“This place looks so sad,” I murmured.

Like a husk the hall’s lamp-lit lobby lay empty this late into the night.

There were oil or glass paintings hanging on the walls, and two dusty scrollshelves. On the wall in front of us sat three corridors, all opposite the spiraling ramp the doors had spat out. Two corridors opened far to either side, one dark and silent, and the other lit with dim, dispersed light and the equally dim, dispersed murmurings of a few distant voices. The middle corridor was a ramp leading even deeper into the building.

Like usual with cliff-dweller buildings, it was half-underground.

Hinte stood beside me, looking like I felt. Inside the hall, she’d at last taken off her goggles. She glanced at me, and in her dark, near-black scelerae, her rust-orange eyes were flames and burned with an intensity that erased the tired, flagging lines of her face. I smiled at her, and she only inclined her head.

“Do you feel that?” I asked, rubbing a foot against a foreleg. “It feels like chasing down the humans or facing down the rockwraiths. Doom.”

Hinte remained silent, frowning in thought.

I looked up to the ceiling. The sight there lit my frills⁠ ⁠—⁠ a mosaic of stars! It covered the concave ceiling, stretching to where the ceiling curved back on itself. It wasn’t accurate. The night sky didn’t look anything like this; none of the stars or nebulae were positioned anywhere near any real formation in the sky. But the work looked so bright, so detailed, so unexpected, and so convincingly stellar, that I found myself forgiving the artist’s ignorance.

When I looked down, Hinte’s frills worked in thought. She said, after some time, “Yes. I worry if the faer will find some fault in defending ourselves against the humans or ask just why we were in the Berwem.”

“Or believe the two of us?” I asked.

She waved a wing. “No. Ushra is the faer’s personal alchemist. The musician only spat up superstitious slime. Mlaen is smarter than that.”

I looked downed, and scratched a bit at the rock floor. “Does it feel like there’s something deeper at work? Some… plot? The rod-twirler dragon didn’t want us going to the faer, and now the treasurer seems to wants us to.” My brilles flashed clear. “And the twirler didn’t seem to like the treasurer. What’s going on?”

Hinte looked at me the way she had when I’d ask about the crysts. She took forever to finally say something, and it was, “This country is not called the land of glass and secrets for nothing, Kinri.”

It was then that I heard footsteps padding up from one of the corridors —⁠ the dim one⁠ ⁠—⁠ and bringing a scent of ripening holly. A secretary flitted into the room, wearing a simple black and gold halfrobe covering her breast and falling over her forelegs.

Wings apart from her body, head held high, she didn’t look as small as I did. Instead, she stood eye-level with Hinte, but without the forest-dweller’s muscles. Her frills fanned as she stepped in, and they were half as long as Hinte’s. My own frills folded back at the sight, and I glanced at the floor.

She searched us as she entered, and clouded her yellow eyes when she saw me. Why? Was it one of those things that was just different on the surface? In the sky’s courts, clouding your eyes when you looked at someone meant, ‘You are unimportant, I don’t care about you! Flick, I don’t even need to see you clearly, ha ha.’

I clouded my own eyes in response, but I doubted it sent a very impressive message. The secretary smiled back, with her teeth. Her secretary would eat you if you looked at them the wrong way. I cleared my eyes and jerked my gaze back to the star mosaic.

Then I looked back at her.

The secretary’s scales caught the lobby’s lamplight, glinting a shimmering blue-green where her black and yellow robes didn’t cover them. Was she mixed sky and forest? I’d never seen anything like that. I opened my mouth to ask about it, but that was when her gaze left me.

The difference stung; the secretary smiled on seeing Hinte and waved her tail at her. “Oh, it’s Gronte’s granddaughter. Hello, Hinte! What brings you here this late?” she asked. Why did she sound so cheerful?

“Cynfe-sofran.” Hinte said, inclining her head. “We must see the faer at once.”

Cynfe. Oh, I’d heard of her. She’d come up in conversation sometimes, during nights at the inn. I would always wonder what she had done to earn so much ire. Was she that unpleasant, or something else? I glanced at her scales. Something else, maybe.

“Ooh? It must be important if you want to bother the faer with it! Why not tell it to me and I shall judge if it is important enough to bother her?”

Hinte pulled at her cloak enough to reveal the three dead apes tied to her back.

Cynfe’s smile disappeared in a heartbeat. “I see. I will alert the faer at once.”

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The blue-green wiver slinked back up the ramp. In her wing-digits, she grasped a rolled up scroll of papyrus, and an inkwell. Her frills narrowed at Hinte, who’d inched closer to the corridor while the secretary was gone, but she said nothing, only dragging her claws along the carpet, beckoning us. Like that, she led us down the middle corridor.

It winded and finally opened to a room with a throne at the head and various mats along the fringes. The walls were decorated with more paintings, styled with the recurring golden yellow, bright against the gray granite.

The faer stood near the center of the room, waiting like a some shining white beacon. Nothing about her was white, yet you couldn’t shake the impression.

Her hornscales were colored like the rest of scales — a sort of ruddy red, almost, but not, brown; the look of recent-shaven hornscales. They lined top of her head and the bottom fringe of her face, spiky and giving her a wild look, but controlled, too: at just a glance, you could taste the care she took in maintaining her face. It still straddled the line of good taste⁠ ⁠—⁠ for someone of her position, at least.

The faer stood there in robes that only looked plain. They were colored patriotic red and yellows, yes, but those reds were deep, and the yellows were bright. You knew those dyes would cost far more than a few day’s meals.

All the symbols of Gwymr/Frina were inscribed along her robes, with fibers of woven glass. Those same stained glass fibers abound across her robes, marking the highlights and transitions and seams. Even in Gwymr/Frina, in the land of glass and secrets, it was a sight.

I bowed, alongside Hinte, splaying my wings and clouding my brilles. Hinte lowered her head to the carpet and raised her tail.

The faer didn’t wait to speak, though, her voice a tired growl. “My Cynfe-ann tells me this is a matter of utmost importance. We’ll skip the formalities.” Even as she spoke, her brilles were clouded, a look you might call bored, or sleepy.

The blue-green wiver twitched at the use of her name. Glancing at the faer, the secretary unrolled the scroll. Holding the page steady with both forefeet, she unlidded the inkwell with her wing-digits and dipped her other wing’s alula into it.

“Yes, my faer,” Hinte was saying. She rose from her bow, and I copied her. She didn’t hesitate to start telling our story. As she spoke, Cynfe was scratching lines onto the papyrus. “Kinri and I were sifting in the fields of the Berwem, when we tasted a suspicious scent: sweat and blood. We followed it out of the lake proper, to a hollow in the surrounding cliffs. There we came upon an injured, dying human.”

While the faer slowly flicked her tongue, Cynfe narrowed her brows, frills bristling as she stared at the page. She only lifted her head a fraction when she spoke, and asked, “Dying of what?”

“A rockwraith bite,” I said.

“I killed it,” Hinte continued, “and Kinri decided it must have fallen from an overhang above. There was no blood trail. I instructed her to watch the body, and I flew up to overhang. There I–I found two sleeping humans, and off to the side was another keeping guard. It was spooked by my arrival, and shouted, and woke up the other two.”

Cynfe dipped her wing-digit into the inkwell again, without taking her eyes from her page. I glanced back at Hinte. One forefoot was above another, scratching. Even when it stopped, it stayed there.

“I reacted as quickly as I could. I leapt at the guard, knocking it to the ground. I tore out its throat. By this point one of the others had reached me, and stabbed my wing. I clawed at it, knocking it away from me, so that I could focus on the last one. But it had stepped up behind me, and slashed its blade at the tendon of my hindleg. It backed away, and I turned and lunged at it and bit its shoulder. I knocked it down and returned the other one I knocked away.

“Taking that human alive would help your investigation, so I choked it until it stopped moving.” The faer shifted, toes curling. Cynfe looked up from her page again, eyeing the lumps under our cloaks.

“One of the humans is alive, then? Does it need restraint or medical attention?”

“…No,” Hinte said, “as we were returning to town, that human awoke, escaping with another human who had feigned its death. We tracked them down, and I killed them.”

Cynfe asked, “Where did your… companion get her injuries, if she did nothing?”

I shifted, my wings hugging my body and my tail around my hindleg. “We,” I started, “were uh, ambushed by rockwraiths as we were coming back⁠ ⁠—⁠ in the Berwem, it was very hard to see.”

“Rockwraiths, plural? How many were there?”

“Four.”

“You killed them?”

“No…”

“Kinri chased them off.”

I looked at her, head tilted. Her lips twitched. My tail squeezed my leg, and my frills preened. She prodded me with a wing, and I turned back to the faer and her secretary.

“Did anything else happen?”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” Hinte said, “while I was gone Kinri spotted a shadow moving in the distant smoke. She chose not to pursue it,” she paused for a moment, “deciding that investigating was not worth leaving the one human unguarded.” After a beat, she added “That is all, my faer.”

“I see,” the faer said. “Have your injuries been treated?”

“Yes.”

“And where are these humans now?”

“I have them with me, faer.” Hinte once again pulled at her cloak. After she prodded me, I followed her example.

I blurted, “Do you believe us?”

The faer, maybe for the first time, really looked at me. Their frown became less of a smile as her face shifted in recognition, and she said, “It is beyond question that something is within all this. The details remain to be determined.”

The red wiver looked away from me like a weight lifting, and addressing no one in particular⁠ ⁠—⁠ implicitly, everyone⁠ ⁠—⁠ she said, “I suppose this merits some discussion.” She then turned to Cynfe, and to her she asked, “Is there anything pressing? No? Then who can we spare?”

Cynfe had met the faer’s gaze, eyes above above her page. “Treasurer Bariaeth is still here,”⁠ ⁠—⁠ the faer’s frills contracted tight⁠ ⁠—⁠ “as are Rhyfel and two of the prefects, who may or may not be still awake. The ridges’ advisers have left, as have two of the Dyfnderi advisers.” She brought an alula to her chin. “Only the military adviser, Adwyn, is still here.”

The faer waved her tongue slowly. “No great loss, then. Bring me the only two who’ll have something worth adding.”

“Rhyfel and Adwyn?”

“Of course.”

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‘Adwyn,’ I half-murmured to myself. Did it have to be Adwyn? The Dyfnderi’s eyescales never clouded when he looked at me, and I had been indebted to him since the moment I walked through the stone gates of Gwymr/Frina. That debt hung, a dark cloud on the horizon.

We waited in that expectant silence awhile. I dared to watch the faer, silently. Just like the last time, her brilles never cleared, always remaining cloudy, like she was forever in danger of falling asleep on her feet.

The blue-green secretary came back down the ramp with a cliff-dweller and a canyon-dweller trailing behind her, flicking their tongues, bemused.

I looked on the left first, because I knew who was on the right. Beside Cynfe came a scarlet dragon swaggering forth with a savage grin, fangs bared. They took in the room with startlingly black eyes.

Golden-accented black armor clad the dragon — schizon by smell — enwoven with dark bamboo plates; armor which covered the front of the legs without hiding their muscular thickness. A sword strapped to the side, in a sheath, and above it was a holster not unlike it; I caught the high guard placing a thick scroll there, just as the dragon stepped in the room.

I could name all the emblems inscribed goldenly over the armor’s plates, glyphs for “battle,” “loyalty,” “Cyfrin,” among others. Seeming to eclipse the others, there was a glyph centered just below their neck, reading “Dwylla.” Centered though it was, it was fading.

There was that smell, that odor, of stabbing schizon, but it came subdued, faint and washed-out in a way that Hinte’s schizon stuff never smelled. As if this armor wanted to hide or disguise its material, and Hinte’s stuff wanted to brandish it. My tongue waved further, and I caught a strange, cloying scent on the high guard that I didn’t know how to place.

Studying the face like that, hard and commanding as it was, a mind occulted within those black eyes, and even the drake’s stance betraying loose power, I finally placed this Rhyfel as the head of the Frinan guard. He looked old; and there had been no likeness between the black and gold armor he wore and the red and yellow sashes of the guards I passed on the streets of town.

His father, Rhyfel the elder, had been the hero — then traitor — of Gwymr/Frina. I wonder how it felt to live in that shadow, to be expected both to live up to and escape from the legacy of highness Rhyfel? I supposed I was in a similar situation, dragging around my family name, Specter⁠ ⁠—⁠ but the difference was I did not care, something I doubted held for Rhyfel here. It must weigh.

He caught me looking, and grinned. It was a grin that reached his still-startlingly black eyes, and you wouldn’t have guessed that. “Heh. Kinri, is it? A crizzle to finally meet you.”

“Um. How do you know of me?”

“Adwyn talks of you every once or twice. And it’d be a trick to not at least know of the spooky new sky-dweller in town. With nobility no less⁠ ⁠—⁠ and don’t look like that, you don’t have a reputation. Not yet, I’d say.”

I shook my head, and broke eye with the black-eyed dragon, glancing to his right, at the orange drake I recognized at first glance, who was already looking at me, and smirking.

Adwyn wore a dark-blue dress curling under his midsection and contrasting the orange of his scales. The dress swirled with various glyphs, and the loose sleeves didn’t reach his lower legs. Most of the glyphs were foreign or unintelligible. I recognized only one, the stylized emblem of Dyfnder/Geunant: that same rainbow-rayed purple eye beneath a moon eclipsing a sun.

I met his gaze, and tried to hold it. Short lines were flowing out around his metallic-red eyes like rays, painted in some purple pigment dark enough to pass as black. His right foreleg was at his chin, rubbing, and his frills were flared.

Adwyn looked serious — yet he smiled back at me. “A fragrance to meet again, Kinri-ychy.” He looked to the corpses on our back, and his look changed as appropriate. He said, “Some shame it was to be within these circumstances.”

Rhyfel, though, never broke his grin.

With those dragons here, the faer waved her wings toward a corridor left of the throne. Cynfe and the drakes followed first, then the two of us. Together, we all walked down the corridor toward the meeting room.

Along the roads into Gwymr/Frina, we had reached the faer and the town hall. This had been our ultimate destination, the climax of our journey. We made it.

* * *