Mak and Kira hated what I had to ask of them, and they weren’t alone.

  Herald despised Zabra no less than Mak did, and she had little to no respect for Tammy. Maglan, Sarina and Marvan followed her lead. Tam and Val had no sympathy for the woman who’d tortured our sisters, and they knew very well what Tammy had done as part of the Silver Spurs. And Ardek was terribly conflicted when it came to his former boss, but he loathed Tammy for what she’d done to Kira over the years. So when I arrived at the rotunda on the palace grounds with those two in my arms, the atmosphere was less than friendly.

  The only person there who didn’t have a personal reason to dislike either woman was Avjilan. I decided he’d have to be the one to look after them until they recovered. But that would be after they were actually on the road to recovery, and that would take the help of my healers.

  Tammy, once she’d gotten over the unfettered joy of me actually touching her for several minutes, looked around the gathered party from where she sat on the loam-covered cobbles of the courtyard. When her eyes fell on Kira she could at first only maintain eye-contact for a moment before she looked down, shamefaced. Then she visibly steeled herself, met Kira’s eyes again, and said, with nothing but humility, “Please, Miss Kira. Help Zabra.”

  “I’ll take Tammy,” Mak said, patting Kira’s shoulder and approaching. “Avjilan, Marvan, get Zabra inside. Somewhere far from my bedroll, please. Tammy, grit your teeth and put your arms around my neck.”

  Tammy looked at Mak with a silent question in her eyes, but my sister didn’t wait. She squatted down by Tammy’s side, put one arm under her knees and one around her waist, and simply lifted her effortlessly off the ground, carrying her inside instead of making her limp or crawl the whole way.

  Mak didn’t even look at me, which felt like a troll-sized punch to the gut. It probably took every ounce of willpower that she had, and it was a testament to how unhappy she was to have Zabra there that she managed to direct any displeasure toward me at all.

  Zabra and Tammy survived, of course. They each had a healing potion in them, and Mak and Kira both knew their business when it came to healing. There was quite a bit of blood and some whimpers from the unconscious Zabra as the arrows came out, but that was unavoidable. And I hovered like a worried mother hen the whole time, but it wasn’t like I had anything else to do. Still, it was late in the night when the patients and their respective healers finally settled down to an exhausted sleep, and even then it wasn’t quite over.

  I lay in the center of the rotunda, on what I thought of as my father’s throne, with Mak passed out in exhausted sleep against me instead of in her bedroll, when Tam crept over.

  “Outside?” he asked, nodding toward the open doors.

  I looked at him, then at Mak, and sighed. “Put her to bed properly first, and I’m all yours.”

  A few minutes later, after Val had carried Mak to her bedroll and Tam had tucked her in, he joined me outside with a lightstone, and we moved a fair distance away so we’d be out of earshot.

  “So, what’s the plan with those two?” he asked.

  “I assume you mean the two wounded women,” I said heavily. It wasn’t going to be a fun conversation. It rarely was, when those two were involved.

  “The two slavers, yeah,” he said, but there wasn’t any heat in it. “Look, I understand that you’re very protective of them. And I don’t pretend to know the extent of what you’ve done to them, but I know they’re different than they were. Kira’s told me a little about what Tammy was like during their years together as mercs, and from what little I’ve seen I can hardly believe it’s the same woman. But it’s kind of hard to welcome the woman who tortured my sisters, and someone who slaughtered villages to cover for their slaving, into our camp. There could be trouble.”

  “Could be, or will be?” I asked.

  “Mercies only know. Herald pretends to be more tolerant of Zabra than she is, and her three little ducklings follow her lead. And Kira… you know how hard it is to get Kira to say a cross word about anyone. The way she looks at Tammy is the closest to anger I’ve ever seen her, and I once watched her heal a woman who had just tried to kidnap her. I know she healed Tammy’s hand and all, but that’s just Kira being Kira, right? It’s all about her kindness, and has nothing to do with forgiveness. And anyway, it’s not her you need to worry about. It’s Ardek. He may be a pretty sweet guy, but he loves that girl like… hell, like I love Val, almost. Almost. If we wake up and Tammy’s suddenly gone, I know who I’d look to first.”

  “And you?” I asked him, stopping and looking him dead in the eye.

  “Me? I’m not going to disappear anyone. But Mercies’ own truth, Draka, if Zabra was dangling from a cliff, I’d stand and watch. Make of that what you will.”

  The next morning, Mak and Kira checked on their respective patients again. Then, after breakfast and some planning, the exploration party geared up and set off for the food court. The plan was to get the broken magical gate open, then take it from there.

  Avjilan stayed behind with the two wounded women, and Kira and Ardek stayed behind to take care of the mules, and in case there was a medical emergency. Those were their given reasons, anyway; I was pretty sure they were just going to find a quiet place to canoodle, but it wasn’t like they were suited for diving into the depths of whatever was going on under the palace.

  I escorted the amateur archeologists-slash-tomb-raiders to their destination, then returned to the rotunda. There was no reason for me to wait by the excavated house; I wasn’t planning on joining them downstairs, but I could watch them from anywhere, and if they needed me I was no more than a minute away. My time was much better spent watching over my two injured servants; Avjilan was only one man, after all, and I didn’t see what Ardek and Kira could realistically do against anything that might give him trouble.

  Credit to Kira; she checked on the still unconscious Zabra frequently, and it only took an hour or two before she stopped ignoring Tammy’s existence.

  “Tammy,” she said with a sigh as the woman in question sat on her bedroll, looking down shame-facedly. “Show me your arm.”

  Tammy only hesitated for a moment before unwrapping the bandage around her stump and holding it out. She still couldn’t look at Kira.

  “How does it feel?” Kira asked as she looked closely at the pink skin and then little nubs protruding from it.

  “Sensitive,” Tammy mumbled. I could barely hear her, despite being only a few meters away in an echoey room. In the same voice she added, “Thank you, Miss.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Kira said sourly. “You had plenty of names for me over the years. What I want to hear from you is my actual name. Nothing else.”

  “As you say… Kira.”

  “Mercies,” Kira said, releasing the stump and rubbing her face in exasperation. Then she did something I’d never have expected from her in a million years. She reached up, took Tammy by the cheeks, and physically turned her head to face her. “Why are you like this?” she hissed, and I had to wave down Ardek, who looked so concerned I thought he may intervene. “Where is your self-respect? You made my life hell for years! You stole from me, destroyed what you didn’t want, humiliated me… I dreamed of seeing you get what you deserved! Of seeing you punished for the awful things you did to me and so many others! How dare you be… this?! By what right do you make me sympathize with you?!”

  “I’m sorry,” Tammy said, sounding small and miserable but not even trying to turn her head away.

  “That you can apologize for? You can apologize for being broken, but not for what you’ve done?”

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  “The mistress commanded me to apologize when I meant it,” Tammy said miserably, turning her eyes to me. “No matter how I try, I can’t feel any regret. Leretem is still part of me, and those are her memories, and she doesn’t regret anything she did to you. I wish she would. I wish so very much that she would! I’m so sorry that she doesn’t!”

  Tammy’s voice was shaking by the end, and though she still let Kira hold her head straight, she was staring somewhere in the region of Kira’s chin.

  Then Kira did something else I would never have expected, but which was much more like the Kira I’d come to know and love. “Oh, gods and Mercies,” she said, moving her hands to Tammy’s shoulders. “She had to shatter you completely to make you a halfway decent person, didn’t she? Barely anything left of you after all the rot was cut away. Come here.”

  Then she pulled Tammy into her arms, and Tammy stopped holding back.

  Beside me, Ardek watched with utter bewilderment, his vulgar Tekereteki nowhere near good enough to follow that conversation.

  “What’s even the point of holding a grudge against you, Tammy?” Kira asked as Tammy shook. “I barely even know you, but whoever you are, you’re really not Leretem anymore, are you?”

  “I’m not!” Tammy sobbed, and the sheer relief in her voice was heartbreaking.

  “Well, I don’t know if I can ever forgive that woman. So I suppose it’s a good thing you’re not her.” She released Tammy and pushed her to arm’s length, then forced a smile and said, “Hello, Tammy. I’m Kira. It’s so nice to meet you. Let’s take a look at that leg, shall we?”

  A little distance away Ardek turned to me and softly asked, “Boss, do you ever feel that you don’t deserve someone, but now you’re lucky enough to have them, you’ll never forgive yourself if you lose them?” He didn’t need to understand what had been said to understand what had happened.

  “All the time, kid,” I told him. “All the time.”

  If Ardek hoped to get some alone-time with Kira, he was about to be sorely disappointed. While Kira was looking at Tammy’s wound, making sure that the healing had gone well, Zabra woke, so Kira had to make sure that she was healing right, too. And while she did that she must have found the time to have a long, hushed conversation, because soon enough she came walking over to me.

  I figured she just wanted to say something at a volume that wouldn’t echo, but she wasn’t done surprising me. Before I even opened my mouth she dropped to her knees, hands folded in her lap and eyes on the floor between us, and waited to be acknowledged.

  If I could sweat, I could have. I knew what this was. The last time she’d done something similar she’d pressed her head to the floor, and I was glad that she didn’t, but I knew that Kira was about to ask something of me that she really, really didn’t want me to say no to.

  “Yes, Kira?” I said, not wanting to drag this out for longer than absolutely necessary.

  “Please, Mistress,” she said, and as if her posture didn’t make her intentions clear, she spoke to me in Classical Tekereteki. “I would beg a great favor of you.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Tammy and Zabra worry about Hardal and his surviving men,” she said, not raising her eyes from the floor. “They speak only of their gratitude for you, but it is easy to see that they feel a great deal of guilt that they have had the aid of two healers, while their men must make do with potions and their own best efforts. I… I know I have no right to ask this of you, but I would beg that you take me to them, if only for an hour, to make sure their wounds have been treated right.”

  I looked over to the two recovering women. They were both on their knees as well, facing me, eyes equally downcast.

  “Kira,” I said with a sigh. “Are you not ashamed of yourself? You know I cannot refuse when you ask like this.”

  “I am sorry, Mistress,” she said, her voice small. “I thought you would feel good about yourself if you were to grant my request. And I think it is the right thing to do.”

  “You are not wrong. It does make me feel good, and it is the right thing to do. I just wish you would ask me normally.”

  “With all respect, Mistress, it is not a small thing for me to ask you to expend your time and effort on my selfish request. I wish to give it the gravity it deserves.”

  “Yes, fine,” I said. I knew I was giving up without anything resembling a fight, but I really couldn’t help it. If she wanted to use a reminder of the imbalance in power between us to shift that balance once in a long while, I couldn’t very well take that from her. I didn’t need Conscience to tell me that. “I will need a few moments. Gather what you need and dress for a short flight.”

  I didn’t need to do much. Get Avjilan and the mules back inside, close the doors, and let Herald know what was going on. That was it. We’d be leaving as soon as Kira was ready, really.

  “Thank you, Mistress!” Kira said, and the very real gratitude in her voice wiped away any shred of resentment I might have possibly felt for what she’d asked me to do, and how she’d done it.

  While Kira was busy showing that she was a better person than I could have ever been, the treasure-hunters were working hard at breaking through the defunct gate. I wasn’t watching them all the time; both because I was busy, first guarding the Shrine and then flying south with Kira, and because as interesting as it was initially, it quickly got boring. But I had Conscience riding along with Mak, and she promised to let me know if anything interesting happened.

  It was slow going, but we hadn’t come unprepared. Maglan was the only one in that group who’d never broken into an Old Mallinean ruin before. They’d packed everything one may need to break through a heavy door, or even a stone wall, and were hard at work with chisels and mallets, heavy pry bars and even a pickax. Still, even with the right tools and three people with strength Advancements turning them into a veritable wrecking crew, getting through those slabs of stone was no easy task. It was almost shocking how little progress they made between my visits to Herald’s head. It took hours in the end. I had plenty of time to bring Kira to Hardal and his crew, let her take care of them as much as she reasonably could before exhausting herself, bask in the reflected gratitude they piled on her, and return her to the Shrine before the undergrounders were even halfway through. I left Kira with Ardek, Avjilan, and her patients, shut them back in, and went and ate three Rifts, and even with my brief periods of unconsciousness Mak and the others still weren’t through by the time I was done. It took until after everyone, above or below ground, had their lunch before they broke through.

  Of course, once they’d made a hole things went pretty quickly. And once they started widening that hole, they only had as much patience as it took to get it big enough for Mak to squeeze her hips through. Once that happened she was inside in a heartbeat, closely followed by Sarina and Tam.

  Conscience had alerted me when they broke through, so I had a front row seat, seeing what Mak did. They had one of the lightstones with them, shining a bright white, and it was more than enough to illuminate the room. It was small but airy — no more than twelve feet wide, perhaps half again as deep, and with a ten-foot ceiling. It was fairly empty, too. Along the walls at the center of the room were two… consoles, was the best word I could think of. Kind of like stone standing desks at a comfortable working height, with their surfaces inclined at forty-five degrees. A pedestal in the center of the room, between the consoles, held a cracked lightstone, and at the back of the room was an old table, a pair of stools, and a locker or cupboard of some kind.

  On the floor before each of the consoles lay a desiccated corpse. I figured they must have been working when whatever killed everyone happened.

  “Well, that’s odd,” Tam commented, as the three of them took it all in. “What do you think this room was for?”

  “It’s not a vault,” Sarina said confidently. “If they’d stored any silver or gold in here for any length of time I would have been able to tell.”

  “They wouldn’t put a magical gate with no other means of opening or closing on a room that wasn’t important,” Mak said. Let’s take a closer look at everything. Sarina, check the cupboard. Tam, the bodies.”

  “As you say, milady,” Tam said with exaggerated deference and got to it. Sarina carefully stepped between the bodies without a word, and was soon hard at work breaking the furniture.

  Mak, meanwhile, looked at the consoles.

  Ever since they crawled inside, I’d been caught between exactly two possibilities. It was incredibly anachronistic, but my gut kept alternating between “security office” and “control center.” It was the consoles. They might have been what they looked like — standing desks — but there were no papers, no books or scrolls or anything on them or on the floor. If there had been papers, and if they were important enough, someone could have removed them, but I didn’t see it. With the way the bodies were scattered, with all their valuables and the doors closed, I doubted anyone had been down here since. No, I was sure that the consoles must have once done something, and when Mak took a closer look — and after blowing the dust off — my gut feeling felt more and more right.

  The consoles were covered in fine, intricate webs of lines of metal inlaid in the stone — very similar to the ceiling of the food court. And just like in the ceiling, some of those lines looked like they’d melted and flowed, leaving lumps of metal toward the bottom of each console and even one or two solidified drops on the floor underneath. They were divided into sections, with clear, straight lines in the stone marking them, and above each section was a line of what I recognized as Malyoni script.

  If those weren’t enchantments that once did something in the wider complex, I’d bite my own tail.

  Then Herald called through the hole in the door, “Did you find something, Mak?”

  And Mak replied, “I found something, but Sorrows know what. Let me try something.” She reached out and placed her hand on one of the patterns—

  And I was back at the rotunda. And when I tried, I couldn’t reach either of my sisters.

  I couldn’t even sense where they were.

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