Oliga hasn’t looked at her like this since Young Tom first took an interest. Like she’s worried Emilia will vanish if she takes her eyes off her. “The heartland ain’t for the likes of us. Noble courts’ve more vipers than the truewilds! What’s he expecting you can do?”

“Talk, Oli. Parley, dealing, noble backstabbing, it’s all talking. You know your tales; is the dragon-fear enough to seal a bargain?” Oliga’s face twists, and Emilia shakes her head. “It’ll make a man afraid, but only that. Fighting men, when something makes them afraid, they kill it. And even a crafter – you remember Jarek from Uncle’s caravan, the trouble he had with lenders?”

Money-lending won’t get you no more respect than trading does – less, from most, though high nobles hardly care if you’re one step or two up the mountains they sit atop. What it can do, if you’re clever and dangerous and connected enough, is make you a profit.

Jarek had been a Cobbler, once. A fine enough craftsman, though no master. But he’d needed more money than he could bring in: for food, for care, for a Midwife and an Apothecary and a funeral and Guild dues and years on years of tinctures and philtres and potions.

Now, his hands shake, fingers as gnarled as an overstood coppice. He reaches for his flask too early and too often. But he lives, and never sends a coin back to the town where he buried his family.

Fear only binds until they see a way out.

“Isn’t this a chance?” It’s natural, after so many years, to hush herself as Hana speaks. “A dragon’s near enough a noble, and he’s offered to make you his ward. You’ll need handmaidens.”

She loves and hates when Hana does this. Cuts to the quick, the heart, the roots, stalking a conversation like a Hunter after prey – and striking. It never takes her more than a few words to move the whole world around, open up a path and shoo them down it like it was there all along.

Idony can swallow her heart, smile and simper, giggle bright as the midday Sun scattering off the Meltwater even though her real laugh is the bray of a wrathful mother aurochs. Oliga knows every song and story that’s ever passed through the village, even the ones children tell amongst themselves; she never misses a note or forgets a word or gets her tellings in the wrong order. Never forgets a promise, neither, be it hers or yours.

Emilia isn’t slow, but sometimes her friends make her feel it.

“Oh!” An awful light shines in Idony’s eyes. “Oh, you’ll need – everything, gowns and fans and shawls, hairpieces, a favour –”

“No.” Oliga shoots her a look. Emilia flushes, but fords on. “I won’t never need no favour. You know that. And none of the other stuff either! I don’t – I’m not –” it never works, but she can’t stop herself trying to gesture the shape of what she can’t force out.

Hana’s always warmer than most anyone else, and the pads of her fingers are soft; as a ‘prentice Weaver, she has to be able to feel her threads, however thin. It’s always an anchor, when Emilia’s thoughts are scattering like startled birds, to have her fluttering hands clasped in Hana’s steady grip.

Oliga uses the pause it creates to shuffle right in next to her, leaning their weight together. She speaks near as quiet as Hana, this close to Emilia’s ear, but still as firm as ever. “We know you don’t like all that fancy stuff Ida loves. But nobles are all about fancy – it’s weapons and armour, in courts. If you and the Bronze Judge want to be taken serious, you’ll have to be dressed like the ward of – some high noble, at least; just ‘cause you don’t like something don’t mean it don’t have to be done. ”

She knows that, and Oliga knows she knows; Emilia takes a breath and lets the spark of ire flow out with it. They’re full afraid, and rightly; she’d be a poor friend to hold it against them. She’s afraid too.

Given her head, she’d never have gone to the Magistrate at all. Now she’s falling apart just trying to stop the Baron blundering in to die. She’s already lost the Bronze Judge’s scale, been dismissed from the manor without a question on his offer. With no ‘prenticeship and no sworn parent she’s not truly the Baron’s subject, but living on his land she’s not not. And she isn’t the Bronze Judge’s ward yet. Maybe not ever, if she fails.

Can she petition? A girl untitled, accusing a noble’s appointed Magistrate of treachery without a dragon scale to prove it – and surely anyone in the Militia who might back her will be stationed well away.

If the parley happens at all, the Magistrate will have poisoned the Baron’s mind against it. The Bronze Judge doesn’t understand mortals; he might hear the words, but he’ll not grasp the missive beneath. It would be full easy for them to talk past each other and fight. And she won’t be there, not to start with, and the Magistrate is awful but he isn’t stupid and he’ll have prepared for the Bronze Judge to ask after her.

The idea strikes her like lightning: if there’s no way for her to change the Baron’s mind when it’s set, then she just has to set it first. Nobody sees a serving girl; it’s been less than ten degrees of the Sun since Idony proved it. What does it matter what the Magistrate writes, if the letter the Baron reads tells the tale true?

Only, never mind punished, if she were caught sneaking in the Magistrate’s workroom she’d be – executed, maybe. If she were lucky.

It’s worth it. The Baron will have grown beyond what he was in her childhood; heartlander Knights strengthen themselves almost as a Delver does. Every child is brought up on fear-tales of what happens when you drink too deeply of any magic but the Sun’s – how it can hurt you, twist you, change you forever. A Squire is titled a Knight when he masters the alchemy it takes to craft that mutation.

Becoming a Delver only needs the willingness to lose whatever the Scar deems fit to take as you gorge beyond sanity on its tainted deluge.

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The village has closer to three hundred souls than two, these days, and even if he were a Delver the Baron wouldn’t be so strong as to afford caution against the Bronze Judge. Should the dragon lose his patience – it’s been steady as stone, but he’s still a dragon; there surely must be an end to it – they could all die in the crossfire, if they haven’t started fleeing soon enough, and maybe even then.

With four stories and a curtain wall, perched atop fifteen or twenty spans of mountain rock, Emilia doesn’t understand why the manor is a manor instead of a keep; by Uncle’s telling, many of the burhs he trades at have keeps much smaller and less fortified. The hall alone is thrice the length of her hearthroom and two stories high; in quieter times, Militiamen and servants barrack there at night. In the corner by the Magistrate’s dais, with a guard-nook to either side, is the door to the stairwell. There’s no way to get in by force without a dragon’s strength, and that’s what she’s trying to avoid.

She knows, from servant gossip, that the workroom is only on the next floor. That the room is scattered with tables, because the Magistrate sorts his paperwork by piles and hates his desk. If the right Militiamen are on guard, ones who don’t know her, if they convince the servants to signal the right time, if she’s careful and quick and lucky –

Idony sighs. “Or Hana and I can go in to see the Magistrate about his new arming doublet. Mother’s brought me along before, and she has other duties as we make ready to flee. We well know Hana’s skill at passing below notice. And –” She pauses, glancing from face to face, before continuing more softly. “And – he’ll overlook a great deal for a chance to put his eyes on me.”

There’s no good way for Emilia to have learned she was wrong that Idony had stopped shutting them out, but there are surely better ones than this. Idony isn’t confiding to ask if they think she’s right, or to ask for help; this is something she knows, has known for some time, and has kept secret.

Hana’s eyes widen for a moment before her brows pull fiercely together. Oliga reaches out again, only to pause when Idony flinches away, curling into herself. Idony doesn’t never flinch, won’t let herself. For her to have fumbled that shield, let it drop –

It takes arguing. Idony won’t hear them; when she’s hurt, she just pretends elsewise, and is well used to the world following along. And she’s right that it’s their best chance, because they can’t know that none of the servants would give them up for selfish profit. They can’t be sure their scant handful of hoarded favours are enough. It’s only that she’s their friend, and that she’ll be a woman grown next summer doesn’t make it well for her to be eyed like she’s one already by a man thrice her age.

Eventually, Idony tires of stalking around it. Her tone is glacial cold when she points out that Emilia, seeing the Bronze Judge and knowing the village to be under threat, had staked her life, and now was planning to stake it again. What grounds have they to object, if she’s resolved to stake her virtue?

By the time they settle on it, last light is approaching and they’re all much dispirited. Yet the day is not over: the calling-horn, bouncing off the valley walls, brings them to a halt before even half of Emilia’s books are set to rights.

For the Magistrate to be gathering the whole village now, he must have something that can’t wait. Something worth the risk of the horn echoing up the valley and rousing a dragon’s ire – the Bloody Tide has salted good earth for less.

Her heart can’t decide if it wants to break out of her ribcage or sink through her guts.

It won’t do no good to hide away and not know, but the three degrees of the Sun it takes walking down to the Scarwall feel like they drain her as much as the hundred and six to the Bronze Judge’s lair. They go together, almost huddled, and though its root is different their mood blends easily into the village’s fear.

Making ready to flee, having it hang over you not knowing if today will be the day you leave your whole life behind you, is an awful thing. If something’s changed enough to interrupt the preparations – to sound the long cry that gathers them all together, and not the short bursts that would set them all to flight – it could be that the threat’s passed by. It could be that it’s changed.

It could be that it’s grown worse.

Emilia isn’t afraid of the Bronze Judge the way the rest of the village is, but she’s afraid. She’s afraid the Magistrate has outpaced or outplayed them. He stands on a wall-tower, face set, hair ruffling in the breeze and the falling Sun lighting him golden-warm. Looking down at them from on high as they gather on the levy-ground, he seems more mural than man.

Crammed in together as they are, it’s easy enough to find her friends’ hands, already reaching back for hers. They knot themselves together like a rat king; the pain is less important than knowing they’re here together.

Soon enough, only stragglers are trickling in, and the Militiaman at each gate signals his count. The village is all here, short the wildsmen still returning, and the levy-ground quiets as the Magistrate raises his arms.

“Citizens! It has been hard, these last two days of uncertainty, and you have served well. I will not dally; I have called you together now that I might give you an answer and a solution. The threat we face is a dragon.”

Fewer than Emilia might have expected are struck by it, even counting for how fast a rumour can flow. With everyone giving their all to make ready, how many have time for gossiping? She can’t say surely the Magistrate had anything to do with spreading it. It just seems like the sort of thing he’d do before striking.

“The Bronze Judge offers parley, that lordship over this demesne may be resolved without bloodshed.” And that’s – true, but wrong – “In times of dire need, it is in my remit to expend certain alchemical resources. Less than five degrees of the sun past, I dispatched a whisper-wind to the Baron, that he might be made aware of this matter and respond with due haste.”

He holds up a dull, cracked jar; it’s not so clear as the Bronze Judge’s bookshelf-glass, but it can only be heartlander work. There’s no crafter in the whole village who could carve so finely into glass when it would surely shatter at the first tap of the chisel.

“I urge you to continue your preparations; we all know the tales of dragons’ ire. Who can say if it will find we mortals’ slow response acceptable? And we will be well-served to scatter and take distance before the parley proper, as a wardoff against disaster.”

When the Magistrate makes speeches like this, he picks people out of the crowd, meeting their eyes for a few heartbeats before moving on. Mostly he works across the crowd as it takes him – only, now, there’s no doubt he’s searched her out specifically.

“Upon receiving the Baron’s response, I will convey the necessary arrangements to the Bronze Judge through its chosen messenger. I understand Young Emilia went to considerable effort in making contact with it.”

Between his eyes on her and his giving her name, everyone nearby turns to look at her. She pulls her hand out of her friends’ grasp, makes sure she’s standing straight; after a moment’s struggle, she smooths a loose strand of hair out of her face. She wishes she’d done it all before they started looking, instead of glaring back at the coward who’s just put half of this off on her and half off on the Bronze Judge and anything left over on the Baron.

The Magistrate lets the silence drag, just long enough for whispers to start building. Just long enough to show clear that she has no answer. It’s no matter that he never asked a question; the crowd is looking at her.

“Take heart; the Sun has lit us a path. We may yet come through.”

And perhaps, for the village, that’s even true. For the Baron, for the Bronze Judge’s hopes, for Emilia herself – maybe even for her friends – she has her doubts.