Anna had been wrong.

  Dead wrong.

  She had been so wrong that I doubted she would ever be right about anything ever again.

  I had not been late, she had seen to that with a near violent dedication. She had fed me what she had called a proper breakfast of sweet oats and milk before literally pushing me out of the door. She had given me a kiss goodbye before she headed off to Hymneth and I had set of for the trial.

  The fear that she was wasting her time had not left me since she had.

  Alexei had been waiting for me at the edge of the clearing. My wolfish looking guard had given me strict orders to not mention his relation to me and to act as if I did not know him once we reached our destination. I knew that his demands for secrecy had come from Nami and had agreed to meet them. No matter how many questions about the trial I had tried to trick him into answering, he had said nothing else on our walk to the gates. Silent as he had been, I did not think it to be a coincidence that he had walked ahead of me and cleared a path through the snow as he went.

  The had been noticeably less maidens than there had been the day before and none of the Precepts had been there to greet us. Not the neat Seram, the savage Mon Zetta, or the serene Cherith. The small groups and loose scattering of the previous morning had not been present either. A silent understanding that the ridiculously small dresses we had been required to wear brought on had packed us tight together into a single shivering mass.

  I had not been late. I had arrived before the hour after dawn had come to pass, when the light of day had yet to brighten the sky above. A full hour had passed after that before the black iron gates had swung open and the pearlescent moon in their center had parted.

  A Precept I did not know had appeared from the glamor that concealed Lun and all that was held within her outer walls.

  She had tied back her mess of curly hair with a scrap of fabric as she approached. Her eyes half lidded and midnight blue, she had looked over our shivering group with a lazy grin on her sweet face. Where the other precepts had been wearing cloaks of icy blue to denote their rank, the new one only had a scarf bundled around her neck to show that shade. A too large overcoat that hung over her hands and dragged along the ground as she walked had concealed the rest of her. It had been all blue, covered in a pattern of small white stars, and had been the strangest piece of clothing I had ever seen. From the top of its collar, to the tips of its sleeves, and all the way down to its snow dusted hem, there had been pockets. No place on the over coat, front, back, or inside, had not held them.

  "Good morning, maidens. I am Precept Shanti." She had said through a deep yawn that had stretched and distorted her words.

  When the gates had begun to close behind her, doubt in Anna's good news had first crept into my mind.

  When she had passed by the gathering and stepped into the wood line opposite the one I had arrived from, that doubt had ceased to creep. It had walked openly and made no attempt at stealth.

  When she had instructed us to follow her into the frozen forest, the doubt had arrived to the front of my mind and revealed itself to be a truth in hiding.

  Anna had been wrong.

  The maidens were not being taken inside to a place where our tiny dresses would be appropriate. We were being marched into the woods where I knew without question that I would freeze to death.

  The moment after Precept Shanti had made her announcement, Alexei had joined her at the front of the maidens with his hands resting on his swords.

  "Who is that?" A maiden shouted from inside our shivering huddle.

  I turned to find the short maiden with the chocolate brown eyes to be the one who had shouted.

  Maiden Reese. I remembered, glad to see that she was not one of the missing maidens.

  "Yes," I called out. If I announced that I did not know the man who was actually my guard, then no one would suspect that I knew him. "Who is he?"

  The other maidens joined into their own barrage of questions.

  "What happened to your eye?"

  "Who needs two swords?"

  "Why does he look so mean?"

  "What is your hair routine?"

  "Can I have your jacket?"

  "Are you single?"

  The gathering broke into a chorus of laughter after the last question. I laughed too, but only out of a desire to distance myself further from my guard. No part of me had found the hilarious flurry of questions funny.

  Precept Shanti held up her hands to quiet it back down and answered Reese and Reese alone. "This is Master Alexei. Phantom bears roam these mountains and he was kind enough to agree to keep them from devouring us."

  Phantom bear? I thought, not enjoying the vision that those two words created together in my mind.

  "What is that?" Reese called out again.

  "With Master Alexei here, you should not have the misfortune of finding out," Precept Shanti said through another long yawn. She rubbed her eyes with her hands and gave herself a little slap on her cheek. "Come along, we have a very long walk before we reach Radomir's Pass."

  All of us followed her into the evergreens and their snow buried trunks forced us into a natural line. At first, there had been a certain amount of cheer that surrounded the group. Either from the excitement at the trial or the relief of moving against the bitter cold, most of the maidens chatted and laughed as we went. The heavy grey sky offered no warmth and the thin dresses that all of us were in might as well have been made of paper. Even still, the cold seemed to only push the other maidens forward in the early hours of the morning.

  Precept Shanti had not been lying when she said the way to wherever we were going would be long. The unseen path that she led us on took us through mounds of snow as deep as my chest and clusters of trees so tight that I had to slip through them sideways. We walked for so long and took so many turns, I had begun to believe that we were lost in the white wastes of the frozen forest.

  The chatter and excitement of the other maidens grew cold and stopped altogether after we had needed to crawl under a downed tree to continue.

  Is this the trial? I asked myself when all I could do was follow the tracks in the snow that the maiden in front of me had left. The thought felt true to the way that I knew sorceresses to be. To lead us into the forest under the guise of having a destination only to let each of us to fail or to give up, it sounded just wicked enough to be believable. If I had not known that the trial would require my aura, I would have convinced myself of it.

  After what had to have been hours but had felt like days, I was exhausted. The thin air stung my throat and would not let me catch my breath. My cuffed boots had done nothing but become heavier as they had filled with melting snow that sent my cracked nail into a dull ache. Every inch of my exposed skin stung and shivered from the wind and cold. I fit my boot into the larger impression the maiden in front of me had made and ran face first into her back. If her angry expression was anything to go by, she had turned around to say something to me but she couldn't get it out through the chattering of her teeth.

  All the other maidens in front of me had stopped and were gathering together in front of Precept Shanti.

  "Have no fear, maidens. We are nearly there and you will have the choice to be warm once again." Precept Shanti yawned.

  I did not believe her. I would never be warm again.

  The sleepy sorceress stood in front of the jagged mouth of a small cave with her hands held in two of the uncountable pockets that covered her coat.

  Somewhere along the way, when I had been able to do nothing but stare at the trampled snow in front of me, the forest on our left had fallen away. The white tops of ever more evergreens ended far enough below my feet that I knew it would mean certain death if I fell. Barely more than a hollow of warm light and white smoke, the town of Hymneth lay within them. Like guards armed with the cold of winter itself, the snow whitened trees stood tall around the town all the way to the mountains in the distance.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Above one but below another, the cliffside that the jagged cave opened from rose so high above me that I could not see its top against the dreary sky.

  "This is Radomir's pass. Our camp is just on the other side. We will have to take it one by one. If any of you are thin enough to pass through shoulder to shoulder, consider withdrawing. You will be too weak to survive the trial.

  Yet another line formed. Most of the maidens stood as far away from the cliff's edge as they could without touching the frozen stone of the cliffside. They were so obviously scared by the height they kept their backs turned to it until they ducked through the entrance of the cave.

  I found a small amount of joy in it.

  After my bath and Alexei's sudden intrusion into the bloody mess Sam had brought inside, none of my attempts to glamor my aura had succeeded. Dinner had not helped. The necklace that I had left laying on my pillow in my quarters that morning had stopped working. By the end of my trying, Anna had needed to give me so much of her antidote that any hope of further attempts had been lost.

  Even with my failure and the uncertainty I had woken up to face, the one I loved was amongst the trees as I looked down at them. She had more than likely already made it to Hymneth and was busy buying things for the place that she was certain would continue to be ours.

  I did not have a sliver of half the belief Anna had in me, but other than her good news, she had not been wrong about much in the time I had known her.

  If she trudged all the way through the deep snow to the little town and back again just for me to fail, I would never forgive myself.

  I hope she is warmer than I am. I thought to myself with a little laugh. How could she not be? She had not been required to wear next to nothing when she had left our little shack that morning. I was glad that I hadn't, but I could not deny that I would enjoy seeing her wear the little dress I was freezing in.

  Just before it was my turn to enter Radomir's pass, the maiden in front of me turned around and looked down her nose at me.

  It was the maiden from the day before, the one with the honey brown hair and probably had a purple bruise on her ribs from where I had hit her.

  Tana.

  "Where are you from?" Maiden Tana demanded. She wore the same thin dress that the rest of us did, but her blue stoned necklace still hung around her neck.

  She broke the rules. I thought at the sight of it.

  "I, uhm. . ." I stuttered. I knew where I was from, my mother, The City Below, the mortal plane, Erosette, any of those answers were true, but I was not Autumn. I was Maiden Ire. I was the underdeveloped maiden with the long black hair and uninteresting features. I was from Don Viven. I knew that, it just took a moment for me to remember it.

  Maiden Tana was not content to wait. "Uhm? I don't believe I've heard of a place with such a name, it must be even worse than I thought."

  "Don Viven. I'm from Don Viven." I managed to say.

  "Ah, I knew it must be something like that," Tana snorted. "What was The Mother in Blue doing talking to a motherless wretch like you?"

  I didn't understand. "What?"

  "I saw her with you yesterday. If she wouldn't so much as speak to the rest of us, I thought to myself that she must have caught you cheating or breaking a rule. That was the only reasonable explanation to why she would speak to someone like you. My mother, Sorceress Tana, says that she could spot a maiden from outside Zenithcidel from a mile away. I have inherited that talent." She said with an ugly sneer.

  I had a mother. Tana was speaking to a glamor, an illusion, someone that did not truly exist. She didn't know that, but her tone alone brought the heat of anger to my face and hands.

  "She should have inherited some common decency," Someone said from behind me. Just as I had the day before, Maiden Reese shouldered past the maidens behind me and stepped between Tana and I. "But if I had to guess, she doesn't have any to spare."

  Reese laughed. The maidens behind me laughed. I laughed.

  Maiden Tana did not.

  Her sneer turned to a silent scowl and her hand went to her necklace.

  "Go on. You're holding up the line and I'm freezing," Maiden Reese said and gestured for Maiden Tana to enter the pass. "I'm sure you can't wait to try and suck up to one of the precepts again anyways."

  Tana stomped her foot on the snowy ground, turned, and stormed into the pass.

  If she had anything else to say, it was lost in the laughs of the other maidens.

  "She was being mean to me, wasn't she?" I asked aloud.

  Maiden Reese gave me a wink with one of her chocolate brown eyes. "Yes, and she'll keep being that way until you shut her up like I did. That's the only way to deal with folks like that."

  "Well, thank you. I will remember that. I am Maiden Ire." I said. The only thing that kept me from feeling guilty about lying to her was the likelihood that I would never see her again after I failed the trial.

  She gave me a small push towards the mouth of the pass. "Hopefully not for long, right?"

  "Right." I agreed. From The Mother's mouths themselves, I was already an underwitch. Maiden Ire on the other hand was probably doomed to forever be a maiden unless I spontaneously discovered how to split my mind in half.

  I lowered my head and stepped into the pass.

  Icy blue crystals adorned the cave walls and cast their dim light throughout it. The footing was not uneven. The ground underneath my boots had been worn smooth and I gathered that it had either been used for a very long time or frequently.

  Maiden Reese followed close behind me, her energetic voice making shallow echoes in the tight space. "Don't pay any mind to that 'motherless' shit. The Mother in Blue isn't even from here. There is nothing to it."

  Nami isn't from Hymneth? I thought to myself. She had said that she hated the cold, but I had thought it was because it was terrible and made her bones hurt like it did mine.

  "Can you walk any faster? I'm ready to be there." Reese said and gave me a soft push in the center of my back.

  I did my best to get out of her way while I carefully moved around the sharp ends of the crystals and reached the exit of Radomir's pass.

  A collection of big blue tents, the same sort that had been in the courtyard the morning before, were connected into a large camp within a clearing. The dead grass underneath them was the only place in the mountain hollow that was not blanketed by snow.

  If there was no snow, that meant that the inside of the tents were warm like they had been yesterday.

  The sight of the other maidens running down the hill towards the camp told me that I was not the only one who had come to that conclusion.

  Reese pushed past me and joined them in their mad dash.

  Not wanting to be left behind, I did the same.

  A low roaring sound, so slight at first that I thought I was imagining it, found its way to my ears. The closer I grew to the camp, the louder the sound became. By the time I joined with the crowd of maidens that had formed on the outskirts of the tents, I was searching through the trees to try and find its source.

  Precept Shanti waited until the last of the maidens had made it down from the pass and Alexei had arrived at the back of the gathering to speak.

  “Inside these tents, you will find everything you need to spend the next day and night of your lives in perfect comfort. Hot food, soft bedding, a steam room to warm your bones.” She raised her voice and said over the roaring sound.

  “Can we go inside?” One of the maidens shouted from within our tight group.

  “Patience, maiden," Precept Shanti yawned before she held up a hand and called out into the trees. "Precept Jasna!"

  Light, blue as the sky over Erosette, sliced through the snow to my right and threw flurries of it into the air.

  The ground underneath it began to collapse.

  With terrible speed, the hard packed snow broke away in a slurry of sky blue power and rushing water. The source of the roaring sound was revealed to be a white watered river that carved its way through the trees with constant violence.

  "This is The River Eae. The place over there that each of you will willingly throw yourselves into is known as the bitter deeps. The five of you that overcome it with your power and take one of the charms in the shallows above will be accepted into Lun Arcanicil as new moons in full." Precept Shanti said without yawning. Her half lidded eyes were deadly serious and her hands were held behind her back instead of one of her pockets.

  Five of us? I thought.

  "Five of us? What does that mean?" Reese shouted out the question I had just asked inside my mind.

  "Do not despair. Most years we only have one or two maidens succeed. It is far more likely that all of you will fail or quit than it is that every slot will be filled. Hear my words, maidens. Learn from the absence of those that were with you yesterday but are not today. When our rules are set, they are final. If any of you attempt to climb to the finish and only enter the river at the end, you will be sent away. If any of you interfere with another maiden's attempt, you will be sent away. If any of you reach your limits and require healing from myself or the other precepts, you will be sent away.” Precept Shanti continued.

  None of the maidens said anything in response, not even Reese, and that seemed like a very difficult thing for her to do.

  Precept Shanti gestured at the tents behind her. "Before any of you can go inside, eat, or get warm, you must attempt the trial once. Only one of you may attempt it at a time. There is no limit to how many times you can try. But, if you have not passed by this time tomorrow, your opportunity has. Who will be first?"

  Only one hand raised amongst the gathered maidens.

  "Maiden Tana. Whenever you are ready." Precept Shanti yawned and her eyelids settled into the lazy position I had become used to.

  With visible confidence in every step she took, she went to the river and slipped out of her shoes.

  All of us followed in her footsteps and spread along the edge of The River Eae to watch.

  Maiden Tana flashed an annoyingly pretty smile at all of us and jumped in without hesitation.

  She crashed through the violent surface of the white water and for a brief moment I thought she had drowned.

  Then, the color of her aura had stained the bitter deeps with its light.

  All of us watched silently as she broke through the rapids and took one of the charms that hung across the shallows into her hand.

  Four slots left.