Lonely flakes of snow drifted down from the morning sky as Liv stepped out into the courtyard of Castle Whitehill. Emma was already there waiting for her, the young hunter clad in her doeskin breeches and hunting boots, along with a fur-lined winter cloak of thick wool.
“Didn’t expect you back so soon,” she said, and stepped forward to grab Liv in a quick hug. “I thought I’d be lucky if you were back in time for the wedding.”
“How is Dustin, anyway?” Liv asked, returning Emma’s squeeze with one of her own.
“Long hours with Master Gregory,” the brunette told her, with a shrug. “The old man’s nearly done, so the forge will be Dustin’s soon. I wish he had more time for me, but I can’t complain about the muscles it gives him.” Emma gave an exaggerated shiver, and laughed.
“I’ll be going to see him today or tomorrow,” Liv said. “To order a few springs. Oh, here, meet Steria.”
Roger, one of the stable boys, led the mare over to them. She was already saddled, and utterly unbothered by the first snow of the year. “You brought a horse back from the capital? What else happened there?” Emma asked, reaching out to pet Steria’s nose. The shaggy northern horse snuffled at her hair as if he was trying to eat it.
“A few things,” Liv said. “Too much to tell before we leave, honestly. She’s a gift from my father. He’ll be coming with us.”
“Your father?” Emma exclaimed, turning back to Liv. “You’ve finally met him? What’s he like? Everyone’s saying the Baron rode in with two Eld, and I knew one must be you - he’s the other?”
“Yes. Here, you can meet him yourself,” Liv said, nodding her head toward the castle gate, where the guards were admitting a single rider. Her father’s hood was down, and the wind caught his white braids, tossing them back. He walked the gelding over to them, and swung down out of the saddle. “Good morning, Father,” she said. It was the first time she’d used such a formal word, but it didn’t quite feel right to be more casual around Emma, and all the other people moving about the courtyard. “This is my friend Emma Forester; she and her father are the best hunters around. Emma, this is my father, Valtteri Ka Auris kæn Syvä.”
“I am pleased to meet one of my daughter’s friends,” Valtteri said, extending his hand. Emma seemed a bit off balance to find herself caught and clasped by the arm, but recovered quickly enough.
“Some of us have been waiting to meet you a long time,” Emma said, looking him up and down. “I hope you’re treating her right. She’s taken enough shit from people who think they’re better than they are.”
“I suppose Livara will have to be the judge of that,” Valtteri said. “We have a lot of time to make up for. You don’t have a horse, Emma?”
The huntress shook her head. “I usually hunt on foot.”
“You can ride behind me,” Liv offered. “Look, they’re bringing Master Grenfell’s horse out. Now all we need is him.”
In the end, Ember preceded his master by nearly half a bell, and the girls spent the time feeding all three horses treats from the kitchen - mostly chunks of carrot, but Liv got an apple from the cellars and sliced it up into wedges, as well.
“I’m getting too old for this,” Grenfell complained, settling into his saddle with a groan. “The reason I chose to be a Court Mage was so that I could spend my days in front of a warm fire, inside the walls of a stout castle, not riding around in the snow.”
“We’ll send you back with Emma as soon as we’ve made our kill,” Liv’s father said, attempting to comfort her teacher. He helped Liv and Emma up onto Steria, then swung up onto his own northern horse with practiced ease.
“We won’t be heading right back?” Liv asked. She turned her mare toward the castle gate, and led the way out of the courtyard and into the cobbled streets of The Hill. Once again, they drew eyes: while the people of Whitehill had gotten used to Liv, she suspected that her father would be a novelty for some time yet.
“No,” Valtteri said. “As we’ll be out by the rift anyway, I have things to teach you.”
“I hope I won’t be having to draw wild mana out of her when you get back,” Grenfell cautioned them. “Shall I have Mistress Trafford sharpen her knives?”
“None of that will be necessary, unless Liv is a slow learner,” her father replied.
Once they’d left the streets of Whitehill behind, the ride north along the river road to the mines was beautiful. The sky couldn’t seem to quite work its way up to a storm: instead, the morning alternated between bright sunshine and gentle squalls of snow that blew away as soon as they came. The scattered clouds moved along on their way quick enough, leaving a vast span of deep, clear blue in their wake.
When the party reached the lower slopes of Bald Peak, they tied the horses up at a convenient grove of aspen trees and proceeded on foot. Emma moved out ahead of them, silent as a ghost in the forest, to pick up a trail.
“She’s good,” Valtteri admitted, with an approving nod. “They hunt mana-beasts, she and her father?”
Liv nodded. “Yes. Her father’s the reason I was finally able to start eating right.”
“It takes not only skill, but bravery, to hunt the edges of a shoal without having any magic yourself,” her father said.
It took several hours, but eventually Emma led them up a rocky slope, which Liv and her father crawled up on their hands and knees. Master Grenfell chose to remain at the bottom and wait for them there.
“There,” Emma whispered, pointing.
Liv couldn’t help but gasp. The buck had a beautiful rack of antlers - ten points, by her count, with a thick winter coat of tawny fur. It must have spent a good deal of time inside the shoal, because it was simply enormous: taller at the shoulder than the largest man she’d ever seen, with stony gray growths along its spine and shoulders that pulsed with a faint blue light. As she watched, the animal suddenly stiffened, as if it sensed danger.
“Quickly,” her father murmured. “Take it now, girls, before it runs.”
Emma fitted an arrow to her bowstring, then popped to her feet and loosed. Liv surged upright and stabbed her staff toward the buck, shouting, “Celent’he Aiveh Trei Aimāk Scelim’o’Mae!”
The arrow hit first, moving far more quickly than Liv could incant her spell. It took the buck through the throat in a spray of arterial blood, but rather than fall, the monstrous buck turned toward them and charged.
Mana poured out of Liv, surging through her outstretched staff, as the Vædic words left her lips. Three needle-thin shards of ice formed in front of her, then shot forward into the buck. One rebounded off the stony growths of its shoulder, but the second took it in the eye, causing the beast to stumble in its tracks, shaking its head. The third sliver of ice took it in the heart, and even then Liv wasn’t certain it would be enough to drop the buck.
The words to summon a wall of ice between the mana-beast and where they stood were at the tip of her tongue, but then the buck lurched to one side and fell over onto the cold forest floor. Liv shared a look with Emma, and exhaled.
“Good work,” her father praised them both. He watched as they gutted the buck, and Liv had the distinct feeling that he was carefully evaluating their level of skill. It made her glad that she’d spent so many days out hunting with Master Forester, because all the practice gave her confidence in what she was doing even while being watched.
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Between Liv and Emma, they had the guts out quickly, working their hunting knives with quick, sure cuts. The metal-smell of raw meat filled Liv’s nose and the back of her throat. By the time they were done, their hands were filthy and their fingers cold, but Liv’s father gave an approving nod. “Help me drag it down the slope, and we can hitch it to the horses after we drain it. There’s no way you and Master Grenfell could carry that thing all the way back, Emma.”
It took all four of them hauling on the rope to get the thing hanging from a stout tree branch so that they could let the blood drip out, as it was. “How much do you think it weighs?” Liv asked, gasping, when they were done.
“A hundred stone or more,” Master Grenfell huffed, sinking back down to sit on the ground. “Next time, perhaps a doe would do just as well?”
“Mama will be cooking venison for days,” Liv said. “There’s too much. for only a few of us to eat.”
“What are you doing?” Emma asked Liv’s father, as he rested a hand on the buck’s carcass.
“Cooling it down,” Valtteri said. “The day would do it soon enough anyway, but with this much meat I prefer to take no chances of spoilage.”
“Do you do a lot of hunting at home?” Liv asked, suddenly very curious.
“Not quite this sort,” her father explained. “We don’t have trees, remember. But there’s an animal that’s very similar, save that it eats lichen and moss. You can train them to pull a sleigh, and butcher them for meat. We keep them in herds, for the most part, rather than hunt them. But the process of dressing the kill is the same. And of course, I’ve hunted further south.”
Once Valtteri and Emma agreed the carcass was ready, they tied it up by its rack to both Ember and Steria; neither horse would have been strong enough to drag all the way back to Whitehill on their own, nevermind carry it.
“Don’t stay too long,” Master Grenfell warned them, once he’d gotten himself back up in the saddle. Emma looked far less comfortable on Steria’s back without Liv there, but the mare seemed content, and Liv wasn’t worried.
“We’ll come back as soon as we can,” Liv’s father said. “But perhaps you could ask Margaret to keep a pot of stew over the fire. I’m not certain we’ll make it in time for supper in the great hall.”
Grenfell nodded, and then he and Emma carefully turned the two horses and maneuvered the buck onto the road. Liv watched them for a moment, to make certain there wouldn’t be any problems, then turned to her father. “What are we doing, exactly?” she asked.
“Teaching you how to exist within the shoals,” Valtteri said. “Chiefly, how to safely manage the amount of mana that comes with it.” He turned toward the peak, and began walking, leading his gelding by the reins. Liv followed. “First, tell me what a shoal is.”
Liv thought back to what Master Grenfell had taught her. “Rifts leak mana out into the world,” she explained. “We call the area right at the middle, the rift itself and just around it, the depths, and that’s where the concentration of mana is strongest. Most dangerous, as well. As the mana spills out, the concentration lessens, and we call that area the shoals.”
“Good,” her father said. “Humans try to limit their exposure to shoals, going in only when they have to. Why?”
“Because all that magic causes mana-sickness,” Liv said.
“No. Uncontrolled mana deforms the body, it is true,” Valtteri said. “But the mana itself is not the cause. It is simply a tool. If you cut yourself with that skinning knife, is the knife the cause, or are you?”
“Probably my own idiot self,” Liv admitted.
“Mana is the same way. Wait a moment, we’re close,” her father said. He walked his gelding over to a tree and looped the reins around a low-hanging branch. “It should be your mother teaching you this,” admitted. “So I am afraid I am not going to do things quite right. If my sister was alive, she could have been the one to take your mother’s place and teach you.”
“There’s no one back at - Kelthelis?” Liv was proud of herself for remembering the name.
“A few cousins,” Valtteri said. “Your grandmother. And yes, we could bring you up there. But I’d rather you learn here, for a few reasons. First, this rift is far less dangerous than the Tomb of Celris. This is what we would call a lesser rift, and the tomb a greater.”
“More mana, and more monsters?” Liv guessed.
“And the shoals extend further out,” her father confirmed. “Your Master Grenfell has given you a good foundation, but I wouldn’t throw you into a place like that without enough training. The lower mana-density here will make it easier for you to learn, as well. My final reason is somewhat selfish,” Valtteri said. “We have missed so many things, that I simply can’t bear to give one more up.”
Liv looked down at her boots, and smiled. “Alright. What do we do?”
“When we cross into the shoal, you should be able to feel it,” her father explained.
“I’ve been inside once before,” Liv told him. “Not for long, but yes. It’s like the air is heavier.”
Valtteri nodded. “You should sit down once we’ve entered. That way you can focus on just the mana. It wants to spread out, until there is an equal amount of mana in the environment, in the air, in the soil and the creatures. A place with more mana will flow into something with less. When you enter, you are less dense. Like a bowl waiting to be filled. If you don’t control the mana as it comes in, it will rip through your body, damaging you in the process. You need to guide it.”
“How?” Liv asked. “Is it like using it to heal?”
“Similar,” her father said. “Master Grenfell has taught you breathing exercises?” She nodded. “Good. Breathe in until you can’t anymore - and I mean it. The deepest breath you can manage, and then hold it for a ten count. You are giving the mana an easier way into your body, so that it won’t have to force its way through your skin. So you want to suck in as much mana-rich air as you can. Your body will move that air through you on its own, so you only have to guide that process. Don’t let too much pool in one place, keep it even.”
“What happens if I can’t?” Liv asked him.
“I’ll be watching you,” Valtteri said. “If it looks like you’re losing control, I will drag you out of the rift. You’ll likely end up with mana-sickness.”
Liv shuddered at the thought of Mistress Trafford carving more skin away from her arms. “Wait,” she said, a sudden thought occurring to her. “Is that why the sickness affects skin so often? The mana’s trying to get in?”
“Or out,” her father said. “And it has to pass through the skin to do either. Are you ready?”
Liv nodded, and followed her father uphill toward the mountain. Like she had with Master Grenfell, she could tell the moment she crossed into the shoal: it was like stepping to the steam from the hot springs beneath the castle. She immediately dropped to the ground and crossed her legs, setting her staff down next to her.
The magic pressed in at her from every side, and it was only when Liv sucked in a deep breath that she felt the pressure begin to ease, ever so slightly. It was torture to hold for a count of ten, but when she finally exhaled, she could feel the mana spilling out through her body from her chest.
This part, at least, was familiar - though if the mana within Liv’s own body had been a trickle, the mana from the rift was the aspen river surging in flood. Liv didn’t even know when she closed her eyes, because all she could do was focus on spreading the magic out to every corner of her body, from the soles of her feet to her fingertips.
“Our people come to the rifts to prove themselves adults,” her father said, and Liv had just enough awareness of the world around her to listen. “When you leave this shoal, it will be as a free woman of House Syvä. It is time to set aside the ways of a child. A child can be reckless; a woman cannot.” The words, Liv realized, carried the cadence and weight of ritual, like the way the priests talked at the temple of the trinity.
“A woman must consider always not only the good of herself, but the good of her family. She must heed the words of the elders, and learn from their wisdom. She must protect her daiverim and kwenim, for however long they walk by her side. She must teach and protect the children the gods see fit to grant her. She must use the words of the dead gods for the good of all, and not the good of one. Will you do these things, my daughter?"
Liv turned the words over in her mind. The good of her family: she could do that. It was a small family, now, just she and her mother and father, but the thought of anyone hurting them was like a dagger in her heart. But there were others who might not be blood, but she counted as family: Julianne, and Matthew. One day, there would be more. The idea of children seemed very distant and far off, but of course she wanted hers to have everything she’d never known.
If I have children one day, Liv told herself, they will know both their mother and father, from the time they are born. No one will call them bastards. They’ll never wonder if their mother or father tossed them aside like kitchen scraps.
“Yes,” she said, mana misting forth from her mouth with the words. Liv pulled in another breath.
“In the first age of the world,” her father intoned, “the Vædic Lords cast their eyes and their ears anywhere they wished. Across mountains and oceans, nothing was concealed from their sight and their notice, save by their own carelessness or complacence. The winds of mana whispered in their ears of things yet to come, things that might be. We are but children in their shadows, but some small measure of their power remains. You will remain here until the trinity sees fit to grant you a glimpse of what is to come.”
Liv breathed out, and then in again, over and over. Was something supposed to happen? The mana of the shoal was no longer violently forcing its way into her; the pressure was gone. Her body was now as rich in mana as the world around her. She was just about to open her eyes and ask her father what to do next when the wind traced cold fingers across her face, teasing her hair.
The magic was on the wind, and in Liv, and then she was the wind. Leaving her body behind, she soared above the slopes of Bald Peak, and saw Whitehill far to the south.
The wind bore her up into the endless blue mountain sky, and then far to the west.