Food became short by the second day in the mountains. By the third, nonexistent.

Willow should have known better. With hundreds of magical creatures in the party, it wouldn’t be possible to forage enough food for all of them. The packs of supplies the elves had organized were just to get them through the first few days, but even so it got them through less than even the elves had anticipated.

“The mountains are devoid of life,” an elf said, Willow’s liason to the forest race which administered the march. Willow walked with Leopold through the temporary camp as the sun began to rise. Soon the tents would be up and they would be shielded from spying eyes. Let the other city-states know where they were once they got to their destination, and not a second before. Once they got there Willow could set up defenses that would work with the naturally rough terrain. But out here on the trail she could implement nothing.

“We’ve scoured the landscape,” Willow said. “Like a plague of locusts.”

“No, my queen,” the elf said, and he bowed when Willow turned her head to him. They had an annoying habit of doing that whenever Willow fixed them with a stare, but she supposed they might be sensing her second sight as well. It was getting to a point where she used it unconsciously to track the essence flow in everything around her.

“Not scoured. Driven off.”

“By our approach?”

“Perhaps,” the elf said. They stopped, the elf sinking into the soft soil on its four spiny legs.

“What are your thoughts on the matter,” Willow said, but the elf would not speak.

“Speak freely.”

“I believe the other humans are poisoning the earth,” the elf said.

“How… how can such a thing be possible?”

“They’ve done it before. Centuries ago when wars raged between the bastions they would send poisonous rays down upon their adversaries. The walls’ magic would stop such rays, but the land around each settlement became scoured of life. We have found several creatures already suffering what appear to be the same burns.”

“Do they know where we are,” Willow asked, but the elf shook his head.

“You can be sure, my queen, that they do not. They are searching, knowing that we’re out here somewhere but not where. They rake their foul beam across the land, just enough to poison the life against us. If we churn up too much vegetation our route will be visible from the sky, but we have no choice—we have been denied quarry.”

Willow thought for a moment. She watched as a giant salamander laid its spade-shaped head down under a pavilion and the flames on its back guttered down to embers. She remembered a time when she’d seen a salamander on a caravan ride right before the deathworm attack.

“Begin foraging the plants,” Willow said. “We are only three days from our destination at the latest, we can afford some wiggle room. But spread out your efforts to the surrounding area. By the time the mages notice a change from above we’ll hopefully be long gone.”

“My queen,” the elf said, and bowed away.

Sleep threatened to close Willow’s eyes, but she forced herself to stay awake just a little bit longer. The tents and structures were all raised and her party were all going to sleep. But she couldn’t help thinking that she should be a last bastion against the threat of the day.

“Come on,” Leopold said, and took her hand. She squeezed back and looked into his eyes. She couldn’t see any of the weariness about them that she felt in herself. Perhaps it was the mantle of queen that had done it.

She let him lead her back to their pavilion beside Sun Geon’s and Sun Lin’s. With Annabelle, theirs were the only human tents in the camp. Out of everyone in the city no others had chosen to follow her. And only Annabelle out of guilt.

They laid down on the stacked quilts which had been raided from houses in Asche and Leopold tucked her in. The sun shone weakly through the canopy, but she knew the elves’ magic was strong. If, when, the mages looked from above, they would only see forest where the camp lay.

Willow was already falling asleep when Leopold spoke, almost casually, from beside her.

“I’d like for us to get married.”

Her hand found his under the quilt and she pressed her face into his shoulder.

“Done,” she said. “My king.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

🜛

The fourth and fifth days were slower than she anticipated. Hunger made the creatures weak, and many required aid from their years of servitude. The elves brought provisions from the forest, but never enough. If she wanted the pilgrimage to remain hidden, it could never be enough.

In the night sky she saw scrying spells flash like shooting stars, but never directly overhead. The Arcana were looking for the column of magical creatures, but not in the right place. It appeared they were performing a random search, perhaps aided by the fact that they hadn’t seen them on the trails north or east. There was still enough difficult terrain between them that it would be incredibly bad luck for the scryers to guess exactly where they might be, and even worse luck for the spells to spy anything in the dark.

Willow tried to go without food, in commiseration with what had become her people, but Leopold and the elves would not allow it. Sun Geon seemed to think it was a noble gesture, but he didn’t look down on her when she finally accepted the meal Leopold had been pestering her with.

Married. She was queen, apparently, and just like that he was king. She’d seen marriages before in Bridgewater with their ceremonies and their fancy dress, but nothing like that was possible here. Not on the road. She decided that once they arrived at their destination and got settled, she and Leopold would have a real marriage. With as much ceremony as the others would lavish on them. With how the magical creatures treated her, it might be an unimaginable day.

As she walked through the overarching trees, Willow focused on the spell taking form in her hands. A blast of electrical power, just like the warbeast at Durum, but condensed down into a beam rather than a bolt from the heavens. She squeezed it down and wrapped it with a protective shell, then handed it to Leopold.

“Thanks,” he said, focused on it for a moment to see its nature, and stashed it in the pack on his side which held a dozen other capsules of different types. After her few practice bouts with Sun Geon, Willow had realized that a mage’s greatest weakness lay in the time it takes to cast a spell from scratch. With her overactive preservation barriers she could front-load that effort.

Willow only carried one very complex spell capsule on her. She prayed she’d never have to use it.

🜛

On the sixth day the column began to flag. The larger magical creatures carried the smaller ones who could no longer walk, and that killed the pace as they wove through the trees, up and over mountains and across rivers in the dark. But midway through the night a quick scrying showed Willow that they had made it.

“We’re stopping here,” she told the elf, pointing to the surrounding dark mountains against the spray of stars above. “This is it. Unload and make permanent camp. This is where we make our stand, if there is one to make, and where we build a home if there isn’t.”

The caravan gave one last push as they spread out in the intertwined hollers. Three large mountains rose around them leaving a three-pronged holler at the bottom that was wide enough to set up their pavilions. She knew this place would begin to transform almost immediately from untouched wilderness to a new city where those enslaved magical creatures who knew nothing of life in nature could live out their days in peace. And she would keep watch over them, the victims of her bretherin.

Willow walked the perimeter of the camp casting barriers and concealment screens. From above, this location should continue to look as though it were an empty, uninhabited valley. As the weeks wore on, their presence would be implied from the felling of trees and working of the land, but in this sensitive time they needed utmost secrecy. She’d already taken too great of a risk by allowing foraging during their journey.

Magic flickered on the hills; it worried her. She’d become used to the scrying spells which could see nothing of their passage in the dark and which were so easily befuddled by the elves’ woven tapestries, but these new flickers were a concern. They weren’t up in the sky at all, but at ground level, barely glanced through the trees as flashes. Whatever they were, there were half a dozen speckling the surrounding mountains.

She’d deal with it when it became a problem.

🜛

It became a problem the very next day. She’d slept through half the night at Leopold’s insistence after raising the barriers around the camp. She woke in the bright day to the silence of slumber. Nearly everyone else was still asleep, including Leopold. The elves patrolled, but she wasn’t sure if they actually slept at all. They were proving to be indispensable allies.

Something tickled her hand and she involuntarily smiled, opening her eyes. There was a small mouse in the tent with her and Leopold, and it was nosing around her quilt. It was white, which was peculiar. She’d never seen a white mouse before.

It looked at her and she felt something stir the air. Unbidden, her second sight spun out and she saw the creature for what it was: encrusted with spells, shimmering with their activation. Like Sun Lin, these cascaded across its skin as they sent what it saw far away.

Or not so very far at all.

“Shit,” she yelled and threw off the cover. The mouse gave a squeak and attempted to run, but she grabbed it with a psychokinetic arm and smashed it to pulp in the air. A gush of essence boiled off at its death.

“Wha—,” Leopold said and looked around bleary-eyed.

“They know we’re here,” Willow said, jerking on her robe, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “They sent in a fucking rat.”

“Wait, who,” Leopold blurted as he threw his own covers off and began to dress. She watched as he shouldered the satchel of spell capsules.

“Don’t know, but it wasn’t a warbeast like Sun Lin,” Willow said and stepped through the curtained wall of the tent. Everything was still quiet, but not for long.

She scanned the hasty camp and found what she was looking for: an elf had spotted her and was running as fast as it could at the look on her face.

“My queen,” it said as it bowed.

“We’ve been spotted. They seeded the hills with enchanted rodents. Prepare for an attack.”

“From which direction,” the elf asked.

“Everywhere. From everywhere.”

Just then, the air beside Willow shuddered and warped as a portal attempted to split space.