In the end, nothing attacked us, and as the sun rose on the seventh day, we appeared once again before the Erudite, who was currently using a toothpick to clean out from under his nails. When we appeared, he looked up and blinked languidly.

  “Welcome back.”

  “You lied to us! That was a faerie plane.” I said, the words tumbling out before I could stop them.

  “Mm? No, it’s definitely not. It’s stuck between a faerie plane and an elemental one,” he said, then glanced in the direction of the pixie castle and raised his voice as if he was shouting to them. “Thrice-cursed faeries just spread through every plane they can get their grubby little mitts on like an infection.”

  He glanced over us, then nodded and sighed, popping his back.

  “Right. You did a good job. Didn’t piss off the locals too badly, and actually helped some of them. Getting rid of the big evil dog was a good call. You also pulled a lot of resources out. Normally I’d have you all handle the challenge of selling those goods without getting fleeced for everything you’ve got, but your team has someone who works at a component shop. So it’s not exactly going to be the challenge I hoped. Want me to take those extra hearts, poison sacks, obsidian, and all that off your hands? Not the dead wood – you’re using that for box creation, right?”

  I glanced at my friends, who were met with a general nod of agreement. Henry waved his staff, and the stored materials that we had no use for vanished from our lockers. I pressed my lips together, then looked at him.

  “I didn’t mean to shout at you. But thank you. That was somewhere you go to train, isn’t it? It’s ether is rich enough that I’d bet even you could improve your ether compression there. Our time there gave us a lot of resources that you didn’t need to. It was a test, but… not really one.”

  “I can’t just give you all a bunch of components, that would violate some of the school rules, get me in trouble with the High King, and probably tick off the other Erudites. But Magda and Fuyuki both send their students to other realms for training…”

  I snorted, then nodded, and turned back to my friends. Jackson was murmuring a prayer, and I thought he might be asking Effervesce to look out for Henry, as thanks for his generosity and assistance. I let him finish, then spoke.

  “Ready for breakfast? Uh. Dinner? Hells, this time difference is going to throw me off for a few days, isn’t it?”

  We wound up getting breakfast for dinner, in an attempt to settle things back down, and then spent a good chunk of the night working. That pattern more or less followed for the next several days, as I underwent all of the last minute preparation that I could for Yushin’s upcoming ritual. Which, naturally, was the time my brother reached out to me.

  “We’ve finally got a lead,” Gerhard said, taking a seat across from me and Salem in the dining hall one morning.

  “About the bloodflame brazier?” Salem asked, while I threw up a quick spell to hide our conversation. Gerhard gave Salem a look, then looked at me, and nodded.

  “You allow your harem far more initiative and willfulness than I think is entirely healthy,” Gerhard said, taking a bite of a bit of steak and eggs. “But yes, this is about the brazier.”

  For a moment, my brain fractured into a thousand tiny shards as I tried to process the fact that Gerhard thought Salem was a member of my harem – or that I had a harem at all. Was he assuming that Yushin, Jackson, and Salem were all dating me? That was… I didn’t even know how to feel. I didn’t think I was polyamorous, but even if I was, I certainly wouldn’t want a harem all devoted to me.

  “I don’t have a harem,” I finally managed to splutter, while Salem started to laugh.

  “Call it whatever you like,” Gerhard said, shrugging. “As far as I’m concerned, the difference between Greta having a bunch of attractive hangers on and you having the same is that yours are far more dangerous. Oh, and the label you put on it.”

  Salem’s laughter grew even more wild at that, and I rubbed my forehead, before taking a deep breath.

  “You have – severely – misread the situation,” I said. “But that’s not the point right now. You have information about the bloodflame brazier.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “I do. Mother left us behind several artifacts, both from wars that she’d taken part of and from lost ages of history. One of them, which I was able to recently get my hands on, is a map of relativistic bloodline power across the world. Well, I say get my hands on – it would be more accurate to say repaired. It was damaged quite severely in the collapse of the house.”

  “Why didn’t you ever use it to track me when I had run away?”

  “It’s a map that covers the entire planet. Even though the map is quite large, one person’s bloodline – especially disjointed and compressed like yours is – isn’t going to stand out. Not only that, but it gives generalities, like a certain area having a massive number of earth-related bloodlines. But on an island, far to the south of both Dreki and Cendel, in an area generally considered to be demon wastes, there was a shift toward fire-adjacent bloodlines some time ago. That alone wasn’t too compelling, as plenty of demons have fire bloodlines. Over the last few days, there have been a hundred minor alterations on the island, each of them spiking significantly. It’s only a small dot, still, nothing like even Tall Mesa’s collection or the Divine King’s court, but it’s still an unnatural increase.”

  “As if the section of missing siblings all used the bloodflame brazier at once,” I finished.

  “And they thought they could get away with it because they destroyed the map, or at least saw it was destroyed and didn’t realize that it could be repaired,” Salem continued.

  “Exactly,” Gerhard agreed. “It’s not as much of an advantage as you may think; we’ve been preparing for an invasion from the missing siblings for a long time. But still, now we know where they’re coming from, and that they’ve all been empowered.”

  “How long do you have before they invade?”

  “A month or two – they’re going to need to get used to their new power, as well as sail up to meet us, since they won’t be able to fly anymore. That kind of logistical operation isn’t the kind of thing that can be done overnight,” Gerhard responded. “But the use of the brazier is still likely to be one of the last things that they did before launching an attack.”

  “Over the course of the summer, then,” Salem said. “Aye, that makes sense. Are ya’ calling in any allies? You’ve been building schools for songcalling and wizardry, but the results won’t have time to show themselves for the fight.”

  “I might not be a match for mother’s raw power, but our economic might and naval power is still nothing to scoff at,” Gerhard said. “We will be contracting some mercenaries – including you all – to bolster our ranks, but that is all. All the stronger members of the family are dead, after all.”

  “I can’t speak to the others, but I approve of the direction you’re taking the Isle of Dreki,” I said. “I’ll fight with you, if they come there to conquer and try and bring things back to the way they were under the matriarch’s rule.”

  “Aye, I’ll fight,” Salem said, sighing. “I dinnae ken how much help I’ll be, but I’ll help.”

  Gerhard nodded his thanks, and we spent a bit more time discussing the specifics and information that we had, before he left to catch his teleport back to the Isle, and I was free to return to preparations. There were the obvious things, like creating spellglyphs, but there were also several other things I needed to do in order to be fully ready for Yushin’s ritual.

  First things first, I cast worldmerchant, trading away the honey to the ants that I’d summoned as a distraction in the world that the Erudite had sent us to. I’d agreed to do that for them, and though I wasn’t a fae to be bound by exact contracts, I’d have felt pretty terrible about promising them payment then going back on it.

  After that, I set to work on something else. Over the course of the winter, I’d worked with professor Toadweather in summoning the nisse and arctic foxes for the school in exchange for the materials for five lesser planner contracts of my own. I poured the dust and herbs out on the ground of the workspace that Salem and I shared, placing my hand on the ground and summoning up Amos.

  “Hi!” the serpent said cheerfully. “Are you doing another final exam, like you were last year?”

  With the donation of my fire, as well as all the times I’d summoned him, he’d grown noticeably larger since the first time we had met. His wings were fuller, and his bloodline smelled more potent, as well as larger.

  “Hello, Amos,” I said. “Not this time, I’m afraid. I want to make a more standard summoning contract with you. My friend is a child of the Traitor Wyrm, and we have reason to believe that she might be taken over…”

  I went on to explain the situation with Yushin, how I planned to help her with a curse on her god if he overstepped, and how that might result in a fight with a bunch of cultivators. If it did come to that, then I’d need his help protecting Yushin, Salem, Jackson, and my lives from them. There was also the matter of the dark sects that we would be trying to lure out, as well as any tricks that they might have.

  “It will be dangerous,” I concluded. “I’m willing to pay with three more vials of my bloodline fire, if I survive. But I’m pressed for time, and can’t arrange payment in advance.”

  The danger would be limited for him, of course, since if he died here his essence would just return to Effervesce’s realm. But this ritual was large and powerful enough that I wasn’t confident the normal rules applied – if the avatar of the Traitor Wyrm was summoned, would he still be safe? I didn’t know.

  “I don’t have any problem getting rid of people willing to kill their own daughter for a dark god, or people who are willing to kill someone just for the sin of being born,” Amos agreed. “You’ve got five circles, do you want the name of four of my friends who would probably be willing to help on credit?”

  “Three of your friends,” I said. “I’m afraid I have a plan for my last contract that is far less wise.”

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