Walking through the village after the meeting, Vidalia, Victoria, and Mariella were swarmed with people. They could barely take three steps without tripping over someone who wanted to ask the dream seer a question.

  It was mainly the women, old people, and children who had been watching the council meeting who approached. The men of the village shot the foxgirl vaguely distrustful looks, while the Elders wore a variety of different expressions but all kept their distance.

  Some of the children pressed small gifts into Mariella’s hands with shy expressions on their faces.

  “What did you mean about access to the Valley of Martyrs?” asked one older beastman.

  “Respectfully, I already said everything I had to say to the Council of Elders, and you heard it all. They have the decision in their hands now. I can only hope they will show their usual wisdom.”

  “Who will I marry, dream seer?” asked another foxgirl.

  “I don’t try to answer personal questions like that,” Vidalia said.

  “Is war truly unavoidable?” asked an old woman.

  “I’m… I’m afraid so.”

  It’s as if they just remembered they know someone who can see the future, Mariella thought, shaking her head slightly. It was strange how the villagers treated Vidalia, and the fire mage did not understand it.

  “Will the flame sorceress stay and help defend us?”

  “That is up to her,” Vidalia said carefully. “Remember that she has her own people and her own family to be concerned with. We should be grateful for the help she has already given.”

  A feeling of guilt swelled up within Mariella. Her conflicting loyalties weren’t going to let her mind rest for even a day, it seemed.

  “Is Lord Necromancer single?” asked a particularly attractive young foxgirl.

  Vidalia turned bright red. “He has a lover. Right here. We were just talking about her!” She pointed at Mariella. “I said it at the very beginning of the meeting. They’ll be married in the future, and there’s nothing you can do about that.”

  “Well, have you seen whether he’s going to take any additional wives in your visions?”

  “I’m not taking any further questions!” the foxgirl said hotly.

  Mariella suppressed a giggle. Funny that’s the only thing Vidalia gets defensive about. I guess that was the real reason why she insisted on Tybalt staying at her place. These other girls would be actively throwing themselves at him without even knowing him.

  After another minute or two of these questions and non-answers, the villagers finally began letting the trio pass through more easily.

  Mariella’s head swiveled from side to side, taking the village in properly as they walked, but the movement stopped when she saw something strange.

  “What is that creature doing?” she whispered.

  Vidalia and Victoria stopped walking too.

  “Oh, yeah, I saw a few of them earlier and asked around about it,” Victoria said slowly. “Back when I stepped away before the meeting. It is odd.”

  “Nah, it’s just what I’d expect,” Vidalia said, a smile spreading across her face.

  Just across the path, a zombie was laying thatch on a roof that had been damaged by the squad’s flames during the attack days earlier. The rest of the hut showed signs of recent repairs, but the roof was still burned away in patches.

  As Mariella looked the village up and down, she saw other undead similarly scattered around, performing repair work, hanging out laundry, and in one case, stirring a large, simmering pot outside someone’s hut.

  There’s no way that skeleton is cooking, right? That’s impossible…

  “Why…?” she asked quietly. “I’ve never seen monsters behave this way before. How did you guys get them to do it?”

  “No one had any idea when I asked,” Victoria said. “After the battle, the undead were just left moving around various points in the village, walking aimlessly like they were patrolling or something. But there were no enemies nearby to worry about, and we have our own guard shifts for that. The village was pretty badly damaged in the attack, and with all our injured, the villagers were shorthanded trying to rebuild. At some point, someone had the idea of trying to ask the monsters to do some work, and before you know it…”

  “Yeah, but you get that monsters are naturally inclined toward… trying to kill everything that moves, right?” Mariella asked nervously. “Especially humanoids? How are the villagers able to be confident that won’t happen to them?”

  After all the effort to save the village, it’s lunacy to put it at this much risk, isn’t it? How is it possible no accidents have happened already?

  “I think it’s because their master is still alive and favorably disposed toward the beastfolk,” Vidalia said with a smile. She looked around and lowered her voice before continuing. “Think of it as darling reaching out from his deep sleep and giving us all a big hug.”

  Mariella could actually picture that, now that the foxgirl used that visual metaphor: the necromancer’s spirit, watching over them with loving eyes.

  Is this… a vision of the future if Tybalt ruled? Living people relaxing, safe, while the dead protect them and do their chores? That’s kinder than I would expect any necromancer to be, but Tybalt is a lot better than I’ve ever heard about dark mages being. Maybe, if it’s him, it’s not so bad…

  “The one thing they apparently haven’t been able to get them to do is leave the village,” Victoria said. “I think what they’re doing now is still in response to a direct order from Tybalt. Some final command to protect the village or something. I’m betting the wording was loose enough that the monsters could construe it as telling them they ought to obey the villagers. That’s probably why they’re helping.”

  Oh, that makes more sense.

  Vidalia scowled. “Can’t it just be his good nature showing through in the monsters? You’re taking all the romance, all the magic, out of it.”

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  It still reflects his good nature either way, though, Mariella thought.

  “It’s what I do,” Victoria said. She coupled the words with a smile, but to Mariella, it looked as if the expression masked some deep pain.

  Vidalia started walking again, but Mariella gently grabbed Victoria by the arm and stopped her before she could follow.

  “Hey, you don’t take the romance out of things,” the fire mage said quietly. “For me, you’re the one who’s been making this—your whole culture, your tribe—accessible. You’re a gateway to a new world.” It wasn’t just her. But Victoria was the closest thing to a normal foxgirl that Mariella had interacted with, considering that Vidalia was an eccentric, unrepresentative of anyone besides herself.

  “Thanks, Mariella,” Victoria said softly. “Vida doesn’t mean it anyway. But it’s true that I am the boring sister, at least given who came out of the womb with me.” She gave Mariella a little wink, but the fire mage thought she still saw the same quiet pain behind the foxgirl’s smile. Mariella wanted to ask more questions, but Victoria gently pulled her forward, and they joined Vidalia. It was something the fire mage would have to think more about later.

  As they passed through the outskirts of the village, the conversation resumed.

  “Vida, what exactly was your game with the Council today?” Victoria asked. “I’ve never seen you provoke them so much. You even pissed Eldest off. You spent years cultivating his good opinion. I thought you liked him. But you still surprised him with all, um, that. You could have at least warned him in advance.”

  “It was a necessary sacrifice,” Vidalia replied calmly. “I needed to bring this up in public, to get people thinking about it and justifying why it was a good idea to themselves. If I had warned him of the specific topic in advance, he would have made it a private meeting instead. Eldest will get over it. In the long term, he’ll understand why I brought the proposal up that way. He is genuinely wise. The other elders, I won’t worry about so much.”

  “Doesn’t it cause you any loss of credibility, talking to them so directly about everything and then getting rejected?” Mariella asked. “Especially after they were starting to doubt you because of their… interpretation of how things went with the Army?” For the fire mage, Elder Michael’s understanding of what had happened—that Vidalia’s advice before had been wrong, because Andric and his men managed to beat back the squad with significant help—seemed almost idiotic. Willful blindness. But it showed how difficult it would be to properly prepare the fox tribe for future conflicts. The leaders had their heads stuck in the sand.

  “It’s a temporary loss of face, but that only matters until and unless I can show that I’m right,” Vidalia said. She shrugged. “Anyway, it’s no longer primarily my credibility that I’m concerned with. I had to think about what would best promote darling’s agenda and his credibility. Anticipating his future plans, I introduced an idea that would have been considered outrageous if an outsider brought it up. Now the Council will consider it, carefully weigh their options, and, yeah, reject it. But when it comes up again, the groundwork I’ve laid will be valuable.”

  “What’s the importance of the Valley of Martyrs, exactly?” Mariella asked. “I mean, Vicky said you lay your dead to rest there, but it sounded like more than that.”

  Vidalia looked at Victoria, and on cue, the twin began to speak.

  “It’s prophesied that the dead there will one day return to protect us,” she said. “We carefully preserve all our dead in anticipation of that event. But we treat the land as sacred. We have a necromancer emerge from within our people every century or so, but we’ve never had an outsider who was a necromancer among us.”

  “And even the necromancers we do have are never allowed to actually raise the dead that we’ve stored there,” Vidalia said.

  “Why not? They could have helped protect you from the Kingdom before now.”

  “Lesser necromancers have a limit to how many dead they can control at once,” Victoria said. “That means that they can just kill enemies and raise them to hit their limit, and using up our limited supply of honored dead would be a waste. According to Vida, that doesn’t apply to Tybalt.”

  The second sentence came out almost as a question, to which Mariella did not know the answer.

  “We only have one shot at employing all the dead we’ve accumulated to accomplish our goals,” Vidalia said. “Our ancestors knew this day would come. They saved the residents of the Valley for our salvation, and the fear of throwing away our one shot preserved the mummies there undisturbed. It’s a healthy fear that previous dream seers encouraged, or some loser necromancer would have already raised up the strongest dead we have from our history to serve as his champions.”

  “Wait, so couldn’t you have just won the argument today?” Mariella asked. “It sounds like you know the whole history of that place, and you can see the future. Couldn’t you anticipate every objection and answer them all perfectly?”

  “Well, I can’t see everything that’s going to happen,” Vidalia replied. “And using my powers just to argue better would demean them a little bit. My mother, my grandmother, and all our female ancestors learned—and taught me—that we keep how our powers work rather vague for the public. They just need to know that we can see things yet to come. That’s why, aside from situations like this where it’s important that I do something in person, I keep my distance from the rest of the tribe. Even in half of the meetings the Council of Elders asks me to attend, I send Victoria to represent me.

  “If I know what they’re going to ask, we can have some fun with tricks like having Victoria answer every question before they ask it. But that’s something we’d do to impress the elders, not a tactic to use if the questions are hostile and it’s an argument. I always have to calculate how to preserve the respect and dignity—and the influence—that my position gives me. People are naturally inclined to be suspicious of the witch who sees the future in her dreams. Even though, if I wasn’t that witch, the Council of Elders wouldn’t hear out a young girl’s concerns at all.”

  “But you’re all right with me knowing how they work?” Mariella asked slowly. “I think Tybalt explained it, although I didn’t understand fully at the time.”

  “You, Vicky, darling, and our other family are part of my trusted inner circle,” Vidalia said. “Hopefully you will choose not to share with anyone else.”

  The implications of what the foxgirl had said did not escape Mariella.

  I’m family? A strange, complicated blend of feelings surged up inside her until she deflected them to focus on Vidalia’s powers. This future stuff is a little intoxicating, huh? The idea that you could know, for certain, who’s important to you in the future and get closer to them. Avoid mistakes. Choose the best version of your life, even?

  “Still not sure I fully understand it, so your secret is safe,” Mariella said, smiling.

  “I want you to, though,” Vidalia said, wrinkling her forehead. “I see possible futures, mainly ones that are connected to my own life, and I prepare for them. Simple as that. Major decisions made by people who are important to my future can set my visions on different paths. For instance, you.”

  “You did say we’ll be important to each other, and the last few days have me convinced,” Mariella said.

  Or maybe I’m going native. Or nuts.

  “Right. Well, in one of the futures that wasn’t, you weren’t won over by darling. You ended up beating him to near death a little ways outside the village, and you were on the verge of killing him.”

  Mariella felt a pit in her stomach. “I want to say I wouldn’t, but… I would have. Or I could have. Probably. I was on the fence for a while. Conflicting duties—and another conflict.”

  Vidalia nodded, smiling placidly. “Between those duties and what your heart wanted.”

  “Yeah.”

  Vidalia reached into her pocket and pulled out a couple of gray orbs that she extended to Mariella.

  “You can touch these, but only very carefully,” the foxgirl said.

  Mariella ran a finger over the surface of one of the orbs. The texture was lightly pitted as if it was made up of porous rock.

  “What are they?”

  “Smoke bombs. The other items I got from the alchemist to help me, along with the concentrated health elixir for Tybalt, in case we wound up in that future I just mentioned. Vicky and I were going to rescue him from you.”

  “Except that none of that happened,” Mariella said slowly. “You saw it, but the future was incredibly different from what you saw.”

  “Exactly.” Vidalia squeezed Mariella’s hand and smiled. “So now you understand.”

  “I guess.”