“There’s movement,” Princess said. “Approaching.”

Except she didn’t say that, she didn’t even think it. She sort of made me think it, so my eyes sprang open in the darkness, and a hatchet appeared in my hand before I even realized that I’d awoken.

Oh. Speaking of which, I’d woken from a deep sleep, after hours of ... no training, no dreamscape. Just regular, restful sleep. Which was lovely, in its way, but I hadn’t even enjoyed a nice stately stroll around Princess’s balconied ballroom in my dreams.

Instead, she’d mentally shaken me awake to alert me of a change in my surroundings. My webtouch senses detected the roughhewn stone ceiling, claustrophobically close to my face, and a figure approaching stealthily from the side. I didn’t summon my other hatchet but I prepared myself to move and ...

Oh! It was just Wren.

“Alex,” she whispered, touching my calf. “You’re on watch.”

I grunted softly and sat up. “Anything happen? You see anyone?”

“Not a soul. Not a sound.”

“I wonder where they are. They crashed through your barricade hours ago.”

She nodded in the dim light of the flecked walls. “I wish we knew, but our plan is our plan. Bring Usim to the surface and lose him in the crowds. And keep him safe until ... the danger is past.”

“You’re really going to turn yourself in,” I said.

“I know Viceroy Limt, I’ve served under him before. He’ll make an example of me, but he won’t ...” She shrugged. “He’ll leave Usim alone. That way, if this happens again, the next traitor will also turn themself in, just like I did, instead of making him chase them down.”

“Are you a traitor?”

“Of course I am.”

“You didn’t have a choice, Wren. They would’ve killed your son.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” she agreed. “But I’m still a traitor.”

“So hide. Hide with Usim, both of you together.”

She rubbed her eyes. “I’m tempted. More tempted than you know. You have children?”

“No.”

“Me neither, I just have child.” She smiled sadly, her lips trembling. “If I hide, there’s a twenty, thirty percent chance that we both survive the year. If I surrender, there’s a ninety percent chance that he does. If I hide and they find us ... “ She rubbed the bridge of her nose with her red hand. “And they will. Eventually they will find us. This isn’t a big island, and I’m not exactly popular.”

“What if they don’t take the island?”

“That’s not possible.”

“C’mon. It’s possible.”

“If the current troops fail? Six Coves will send more. There are what, ten or twenty local gifted on Waldhill?”

“So far I’ve only met me, and I’m hardly local.”

A gleam appeared in her eyed. “Yes, I do wonder where you’re really from.”

“It’s a big secret,” I said.

She snorted. “Yeah, but you’re in Ryetown now. We know--the Six Coves forces have identified five local gemmed, and I’d guess another ten are lying low. Let’s say twenty, max.”

“And there’s how many gifted invaders?”

“About the same number, plus two thousand shock troops.”

“Still, that’s not--”

“Plus another hundred gemmed on Six Coves.”

I blinked at her. “What?”

“Six Coves is a major military outpost of Krelv. You know why they call Krelv ‘the whetstone?’”

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

“No.”

“They believe the most effective path to power is to let gemmed strengthen ourselves against each other. Scrape against each other. To get stronger. And it works. So there’s another hundred gifted there, and some of them ...” She shook her head. “Some of them make you and me look like we’re just a lone kobold.”

“Damn.”

“They’ll send more if they need. They’ll reinforce with as many as they need. They won’t fail to take the island.”

“Well, fuck,” I said. “Why didn’t they send all of ‘em to start with?”

“Training. You can’t train properly if you deploy with overwhelming force. You need to prepare for a real fight. You need to fight a real fight. Even better, once where you’re outnumbered and out-armed.”

“That’s the whetstone thing again?”

“Yeah. Because even against the least of the Plagues, we’re like chipmunks fighting a panther. Complacency is death. We need to scrape for every last ounce of power, or everyone dies. You can hate Krelv--we all hate Krelv sometimes--but they know that better than anyone.”

I squinted at her in the dimness. “You’re cheery this morning.”

“I’m tired. Take the watch, I’m going to sleep.”

So I crawled toward the exit then lay on my stomach and watched the hallway beneath us in the faintest glow of skystone flecks in the ceiling. Listening for footfalls, but only hearing drips of condensation and the scurry of lizard-rats. I turned my arm to smoke and wafted it into threads of drifting particles. With that new perspective, I checked all directions at once.

Which was kind of a waste, because there were only two directions that mattered. Also, I felt my mana dropping. So I stopped messing around and just lay there, bored out of my skull, until morning came. Thinking about skills and tiers and plagues. Trying unsuccessfully to rouse Princess to talk to me. Mentally inventorying my domain. I want to describe everything I did over those hours, to share the utter tedium, but I’ll spare you.

Also, I didn’t actually know when morning came. It was impossible to tell underground. Still, I figured that at least three hours had passed before Tansy stirred in her corner, then snorted a few times. Her trunk-nose stiffened when she snorted, which was adorable.

I crept nearer and lay my hand on her shoulder.

She blinked at me, then smiled sleepily, and she suddenly looked young. Too young for fighting to the death in underground tunnels.

“How’re you feeling?” I asked.

“Gold beads are the shit,” she said, touching her injured abdomen in wonderment. “I feel good as garigrass. Well, it aches a little, but more like a punch than a stab. And I get a good scar, too.”

“Won’t that fade?” I asked. “When a gold bead heals me, it doesn’t leave a mark.”

“Yeah, and it takes one heartbeat, because you’re gemmed.” She narrowed her eyes at Wren, who’d woken at the sound of our voices. “Of course, we could get me a gem, boss. I know where to find one. Just an arm’s length away.”

“You want fruit for breakfast?” I asked, ignoring her murderousness. “Or those stuffed rolls that Maryne makes?”

“Can you imagine if I grew three feet taller and had a spiked gem-tail?”

I gave her a pine-melon. “Wren’s tail isn’t spiked.”

“Yeah, but mine would be.”

Wren ignored us, murmuring to Usim to wake him. We ate breakfast then I domained our blankets and wafted from our hidden half-ceiling to diffuse into the hallways below. I didn’t detect anyone nearby, so I resolidified and nodded to Wren.

She dropped soundlessly beside me and scouted the area. When she returned a few minutes later with the all-clear, Tansy and Usim joined us.

“Which way, cap’n?” Tansy asked.

“No idea,” I said. “I’m totally turned around.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” she told me, and turned to Usim.

He flushed in pleasure--which surprised me given his orange skin--and pointed at a wall. “The kobold village is roughly in that direction. It’d only be a ten minute walk if there was nothing in the way. Instead of, um, everything being in the way. So if we turn right as soon as possible, we’ll parallel their valley and then any left turn will bring us closer to the lighthouse exit.”

I wasn’t sure why he was so confident, but Wren saw my expression and said, “He’s got a good sense of direction.”

That worked for me. We walked for twenty minutes, then took a left that almost immediately jogged to the right again. We followed a snaking path between erosion-carved walls, like we were in a steep riverbed. Pale strands of what looked like seaweed draped the walls, and hundreds of dimly-glowing moths danced through the air.

I tensed in case they were some kind of horrible monster. They were just moths, though.

That riverbed path led upward to a squared-off tunnel that looked like a mine shaft, plain rock with single chunks of sunstones embedded every thirty feet. We turned left again, and Wren scouted ahead, small and silent.

I turned to Usim. “So you hadn’t seen your mom in a year?”

“Almost two years.”

“But you were both on Six Coves before the invasion, right?”

“Oh! No. I was on Krelv with my father. See, Krelv and Six Coves have weirdly-overlapping routes? That’s why Six Coves is so important to Krelv. They form a bridge every few years. Every decade at the absolute least-often, according to the old almanacs.”

“Oh, So you were there, then crossed over at the last bridge, but your mom was already on Waldhill?”

“Right. I’m her because ...” He chewed his lower lip. “Well, I guess I’m supposed to be getting experience.”

I laughed. “You’re definitely overachieving at that.”

“Ha! I guess so, yeah.”

“Shh,” Wren said, slinking into view ten feet in front of us. “Come. Quietly.”

She gestured for us to follow, and two minutes later the mine shaft opened into a cavern. Like, a proper cave, with stalactites and everything, which was pretty weird in the middle of a sunken city. Without the skystone-flecked walls, the space was darker than the rest of the Old City, illuminated only by trickles of condensation catching the light that glowed from five or six tunnel mouths that opened into the cavern.

While Tansy stepped closer to guard Usim, I slipped beside Wren.

She didn’t speak. She raised three fingers then pointed to three locations across the cavern. Three circles of absolute darkness in the rocky floor.

Wraith Pits.