Afternoon, Third of One, Harvest, 236 CR

“Your proposed delving cadence is unsustainable, the depths you’re asking permission to target aren’t ones you’re going to survive, and I’m not inclined to approve your request.”

Esse’s words were audible throughout the entire refectory where I was eating lunch, sharing my table with Kelly, Tayir, and Ketka. It caused a ripple of silence and then a follow-up ripple of people picking up their conversations deliberately, pretending like they weren’t eavesdropping—though some tables, like mine, didn’t bother to pretend.

Given how powerful Esse was, that had to be deliberate, and all four of us were absolutely shameless in dropping our previous conversation. Alchemical paints could wait.

“We have yet to find our limits,” a hard-voiced man ground out from Esse’s table. “Is it not so, that in four days there will come into our presence such power as to render all expectations dust? How strive shall we then?”

“What Kasménos means,” a calmer voice chimed in, “is that this is our opportunity to fulfill our rite of passage. Ma’am, I don’t know if you’re familiar with—”

“Tathís,” Esse interjected with an obviously forced calm, “I am a Delve Pillar of Shem, and I was appointed to a village with a dungeon, a Forest border, and a Sudha border. I know the krypteia your city’s lodge assigns delvers, which you call night-seekers—and I know that it’s compatible with what Kasménos is tasked with.”

“Ma’am, I meant no—”

“I also, by the way, know who judged the acclaim-call for your establishment as Glory-Seekers, all five of you. I know who was silent, who spoke in favor, and who spoke against. Would you like me to tell you?”

“Honored Pillar, the idiots meant no offense,” a woman interjected stiffly. “I, Choris, swear to this. They are fucking morons, and that is all—but you know that they are not wrong. We beg that you reconsider.”

“I said I’m not inclined,” Esse pointed out with less heat. “Who speaks for the team?”

“The right and obligation is mine,” the first man—Kasménos, Tathis had said his name—said slowly. “But this mantle may be shared, and it is my will that Adei partake of these responsibilities.”

“Fine, whatever.” She crunched down on something like, but also unlike, a carrot. “You probably want to talk in Aenic. Go for it.”

“Kyria,” Adei said in tones of deep respect. I knew her, or at least had been introduced to her a couple of times, though I wouldn’t have been able to remember her name—some sort of mage or wizard type, if I remembered right, with some sort of erasing-stuff magic.

“This is Remnant League political camelshit,” Ketka murmured in a voice that barely carried to the other three of us. “Worst-kept is this secret: all know that Kasménos’s team bears orders to test themselves until they shatter.” Her voice went back to something more normal as the voices around the room picked up more genuinely and the conversation between Adei and Esse transitioned into a language that I didn’t know. “They must find their limit before they may return in what their idiot cities call honor. Not all shall survive it.”

“Political is right.” Kelly’s hand gripped the table, knuckles flexing. “It was a deliberate move against Kas’s dad. But they’re refined and into Third Tier, so it might backfire on the magistrates who made it happen, especially since the other four got caught up in the shit just by association.”

“Remnant League?”

“No relation with the Forest’s Remnants,” Kelly answered me absently, picking up on the thrust of my question instantly. “Just the same word. South of Yaro?”

“Southeast of The Quiet,” I said, “and east of the southern parts of Sudh. I remember now, at least vaguely.”

“Tagata does no trade with them.” Tayir shrugged at my raised eyebrow. “They are a vicious den of vipers. What good does it do for a city to execute those who extort a ship or burn it to deny its goods to their rivals, when the crew’s lives are lost and can’t be returned?”

“I thought they’re, uh, a bunch of cities? Are they all like that?”

He shrugged. “Vicious in different ways, vipers in different ways.”

“Their delvers are worthy, if prone to pushing themselves overmuch,” Ketka interjected, “but their leaders profane the notion of leadership. They are short of sight and mean of spirit, wicked creatures who can never be trusted to keep their word personally, nor to meaningfully bind their cities to any agreement. Often, if a provision must be upheld, it is only by Yaro’s willingness to wage war against them that it may be.”

“They ceded their northern border to The Quiet so that your dervishes couldn’t burn the fields of Karye,” Kelly pointed out with a sardonic lilt to her voice. “There was a little bit more going on historically than treaties being upheld or not.”

“Okay, while I am interested in geopolitics and history, can we go back to the delving thing? I don’t understand what that conversation was about.” I grinned at Ketka, grinning wider as she—unconsciously, I was pretty sure—returned my smile. “I bet you know what’s going on, though.”

“And shall I tell you?”

“Yes?” I ventured. “Because you’re emotionally compromised and inclined to tell me all sorts of things you theoretically shouldn’t?”

“Perish the thought,” she said dryly. “Tell the secrets of others? I would never. Your bow-work has come along well enough, I would say; today, we practice in the Forest, seeking game and truer sight-lines.”

I blinked at the sudden change of subject and seeming non sequitur. Before I could say anything, Tayir’s chuckles and Kelly’s snickering prompted my brain to make the obvious connection. “I’ll enjoy the privacy.” I leered at her—not even a little bit performatively, since seeing her undressed didn’t make me appreciate her a whit less. “Who knows what we’ll talk about, out where nobody can see us being inappropriate.”

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“You two,” Kelly muttered good-naturedly, “are a couple of the weirdest flirts I’ve ever known.”

“Yeah, well.” I grabbed Ketka’s hand and hugged Kelly around her shoulders at the same time. “Get used to it.”

“Already done,” she answered, and Tayir nodded in agreement.

Laughing, we all left the dining hall and went our own ways—Tayir and Kelly for their own purposes to go do paperwork, and the two of us to enjoy our afternoon in our own way.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

“I had thought,” Ketka laughed, “that it was merely the perfection of the bow I would guide you towards.”

“Rude,” I retorted. “And untrue. You also thought you’d play my body like a wailing fiddle.”

“This is so,” she allowed. “And yet.”

“I get it, I get it.” I kicked at the ground irritably, not worried about the noise by dint of the simple fact that I was making far too much regardless. “I can’t exactly go on a hunt and try for a perfect bow shot or whatever when I make too much noise to sneak up on anything!”

“Nonsense. A blind, baiting, and hunting that which will not flee are all possibilities.”

“Hunting mundane game that fights back, back home, was terrifying enough.” I looked around at the Forest surrounding us, awed by the cavernous feeling brought on by the towering near-redwoods. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to try to stop the magical equivalent with an arrow, while it’s bearing down on me. Would I even be fast enough to get a shot off?”

Ketka’s mouth opened and closed. “No,” she said eventually, shoulders slumping a little. “Even the weakest of that which we might find here in the shallows would strike too quickly.”

“You’ve been teaching me how to fire a bow, and it’s been quite nice,” I pointed out with deliberate understatement. “You could teach me how to move. It would help with the dancing, if we’re going to be dancing again, and, um. We were going to talk about what we were going to be to each other and with each other, but then you got called away.”

“I should indeed like to dance with you again,” Ketka said dryly. “To dance and more, when time permits, until our paths part—but part they will, in time. And now I hear that I should, too, instruct you in these manners of motion in our span together?”

“Until our paths part sounds good.” I mustered my focus, pressing myself against her side as though I was drawing focus from her proximity. “I like the ways in which you’ve got… mastery, I guess? And if I can understand even a little bit how I should move, I bet I’ll understand better how amazing you are.” Blushing, I grinned up at her. “And I’d like that.”

“Godsent and godforged, and you say such things,” Ketka muttered, practically preening, and the sight of that struck a chord in my heart that had me feeling all sorts of emotions.

I didn’t say anything, looking around to take in the sights. Everyone had been clear that the Forest was both more and less dangerous than usual. Anything which could think was apparently operating under some sort of extremely unofficial ceasefire, but the animals—magical and mundane both—were behaving… erratically, to hear people tell of it. Fleeing where they might have attacked, attacking where they might have fled, turning on their pack, or leaving their young; everything was in turmoil, and nowhere was safe.

Nowhere except for within the guard of a six and a half feet of whirling, battle axe-wielding dervish, more accurately.

“It’s gorgeous in here,” I murmured absently. “The trees are so huge, and the way the light lenses around the leaves is really something. Patterns and shades of green that dance and flicker and change with every breath of wind. The way that they use focused light to fight pests, the way that the pests adapt, the seedpods from the grasses that soak in that heat and then bloom, it’s all so… I almost want to say majestic.”

“It is a rare joy to be with one who enjoys, who delights in all she comes across as you do, Sophie—may you persist in it.”

Now I’m the one blushing, I grumbled good-naturedly to myself as my face and neck heated up. “You were going to tell me about whatever’s going on with the delving team,” I said by way of deflection. “If it won’t distract you too much from keeping an eye and ear out?”

“If I were so distracted by speaking, I would long ago have been killed while…” Ketka frowned. “Speaking lightly to one’s teammates, how do you say this in Shemmai?”

“Bantering?”

“Yes!” She grinned at me, squeezing my shoulder gently with a hand that could crush stone. “I would long ago have been killed while bantering. So, the League delvers. How much know you of them?”

“They won’t use my potions,” I muttered darkly. “They say that the point is to hone themselves, and that relying on anything they didn’t make themselves, especially anything consumable, is a betrayal of that. I offered to teach them how to make the grenades, but apparently that was insulting for some reason.”

Ketka shrugged, still smiling as her head snapped to the side as though hearing something. “Delvers of the Remnant League are sometimes sent to die,” she said simply, staring into the distance of the forest. “Of the five, they must seek their limit, and until they find it they may not return. But once they do, they return in glory.”

I shook my head. “That’s absurd, though. You’d inevitably wind up having all five—oh.” I sighed, rubbing my forehead with my fingertips. “That’s the point. Did they all piss someone off or have their families piss someone off, or are some of them just expected to be collateral damage in killing off, uh, Kas-I-don’t-remember?”

“Kasménos. There are no accidents in that team’s composition,” Ketka said with a hint of terrifying flatness. “Tathís was thought to have betrayed his shieldmates, but nothing could be proven and he would not permit them to make final his shame by executing him. Matis is all that remains of an old family that many would see gone forever, and Adei is a daughter of the slums whose heart contains only the empty void and a hunger to inflict the sufferings she suffered upon the mighty.”

“That’s four,” I pointed out. “What about their fifth?”

“Choris.” Ketka shrugged and shook her head. “I am told her presence is no accident, and she has the look of the Citizen—their nobility, though they do not call it so—in her bearing and motion, and in the forms of her bow-draw and crafts. A half-child, unacknowledged? A woman who departed her family, or was cast out? I have heard no full truths.”

“So they want to delve hard and fast, because… something’s going to happen, when the two godlings come by?”

She snorted. “Many things will happen. None know precisely what. And perhaps they feel that this is a Shemmai matter, and that those of the League are best on their way before the duty of a Delver becomes political.”

“So they’re going as deep as it takes for one of them to die,” I said with a shudder. “And they needed to ask Esse for permission, because they want to delve as fast as possible so that they can have that happen faster, because they’ll be exhausted.”

“Just so.” Ketka shrugged. “It is their way,” she said at the expression on my face. “Did they wish to do so, they could leave; nothing chains them to the death they seek.”

“Still. That’s fucked up.”

Ketka nodded. “So it is. And yet, it is their way.”

“Fine,” I muttered, then looked up at Ketka, letting myself sink back into the enjoyment of the moment. “So! Back to, uh, hunting and whatever. Show me what I’m supposed to do with my body?”

“Sophie,” she half growled, half laughed, “asked in such a manner, I could never say no.”