Laila’s hand went to her temple, fingers pressing against the dull ache that had been building all evening. The headaches were becoming familiar companions, arriving with the regularity of unpaid bills and twice as welcome.
“More tea, Madame?”
Phaedra stood at her elbow, already pouring. The gorgon moved with quiet efficiency, having anticipated the need before it was spoken. Laila accepted the cup with a nod that she hoped conveyed gratitude rather than exhaustion.
The tea was bitter. It always was, lately.
She had sent the boys to handle the d’Amboise fire. Maximilian’s flames fighting flames, Lambert’s prayers for the wounded, Wylan’s chemical expertise assessing the damage, Isabella’s sharp eyes watching for trouble. It had seemed the obvious deployment at the time.
Half the remaining household had gone with them, dispatched to help their neighbours. Tending to the injured, salvaging what could be saved, doing all the neighbourly, decent things one does when disaster strikes next door.
It had seemed the obvious choice. But the manor felt empty in a way that had nothing to do with headcount. The lamps in the corridor were unlit. The servants who should be tending them were absent. The house had the held breath of a place that knew something its occupants didn’t.
“Phaedra.” Laila’s voice was low. “Where is everyone?”
“At the d’Amboise estate, Madame. As you ordered.”
“Not them. The house staff. Cedric. Elariana.”
Phaedra’s expression remained neutral. “I could check, Madame.”
“No.” Laila rose from her chair, ignoring the way the room swam briefly at the edges. “Something feels strange. I think I’d rather you stay by my side.”
“Of course, Madame.”
They moved through the corridors together. The wrongness had no name yet, but it had weight. Familiar corners felt different in the half-dark, each shadow a place that could hide something. Or someone.
A sound reached her. Faint. From below.
The library.
Laila paused at the top of the stairs, listening. A soft hiss, mechanical and rhythmic. And beneath it, the clink of metal on metal. Someone working.
The library should be empty.
She descended, Phaedra a silent presence at her back. The door stood ajar, lamplight spilling through the gap. Laila pressed it open.
The sight that greeted her refused, for a moment, to make sense.
A contraption crouched at the centre of the room like a surly toad. Tubes, wires, and valves bound together in roughshod assembly. Two massive canisters braced beneath, the source of that ominous hissing. The smell hit her next: turpentine, sharp and acrid, catching at the back of her throat.
Divina Glitterbeard knelt beside it, her clever fingers making adjustments with the focus of someone threading a needle. And standing guard at the door, blade drawn, was Elariana.
The Mistress-at-Arms turned. Her expression was blank, utterly without recognition.
“Divina,” Laila said carefully. “What is this?”
Divina didn’t answer. Didn’t even look up. Her hands kept working, movements precise and mechanical.
Laila reached for her magic. The threads of enchantment were right there, familiar as breathing. She would simply take hold of Divina’s mind.
Nothing.
The magic slipped through her grasp like water through fingers. She reached again, harder, and felt the power stutter and fail. The headache flared, sudden and vicious, and for a moment her vision swam.
Not now. Not now.
Elariana moved.
When confronted with a staff uprising, generations of noble breeding told her exactly what to do. She ran.
The corridors blurred past. Behind her, she heard Phaedra’s footsteps keeping pace, and further back, the heavier tread of pursuit. She rounded the corner toward the entrance hall.
And collided directly with someone coming through the front door.
Hands caught her. Steadied her. A familiar voice: “Mother?”
Lambert. Behind him, Wylan and Isabella, still smelling of smoke. And Maximilian, ash streaking his coat.
“The library,” Laila gasped. “There’s something in the library. Divina and Elariana—they attacked me—”
“Slow down.” Lambert’s grip was firm. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.” The words tasted like failure. “But I think we’re under attack.”
Not another fight in the entry hall. We only just got the scuffs cleared from last time.
The next few moments were a collision of voices.
“—found tracks on the belltower, multiple sets, they were watching—”
“—the fire was no accident, I found phlogiston residue, military grade—”
“—Thornwood, Mother, the blackguard from d’Aubigne’s dinner, he was there—”
Laila held up a hand. “Stop. All of you.”
They stopped. Four faces looked at her, flushed with cold and adrenaline and the energy of people who had seen too much and not yet processed any of it. They smelled of smoke and sweat and the sharp tang of fear dressed up as excitement.
“The house,” Laila said, “is compromised. Divina and Elariana are—”
She didn’t get to finish.
Elariana emerged from the corridor to the library, blade already drawn. She moved with the mechanical purpose of someone who had forgotten how to hesitate.
Isabella’s sword was in her hand before conscious thought caught up. Steel met steel with a ring that echoed off the marble, and the homecoming revised its agenda.
Wylan’s hand was already in his coat, pulling out a vial. He popped the cork and downed the contents in one swift motion. His skin took on a faintly rubbery quality.
Elariana didn’t press the attack. Instead, she circled, blade raised, positioning herself between them and the front door. Blocking the exit.
“Four against one,” Wylan said, moving to flank. “We’ve got this.”
From somewhere above them, faint but unmistakable, came the sound of a child crying.
“Aurora!”
Maximilian’s voice cracked across the chaos. He was already moving, fire flickering at his fingertips, making for the stairs.
“Max, wait—” But Maximilian was gone, taking the steps three at a time toward the gallery landing, vanishing into the upper darkness.
Let him find her safe. Let him find her safe.
“Three against one,” Wylan amended. “We’ve still got this.”
Elariana moved.
Her blade was everywhere at once, catching Isabella’s strike, forcing Wylan back, turning to meet Lambert’s advance. Every counter was precise. Every riposte found its mark.
She crossed the distance to Lambert in a single impossible leap. Physics registered a formal complaint, but Elariana had long ago filed the paperwork declaring gravity optional for tactical purposes. Her boot caught him square in the chest before he could raise a guard.
He flew backward through the archway to the dining room with the graceless trajectory of a man who had not planned to visit that room today. A chair splintered under him.
“Two against one,” Wylan said, adjusting his stance. “How hard could it be?”
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The blunderbuss roared.
Wylan spun toward the sound. Divina Glitterbeard had emerged from the library behind them, the weapon raised. The shot went wide, marble exploding from a pillar three feet to his left.
“Well, that’s just rude,” Wylan said. He dove for cover behind a statue, then poked his head out. “And Divina, that’s awfully gauche work. You didn’t even decorate it.”
Divina was already reloading, fingers moving with mechanical precision.
“Wylan!” Laila’s voice cut across the chaos. “There’s a contraption in the library. I think the staff were trying to sabotage something.”
Wylan stretched sideways at an angle that filed a formal grievance with geometry, narrowly avoiding another blast. “What do you mean, contraption?”
“I don’t know.” Laila pressed herself against a pillar as marble chips scattered. “Big canisters, lots of pipes. I didn’t exactly stay for a look.”
Isabella leapt back from one of Elariana’s strikes, the blade passing close enough to part the air by her cheek.
“Mother, that sounds like an explosive.” Wylan’s voice had lost its levity. “Can you hold off Divina?”
“I can try.”
Laila stepped out from behind the pillar. She might not have her magic, but she was still lady of this house. She drew herself up to her full height, which was not considerable, and fixed Divina with the look that had cowed servants, merchants, and minor nobility for decades.
“Divina Glitterbeard.” Her voice rang with imperious authority. “Stop this tomfoolery at once. You’ll wake the baby.”
Divina whipped around to face her. For a moment, something flickered in the artificer’s eyes. Hesitation or confusion? Perhaps some part of her still remembered who gave the orders in this house.
It was all the distraction Wylan needed. His limbs stretched like taffy as he slung himself over the fight, arcing toward the library door in a trajectory that owed more to rubber than reason.
Phaedra appeared at Laila’s elbow. “Well done, Madame. You’ve got her attention.” A pause. “Now what?”
Lambert picked himself up from the wreckage of a dining chair and took stock.
Through the archway, he could see the fight going badly. Isabella and Wylan were holding their ground against Elariana, but Divina had emerged from the library with what appeared to be a hastily constructed blunderbuss. Two against two, and one of the two had a firearm.
They needed reinforcements.
Lambert made for the kitchen. Ursula might not be a trained fighter, but a hundred-odd kilograms of angry ogren chef had settled more than a few arguments in the household’s history. And she kept a cleaver sharp enough to shave with.
He pushed through the kitchen door.
“Ursula, we need—”
The cleaver swung for his head.
Lambert ducked, more by instinct than design, and the blade buried itself in the doorframe with a solid thunk. Lambert’s instinct to duck upon entering the kitchen had been honed over the years, and not by accident. For once, his arrival and the presence of honey cakes were merely coincidental.
Ursula wrenched the cleaver free and advanced, her massive frame filling the kitchen like a storm front.
There is something inherently more frightening about an enormous ogren chef wielding cooking implements with malicious intent than any spectre with a blade. A spectre doesn’t know what to do with herbs.
Lambert scrambled backward, knocking over a pot rack with a tremendous clatter.
Elariana. Divina. Now Ursula.
Three of them. Three members of the household, all turning on the family at once. If this was betrayal, it had excellent project management.
Ursula swung again, and Lambert threw himself sideways. She was fully herself - he could see that much. The same fire in her eyes, the same professional grip on the cleaver. This was the woman who had once spent an entire evening debating him on whether faith or food better sustained a person. Who had argued that faith might nourish the soul, but food was the thing keeping one from becoming a skeleton. Who had countered his claims of miracles by noting that she had once made a soufflé rise in defiance of natural laws.
That Ursula had never given him cause to doubt her.
So why was she trying to kill him?
This felt wrong. Too complete. Too random.
Lambert clutched his holy symbol and whispered a prayer for insight.
The divine sight came like dawn breaking through clouds.
Invisible threads blazed with terrible clarity. They wound through Ursula’s mind like chains, binding her will to something distant and imperious.
Draconic theurgy? A warlock’s compulsion!
Ursula lunged again, skillet whistling through the air. Lambert sidestepped, nearly losing an ear, and made a decision.
“By the light of Invictus, I name thee Ursula of House de Vaillant.” His voice carried the weight of prayer. “I see the chains that bind you. I command them broken.”
Holy light flickered at his fingertips. An aureole of light appeared momentarily around Ursula’s head.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the threads of compulsion shuddered, frayed, and snapped.
Ursula staggered. The skillet lowered. Her eyes, tinged with rage, gave way to confusion.
“Lambert?” Her voice was hoarse. “Why was I attacking you? Did you steal honey cakes again?”
“The house is under attack.” Lambert straightened, brushing flour from his robes. “We need your help.”
“Who are we fighting?”
“Elariana and Divina.”
Ursula stared at him, then at the skillet in her hand. Then, calmly and without much effort, she lifted the great iron stockpot from the stove with her other hand.
“Lead the way.”
Wylan stepped into the library.
The smell hit him first. Sharp, acrid, entirely too flammable. Turpentine. That, paired with the soft hissing noise coming from the centre of the room, was rarely a good sign.
The device dominated the space like an unwelcome guest who had decided to redecorate. Wylan’s eye went immediately to the bookshelf on the far wall. The secret door to Father’s study was closed, but the placement of this thing couldn’t be coincidence. Someone knew what was down there.
He circled the contraption, cataloguing. Two pressurised canisters, industrial grade, probably salvaged from a mining operation. Copper tubing running between them, poorly soldered. A timing mechanism that looked like it had been assembled by someone who understood the theory but lacked the practice. The whole thing reeked of amateur enthusiasm married to professional-grade materials.
Roughly forty litres of compressed accelerant, he calculated. Blast radius of perhaps fifty metres. Enough to take out this wing and everything beneath it.
Presumably including the portal to the Dungeon.
“Right,” Wylan muttered. “Let’s not let that happen.”
His gaze darted to the broad library window. The pane was large enough to offer a hasty exit for one of the canisters. Beyond it, the pond shimmered serenely in the moonlight, enjoying its last few seconds of dignity; blissfully unaware that it was about to become a key part of Wylan’s unplanned redecoration.
He rolled his shoulders. “It’s only highly dangerous if I miss.”
Wylan reached out, and then stretched further. His arms elongated with a snap, latching onto the sturdy brackets on either side of the window. The motion pulled his entire body taut, turning him into a human slingshot that would have made any reasonable engineer cry, and several unreasonable ones applaud.
The contraption, of course, resisted. It groaned, hissed, and clung to its bolts like a cat refusing to be put into a bath. Wylan gritted his teeth, muscles wobbling like taut rubber, and then released.
With a final, offended crack, one of the canisters tore free. It hurtled through the air with all the grace of an extremely large potato. The window shattered, shards raining down like disgruntled stars, and the canister arced beautifully out into the night.
Moments later, there was a resounding splash and an indignant screech from a passerby, now involuntarily showered. The canister lodged itself in the centre of the pond, spurting chemicals in what could generously be called a fountain display.
Wylan winced, already anticipating his mother’s sharp words regarding her lavender patch.
He turned his attention to the remaining canister. A few adjusted valves, a careful release of pressure, and the hissing subsided to silence.
The ordeal was resolved.
Wylan allowed himself a breath. It wouldn’t be the first time holiday decorations using experimental Immolator tech had created decorative holes in noble houses. The Yule lights feud of 1772 had ended in a court martial, an excommunication, and the mysterious disappearance of one nanny who was still the subject of local legend.
At least this one hadn’t gone off.
? It would be unfair to say Wylan was disappointed. But alchemists who build things that don’t explode are left with a curiosity that never quite gets satisfied.
Laila stood her ground.
Divina’s blunderbuss wavered between her and the archway to the dining room. The artificer’s face was a war of impulses, something in her fighting against something else. Phaedra stood at Laila’s side, knife drawn, ready.
Come on. Remember who you are.
Lambert emerged first, robes flapping, sandals slapping against the floor in what was clearly intended to be a heroic charge but arrived as a determined lope. Behind him came Ursula, stockpot in both hands, who had no such pretensions.
She saw them appraise the situation. Lambert’s eyes went to Divina, to the blunderbuss, to Elariana still trading blows with Isabella.
Laila snapped her fingers sharply. Divina’s attention whipped back to her.
“Eyes on me, Divina.”
Divina levelled the blunderbuss, finger tightening on the trigger.
The cooking pot descended.
One moment Divina was aiming, the next she was engulfed in cast iron. The blunderbuss discharged inside, the pot shaking with a muffled boom. When it settled, Divina’s legs were visible beneath the rim, motionless.
“Divina!” Lambert broke from his charge and skidded to his knees beside the pot, hauling it off her. The dwarf lay crumpled beneath, ears bleeding, eyes rolled back. Lambert’s hands were already glowing with soft light as he checked her breathing, her pulse. “She’s alive. Concussed. I’ve got her.”
Isabella saw her opening. She pressed Elariana back with a flurry of strikes, driving her toward Ursula. The ogren chef dropped the pot and grabbed Elariana from behind, pinning her arms. It was like grabbing a hissing cat by the scruff of its neck. Elariana writhed, snarled, but a hundred-odd kilograms of angry chef was not so easily dislodged.
“Now what?” Ursula grunted.
“It’s Warlock compulsion,” Lambert said, breathing hard. “We need to break the control.”
Warlock compulsion. In my house.
Laila reached into her sleeve and pulled out a small pouch of cerulean powder. Her hands were steadier than they had any right to be.
“Hold her still.”
She stepped forward and threw the powder directly into Elariana’s face. It was not, by any measure, a good makeup job. But Laila wasn’t aiming for aesthetics. She was aiming for contact.
The pigment settled on Elariana’s skin, and Laila reached for her magic. This time, it answered. Fired up as she was, furious as she was, the threads came when she called.
“You are mine,” Laila said. “Not hers. Mine.”
She felt the draconic compulsion, proud and imperious, wound through Elariana’s mind. She took hold of it and pulled.
Something tore.
Elariana went limp in Ursula’s grip. Her eyes, wild a moment before, cleared. Confusion flooded in.
“What...” Elariana’s voice was raw. “What did I... Isabella, did I hurt you?”
“Later.” Laila turned to where Lambert knelt over Divina. The dwarf was stirring now, groaning, one hand going to her head. Lambert’s healing light pulsed softly around her. “Is she...?”
“Coming round,” Lambert said. “The compulsion’s fading on its own now that she’s unconscious. Give her a moment.”
Wylan strolled in from the library, dusting his hands together with the satisfied air of a job well done.
“Greatest alchemist of all time: one. Massive explosive device: zero.” He glanced around at the aftermath. “What did I miss?”
They had won. The bomb was defused. The staff were freed. The house still stood.
Laila allowed herself a breath.
And then she noticed.
It was the thought of Aurora that brought it into sharp focus: the absence of sound. No laughter echoing through the halls. No delighted squeals or the patter of small feet. The silence where her granddaughter’s joy should be.
Max had gone upstairs. Max had gone to find Aurora. That had been... how long ago? Minutes? It felt like hours.
A memory came to her unbidden: young Maximilian’s running footsteps, a sudden thump, then silence. Followed shortly by a large wail as Maximilian reconciled with physics. That had been relief, for it meant the child was not so badly hurt as to complain about it loudly.
Her thoughts were catching up with her now. The sound of Aurora crying when Max had bolted for the stairs. The chaos of the fight. The blunderbuss, the clashing steel, Wylan’s shattered window.
The house had gone quiet, and the quiet was worse.
She couldn’t hear Aurora crying.