They went under the cover of darkness, though to Saebrya’s eyes, their approach stood out painfully in the dark of night, with molten silver leaving a brilliant trail of ether behind them as Ryan struggled to carry her without jostling her hard enough to make her scream.

They reached the back door of the inn in silence punctured only by Ryan’s grunts when he stumbled. At the base of the wooden steps at the entryway, Ryan gently set Saebrya down to look for the spare key his mother kept stashed on the upper lip of the outer doorframe. Ryan finished unlocking the door and, replacing the key, hefted her back into his arms. Saebrya bit down on a groan as her leg brushed the steps.

Both froze at the sound. It had cut through the silence like a sipper through ether.

When no one came out to challenge them, Ryan slowly began his ascent up the stairs. They could hear patrons snoring in the rooms, and Saebrya could see spatters of gold dominating the usual speckled rainbow of droplets glowing against the floorboards. Ryan paused every second breath to listen, the dry wooden planks creaking with each shifting of his weight upon the steps.

Once they were inside, Saebrya bit her lip, praying that Ryan knew his way around his mother’s establishment well enough to be able to navigate it in the dark without bumping into the furniture and alerting the inhabitants. He kept moving beneath her, and eventually he stopped and whispered into her ear, “The Auldin’s room.”

Sure enough, golden light was leaking through the crack beneath the door, attracting a group of sippers. Saebrya found the doorknob in the darkness and turned it.

Inside, a Vethyle’s golden liquid had been smeared upon the floor with bare feet and sloshed across the walls and the quilted covers.

Further, the crib was not overflowing with ether. A horrible fear wrenched Saebrya’s heart as she wondered if the baby was already dead.

“There,” Ryan whispered, pointing to the far corner of the room.

Saebrya realized that the golden glow pooled on the floor across the room was a combined trickle from both the mother and baby, whom Auldin Cyriaca cradled on the bed beside her.

The baby was still alive, but barely.

From the darkness, the sipper’s faceted black eyes watched her. Its segmented body pulsed with a golden light that it drew out of the child with visible sucking motions of its fishlike jaws. Even from this distance, the baby’s struggling breaths clawed at the darkness.

“Well?” Ryan whispered into her ear.

“It’s still there,” Saebrya whispered back. “On the bed.”

Ryan began carrying her with sure footsteps into the room, leaving a glowing trail of silver splashes beneath him to swirl and mix with the Vethyle Auldin’s gold.

Ryan stopped at the side of the Auldin’s bed. Moonlight illuminated her and the child, sleeping side-by-side. Saebrya readied the long sipper spine that she had stolen from a beetle and, taking a deep breath, she took a grip on the creature’s spiked tail. The sipper tightened its hold, making the baby gasp.

Only a foot away, Auldin Cyriaca Vethyle stirred in the moonlight. The royal woman checked her infant and made soothing sounds to it as she tucked the blanket tighter around its tiny body. Then the Auldin lowered her head back to her pillow.

As she did, her ice-blue eyes met Saebrya’s and Time seemed to stop.

Saebrya yanked on the sipper’s tail as hard as she could and its fangs slid free, its body pulled through the child more than unwrapping around it.

As the Auldin’s eyes narrowed and she started to sit up, Saebrya cried out as the sipper twisted around and sank its teeth into the flesh of her bicep. She frantically stabbed the beetle spine between the faceted black eyes, into the creature’s pulsing golden head. The snakelike sipper’s fangs slid from her arm and it fell to the floor, wriggling.

At the same moment, Auldin Cyriaca lashed out, lifting both Saebrya and Ryan into the air and throwing them backward with fists of golden ether. Saebrya screamed her lungs raw as she crumpled to the floor in a golden spray, feeling her leg snap underneath her a second time that day.

As she gasped and panted, Auldin Cyriaca put her body between them and her baby. Her elegant face was a thunderhead as she examined first Saebrya, then Ryan.

“The innkeeper’s boy,” she snarled. “I knew there was something not quite right about you.” A golden hand caught him by the neck and Ryan choked, turning purple.

In a panic, Saebrya slapped her palm through the pulsing golden vein extending from the Auldin’s stomach. Ryan slumped to the floor, sucking in whooping lungfuls of breath and coughing. He glanced at Saebrya, then at the startled Auldin, then ran.

Auldin Cyriaca grabbed Saebrya by the throat with her hand. “You little wretch,” she sneered. “How are you doing that?”

Looking up into the woman’s cold blue eyes, Saebrya said nothing.

The Auldin’s delicate brows furrowed and she slammed Saebrya’s head into the floor, making her see stars. “Who sent you?” she demanded in Saebrya’s ear from where she held it pinned against the wood. “Who gave you the nullification charm? The Ganlins? Those drunken fools still think we killed Brael’s son, don’t they?!”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“I don’t know!” Saebrya cried. “Please, it hurts!”

The Auldin’s fingers fisted in Saebrya’s hair. “Why do you monsters want to hurt my daughter?” the woman asked, tearing her off the ground and slamming her into the floor again and again. “She’s just a baby.” She put a foot on Saebrya’s injured leg and pressed.

Saebrya was barely conscious when a male voice cut through the darkness.

“Cyra.” A male voice cut through the Auldin’s rantings.

The Vethyle Auldin froze and looked up, but refused to release Saebrya’s head. “Uncle. This is the one that made Sophi sick.”

“That girl didn’t hurt your child.”

“Do not tell me what I saw with my own eyes,” the Auldin snapped. “I watched her do it.”

“She came here to help the babe,” the Auld said. “Not hurt it.”

As if to punctuate that fact, an infant’s full-lunged scream rose from the bed. The grip on Saebrya softened as the Auldin turned to look.

“That’s not possible,” Auldin Cyriaca said. “I tried everything.”

“Apparently not everything.”

Awash with dizziness, Saebrya somehow opened her eyes. In the doorway, Ryan stood with a tall, graying Vethyle man—the same Auld that had tracked her with his dog. The Auld stripped off his riding gloves and stepped into the room. Like Ryan, the newcomer gushed with silver liquid. He was still wrapped in the strange ethereal blanket, one that seemed to balloon with his essence. His two faces—one blond, one black-haired, were filled with concern.

The Auldin’s fist tightened on Saebrya’s hair. “What could this wild cur do for her that I could not?” Feeling Auldin Cyriaca’s arm stiffening above her, Saebrya braced herself for another impact with the floor.

The Auld stepped between them and a wash of silver ether flooded over Saebrya in pulsing rivulets, overwhelming the gold, protecting her from the Auldin’s rage.

“Go tend your child, Cyra.” The man held Auldin Cyriaca’s gaze until the Auldin made a disgusted noise and returned to the bed.

“Come here, child.” The Auld squatted beside Saebrya and gently scooped her into his arms.

Still dizzy, Saebrya stared up at the odd double-image of the man’s face, feeling her hold on the present slipping with every breath.

Auld Rhydderch lifted her from the floor and carried her from the room. As he did so, a throbbing silver vein emerged from his belly and began to wrap around her broken bones. Immediately, the pain began to fade. More silver arteries emerged, fuzzing her mind, making her drowsy.

Then Saebrya gasped with sudden realization.

The sloshing liquid, the sippers, the coalescing ether...

Ryan was an Auld.

Her last thought before oblivion was, No. They’ll take him away...

“Girl.”

The voice belonged to an adult. At first, Saebrya thought it was her father, then she remembered that her father was dead. She opened her eyes.

The Vethyle man was sitting in a chair beside her bed, silver liquid pooling inside the ethereal blanket that wound tightly around him, trapping most of his essence in its soggy embrace. Saebrya realized again that her physical eyes and her ethereal eyes were seeing two different people. The physical was tall, blond, and blue-eyed, with richly-tanned skin.

The ethereal looked almost exactly like Ryan.

The old man was watching her intently. “You see it, don’t you?” the Vethyle man asked, leaning forward. His eyes were sharp as he watched her. “Something that shouldn’t be there.”

Swallowing hard under his double stare, Saebrya nodded.

His voice cracked. “Describe it to me.”

Saebrya licked her lips, trying to decide what to say. Tentatively, she said, “You have green eyes.”

He let out a shuddering breath and seemed to slump into his chair, staring at the ceiling. “What else?” he whispered.

“You’re freckled and you have curly black hair. Like—” She bit her tongue.

“Like your friend.”

She nodded.

“Do you know which royal family he resembles?”

Cringing, she nodded.

“Say it,” the man commanded, his gaze fixed on her with such intensity it scared her.

“A Ganlin,” Saebrya said, her voice no more than a whisper. It was blasphemy, and could get her killed.

“Louder,” the Vethyle commanded. “What do I look like?”

“A Ganlin,” Saebrya said.

The big man’s shoulders began to shiver. “It’s been so long.” He dropped his head into his ring-bedecked hands and he sat there breathing deeply. When he finally looked up, his eyes were wet. “Thank you.”

Saebrya, who wasn’t sure what she had done, just nodded.

Abruptly, the Auld stood to go. As he reached for the door, Saebrya managed, “Are you going to take Ryan back with you to the Spyre?”

The Vethyle man stopped and gave her a long look. Saebrya cringed.

“Do you want us to?”

She choked on a sob, thinking about being alone with the sippers again. “No.”

The silence that stretched between them seemed to last forever. Then, softly, he said, “If I asked you to give me the shape and form of the Ganlin you see, could you do it?”

Glancing at the flimsy strands of silver ether pulsing in a net across his face, Saebrya wondered if it was a trick. Why would an Auld need her to destroy a spell he had cast upon himself? Reluctantly, though, she nodded.

“Right now?” he pressed, his eyes sharp.

She nodded again.

The Vethyle took a shuddering breath. Softly, he said, “If your friend doesn’t meet us in the courtyard at dawn two mornings hence, we will leave for the Spyre without him.”

Saebrya lowered her eyes in gratitude.

“But girl.”

She glanced up.

“If you don’t tell him, know that you are taking something very special from him.”

She looked away and the Auld reached for the door.

“Do you want me to tell someone you’re a Ganlin?” Saebrya whispered.

A little gasp came from the Auld and his fingers went white on the knob. When he looked at her, his eyes were again brimming with unshed tears. Silence stretched for an eternity between them. “Someday,” he said. Then he yanked the door open and walked through it.

The morning that the Vethyles left for the Spyre, Ryan was asleep in his room. Saebrya propped herself up in a window of the inn to watch the courtyard, just to make sure.

As the Auld had promised, Ryan had not been told.

The courtyard became spattered with golden droplets as the Vethyles milled around their horses, chatting and smoking as they waited for their servants to load their luggage in the big carriages that were marked with the triangular seal of the Spyre. It took almost an hour to collect all their things.

Saebrya watched it all, torn between relief and guilt. A part of her wanted to hobble to Ryan’s room upstairs and tell Ryan so he could go with them. Instead, she gripped the windowsill and watched as the last Vethyle tapped the ashes from his pipe, tucked it into his pocket, and climbed atop his horse. Afterward, the entire royal procession began to lumber from the courtyard.

As the last of them disappeared down the Butcher’s Road, the Vethyle Auld with two faces glanced up from his horse as he waited on the cobbles below. Their eyes met, and he waited.

You promised, Saebrya thought, desperately.

The Auld held her gaze for a moment more, then nudged his horse into a trot to catch up with the rest of the procession.

I’ll make it up to him, Saebrya thought. I’ll be the best friend Ryan ever had.

Still, she knew the truth. Nothing she could ever do would make up for this. Nothing.

When he found out, Ryan would leave her alone with the sippers.