

  The vitriol that crept into Jancia’s voice was the first real emotion except sadness and shame that Ana had heard or felt from the woman. And she was glad for it, messed up as that was.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you, Jancia: we’re going out the day after tomorrow. Leaving the settlement. We’ll be in combat almost immediately. Do you want to be in Tellak’s Party, or mine?”

  Jancia’s face went blank. Not in the careful way that Ana’s could, in order not to reveal anything, but in the slightly open-mouthed way of someone who wasn’t sure what was going on or what to say.

  “Let me rephrase,” Ana said. “Tellak? Do you have anything against having Jancia in your Party?”

  Tellak’s response was immediate and heartfelt. “No. Not at all. Of course not.”

  “Jancia, do you have any objections to joining Tellak’s Party for the… campaign, or whatever this is?”

  Jancia’s jaw moved. Her lips parted soundlessly, and then she looked at Tellak with a desperate hope that Ana could feel through her Connection as a wild, unsteady warmth. “You’ll have me? You’ll still have me?”

  “Without a doubt,” Tellak said solemnly.

  “Then, I— I’d like to go with Tellak, please, Miss Anastasia.”

  “Good. I’m glad that’s settled.” Ana gave a practiced smile and rose to her feet. “I want to see you in the practice yard tomorrow, an hour after sunrise. Can you do that?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning, then. Tellak, Touanne: thanks, as always. G’night.”

  When Ana and Messy arrived at the practice yard the next morning, Jancia was already waiting. She was wearing appropriate clothing, too, even though Ana hadn’t said anything.

  “Morning, Jancia,” Ana said when the woman herself failed to break the silence.

  “Good morning, Marshal Cole. Miss Mestendi.”

  “Just Anastasia, please. Anyway, it looks like you’ve got an idea of what we’re doing.”

  Jancia smoothed her tunic self-consciously. “Telly warned me.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “That I might end up in the dust a couple dozen times.”

  “True enough. Is Tellak having a regular training session today for her team?”

  “She is. I’m to learn to hold a spear, for emergencies.”

  “Good. I’m not going to cover weapons at all. We only have one day before we move out, so I want to focus on three things. First, where to aim to kill a man. Second, how to get away if you get grappled. Last, I want to know what you can do. I know you’re a Lumimancer, so I assume you do something with light, but that’s it.”

  “I… do something with Light, yes.” There was some annoyance there, but a faint hint of amusement, too. Two more firsts from Jancia since her recovery.

  Ana gave her the barest hint of a smile, to mirror her tone. “You’ll have plenty of time to show me. For now, Messy has graciously agreed to help me demonstrate the most lethal targets on a human, along with the basics of grappling. Have a seat, and we’ll get started.”

  It wasn’t long before Simt’s group arrived for a morning training session, followed by Halmer, then Wandak, and others. They kept their team members busy, though anyone resting tended to gawk at Ana and Jancia grappling in the dust, while Messy cheered from the sidelines. By the time they finished, Jancia could at least demonstrate how to get out of a few common grapples that the near-mindless crazies might use. As to whether that would translate into anything effective in a real situation, you’d never know until it happened.

  Then came time for Jancia’s demonstration.

  Jancia was highly specialized. She did light. No color, no images or anything; she did bright white, and she did dark. She could use both to great effect, though her playbook was small, using areas of darkness to hide, bright, directional flashes to blind, and what were, as far as Ana was concerned, lasers to cripple and kill.

  “My light rays’ biggest weakness is that they take time to work,” Jancia said as she maintained a beam aimed at a rock. The point where it hit was glowing bright yellow, hissing and spitting, and the beam itself was only visible when dust flared away into nothingness as it passed through. “If the target moves around a lot I can cut their skin up, but with a demon that won’t kill them. It’ll barely slow them down. I’d generally only use the rays once Tellak disabled a target. Med— Med and I would take them out from a distance, so Tellak didn’t need to stay close for the kill.”

  At about that time the laser-beam came out the other side of the foot-thick rock, having melted a straight path through it. Black slag dribbled out both ends of the passage.

  “What’s the range?” Ana asked. “What if you have a crazy bearing down on you from three hundred feet away?

  “Range is a hundred and eighty feet for full effect, then it drops off for another hundred and eighty,” Jancia answered immediately. “But the demons aren’t still enough when they charge to keep the ray on one point to drill into their head and drop them.”

  “What about if you sweep slowly at knee height on a charging crowd? Could you cut the ligaments? Or at neck height, for that matter?” Messy asked.

  Ana looked up. She’d been about to suggest the same thing; she just didn’t expect Messy to think of ways to cripple or kill large numbers of people.

  “I… could,” Jancia said thoughtfully, though she clearly wasn’t comfortable with the idea. “I was thinking more along the lines of trying to blind most of them. Bright, strobing lights right in the eyes. That’s faster and a lot less strenuous, and what I’d usually do against a charging demon. It’s served well, until…”

  “Use your judgment,” Ana decided. “Even if you only blind them, that could make a real difference. Discuss it with the other backliners in Tellak’s team. Try to find a plan where you don’t double up on too many targets. You should avoid blinding those who’d get stuck in mud; things like that. We can’t afford to be inefficient out there.”

  “Well,” Messy said casually as she and Ana were leaving, “that was enlightening.”

  Ana huffed heavily through her nose. “You did not just say that.”

  “I’m allowed a pun now and then! And it was! It really shed some light on what she can do, and I’ve been curious. I asked Tellak, but she left me in the dark.”

  “I bet you’re satisfied with yourself,” Ana sighed as Messy grinned at her.

  The sky was clear, the sun bright, but a cloud of hurried tension lay over the settlement. People moved quickly in the street, and most of those who were out were carrying things from stores, homes, and workshops to the square. There, Pirta’s clerks were organizing everything for transport by handcart, essentials spread out into multiple loads so that the loss of any single cart wouldn’t be too heavy of a blow. A multitude of individual packs sat in neat rows, as did weapons — mostly spears and other polearms — shields, and armor, ready to be picked up by those volunteers who didn’t have their own. Among the clerks was Dilmek with Jisha close on her heels, but both were too busy to notice Ana.

  Directing everything was Drisa, moving with brisk schoolmarm efficiency, and the unmissable Pirta, who’d had a desk set up where she could work between the times she was approached for a decision. She looked up as Ana and Messy stepped onto the platform, spared them a single, brisk nod, and went back to her work.

  “Mistress Cole?”

  A voice from Ana’s right caught her attention. She recognized it, vaguely, as she did the woman herself when she saw her. [Elfin Memorist (27)], whatever that was. Not one of the conscripts, but a volunteer. She had a large, cloth covered bundle in her arms.

  “You’re in Sira’s team, aren’t you?” Ana asked, and the woman nodded.

  “I volunteered after your first speech, Mistress,” she said with a quick curtsey. Ana didn’t let her surprise show, but it was the first time she’d seen the gesture here. Hell, she was pretty sure she hadn’t had anyone curtsey to her since… what? Sunday school? “I’m Valena. I wanted to bring you this. For Kaira’s sake.”

  Valena bounced the bundle in her arms demonstratively.

  “Right, Valena! You’re Kaira’s landlady?”

  “Yes, Mistress. I—”

  “Please, don’t. The whole ‘Mistress’ thing. Anastasia’s fine, or ‘Miss’ if you absolutely have to.”

  “Or Marshal,” Messy suggested impishly.

  “If you absolutely must,” Ana agreed tiredly.

  Valena looked between the two and made her mind up. “As you say, Anastasia. Yes, I’m Kaira’s landlady, I suppose, though I prefer to think of her as a friend who rents a spare room. And I hope I know her well enough to be correct that she’d want you to have this. Everyone knows how strong you are, and she told me that she taught you how to shoot a crossbow, and that you took to it well, so…”

  Instead of continuing, Valena trailed off, placed the bundle on the ground, and opened it. There lay Kaira’s prized arbalest. Four feet long, with metal arms and a windlass. There was also a long quiver, along with a bundle of twenty thick, two-foot broadhead bolts.

  Ana picked the weapon up, turning it in her hands, then shouldered it. It was long and front-heavy enough that she probably shouldn’t have been able to handle it, but 36 Strength put her at powerlifter levels even out of combat. The arbalest sat stable in her hand, resting firmly against her shoulder.

  The winch — windlass? — was easy to figure out, so Ana cocked it, shouldered it, then dry-fired into the air with a deeply satisfying Tchunk. The weapon tried to leap forward, but much less than Ana expected. Because of its mass, maybe? Still, even without recoil Ana could imagine the energy one of those massive bolts would carry.

  Looking back at her two companions, Ana couldn’t help but grin. They were both clearly happy about the demonstration but for different reasons: Valena had a pleased smile on her face; Messy was worrying her bottom lip with her teeth.

  “Thank you, Valena,” Ana said, packing the bundle back up. “I’m sure you’re right. Kaira wouldn’t want this monster gathering dust.”

  “I’m glad you think so! And, if I may be so bold: may I reproduce this memory?”

  Ana blinked, once. Slowly. “I don't think I understand.”

  “The— may I paint the scene just now? You with the arbalest. It’s what I do. I’ve been documenting the early cycles of this Splinter, you see, and—”

  “Oh, paint! Yeah. Sure. Do you have time, though? We're leaving tomorrow.”

  “Oh, yes! It won’t be perfect, of course, but between magic, Skills, and experience…”

  “Right, right. Hey, step aside with me for a moment.” Ana held up a finger to Messy, silently asking her to stay where she was. “I have some questions.”

  The rest of the day passed in a blur. More meetings, more decisions that Ana wasn’t qualified to make and deferred to others. Then it was evening, and there was one thing left to do. Something Ana had been planning in the back of her head. She’d been putting it off for too long, and this was her last chance before leaving. Possibly her last chance, full stop.

  “Mess,” she said as they left the last meeting at the Guardhouse. They’d been discussing watch schedules. “I want you to wait here while I go back to the apartment, okay? Follow me in ten minutes, or so. There’ll be a note on the bed. Do what it says.”

  “Okay?” Messy answered curiously. “What’s going on?”

  “Just do what the letter says,” Ana said. “You’ll like it. Trust me.”

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