With Celica and Blight gone from the training ground, Derpy finally lowered his arm.
The Frostburn faded. Across from him, Lewd let the tip of her sword descend until it almost touched the ash. They looked toward the boundary where the calamities had gathered around Lenora, then at each other.
“I think that counts as a break,” Lewd said.
Mia agreed before Derpy could answer. She dropped onto the shore with her tongue out, tail beating against the ash. Sphinx circled twice before sitting beside her, holding herself with enough dignity to suggest that rest had been her intention all along.
Derpy sat near them.
Lewd joined him, setting the shield beside her knee. Its skull faced upward. She turned it away before working the stiffness out of her fingers.
For a while, neither spoke.
Then she moved closer and rested her head against his shoulder.
He stiffened briefly. Lewd felt it and almost withdrew, but he shifted to give her more room before she could.
“We should run away,” she said.
Derpy looked down at her. “Where?”
“Somewhere without a War Council. Or a queen. Or anyone who thinks we need another lesson.”
“That narrows it down.”
“You, me, Mia, and Sphinx. We could find somewhere.”
He gave a tired chuckle, then watched the motionless horizon.
“You really want that?”
Lewd rubbed the place where the shield had pressed against her arm.
“I do not like any of this war business. I am learning because I want to help you. I want to be able to stay beside you without someone deciding I should be sent away for my own safety.”
“Do you think leaving would be that simple?”
“I think I would like to find out.”
Derpy glanced toward the distant figures. The air around Pyro seemed darker where the heat distorted it.
“Our books are preparing us for something. We still do not know all of what it is. I am not sure they would let us walk away, even if we found somewhere to go.”
Lewd lifted her head.
She was about half his size. Sitting close helped, but she still had to look up to meet his eyes, and the difference irritated her for reasons that had nothing to do with fighting. She wanted reaching him to be easier in at least one way.
“Then we would argue with them,” she said. “You do that already.”
“With mixed results.”
“I would still follow you.” She held his gaze. “Anywhere. I mean that.”
His expression softened, then changed before she could decide what the softness meant.
“I appreciate it,” he said. “But there is something I need to tell you before you promise me that.”
Lewd sat straighter.
Derpy looked toward Mia and Sphinx, both resting close enough to touch.
“When I saw Riven’s memories, I wanted to burn the Elven Empire.”
Lewd’s hand stopped moving against her arm.
“You mean you were angry.”
“I mean I began thinking about how to do it.”
She stared at him.
He kept speaking, as though he had decided the only way to finish was not to give himself time to stop.
“I talked to my sinister side. At first, it was about what had been done to her. Then it became what I could do in return. I did not notice every step as I took it.”
“You noticed enough to give Riven those orders.”
“Yes.”
The admission made her chest tighten.
Derpy drew a breath.
“I let the dolls take me.”
Lewd pulled away from him.
“You let them?”
“Celica knew. Sinister knew. We were already talking about what would happen.”
“Before you were captured?”
He nodded.
The agreement in containment had been frightening enough when Lewd believed it had begun there. Now he was telling her there had been decisions before it, steps he had chosen while the rest of them were trying to understand how to help him.
“Why would you do that?”
“I wanted to test myself. To see how the empire worked when someone I cared about was in danger. After what I saw in Riven’s memories, I could not stop thinking about who had allowed it and what they would do if I was in front of them.”
Lewd stood so quickly that the shield strap caught against her wrist.
Derpy looked up.
Her hand struck his face.
The sound brought Mia upright. Sphinx’s ears turned toward them, her body going still.
Lewd stared at her own hand for half a breath, then curled it into a fist at her side.
“We were worried about you.”
Derpy remained seated.
“I was worried about you,” she said, louder. “I kept wondering what they were doing, whether we would reach you, what would be left when we did. You let us believe all of that because you wanted to see what happened?”
His expression changed. The hurt in it made her angrier because she could already feel herself wanting to take care of it.
“Look at it from our side for one moment,” she said. “You have friends. You have family. We do not stop existing when you decide the best way to protect us is to leave us outside the plan.”
“You think I do not know that?”
His voice cracked. He rose slowly, eyes bright, one hand opening and closing at his side.
“Everything I have been trying to do is for the people I care about.”
“Then listen to one of them.”
“I am listening.”
“You are waiting for me to understand why you were right.”
Derpy looked away.
Lewd reached for the shield. Her sword formed in her other hand before she had decided what she intended to do with it.
“You do not get to decide all of this for us,” she said.
Frostburn returned along Derpy’s arm.
Small black roses pushed through the ash around his feet.
Lewd watched the petals open. Earlier, a single flower had required concentration. Now they formed with the anger he was failing to contain.
The cartridge at her sword’s hilt clicked beneath her hand.
Mist seeped through the weapon’s vents. It carried the same sweet scent as the training haze, but this time there was a sharpness beneath it that caught at the back of her throat.
The skull on her shield began to weep.
Dark liquid tracked from its eyes and fell into the ash. Each drop hissed, leaving a small bubbling stain.
Derpy saw it.
Neither lowered a weapon.
“I did not ask for this,” he said.
“Which part?”
“Any of it. Being here. Being something they want to control. Having people frightened every time I make a decision.”
“We are frightened because you matter to us.”
“I did not ask you to worry about me.”
He moved before the words had finished hurting her.
There was no warning about his approach, no pause to check her feet. His fist struck the shield hard enough to drive it against her shoulder.
A black ice-rose spread across its face.
Lewd staggered. The shield pulled downward with a weight that had not been there before, its frozen surface resisting her effort to bring it back into position.
She shoved forward with a cry of anger.
The rose cracked. Poison ran through the fractures, eating at the ice until its petals began to soften and fall.
Lewd charged before the last piece dropped.
Her sword struck Derpy’s Frostburn guard. Ice scraped along the green blade, and mist surged into the space between their faces.
He turned away from it. She pressed closer.
“I care about you, you big dummy!”
Her next swing came too wide. Derpy stepped inside its reach, then checked his movement as her finger found the trigger.
The gunblade discharged a burst of poison mist.
He twisted clear of the densest part of the cloud. It passed his shoulder and spread over the ash behind him, leaving the ground slick where it settled.
Mia and Sphinx withdrew from the spreading haze. This was no longer the exercise they had been taught to join.
Lewd lifted her shield and advanced.
The poison tears fell faster. She could feel the power responding to the anger and fear together, giving both a shape before she had managed to name either.
Derpy caught sight of her eyes.
Hearts had formed in them, bright and distinct. The change belonged to the calamity moving through her, but the words that followed were hers.
“I have been worried about you since I joined this party.”
The sword came forward. He deflected it with his guarded arm, taking a step back as another burst of mist left the vents.
“I want you to be mine,” she said.
Derpy’s guard faltered for an instant.
Lewd saw that she had reached him and hated how much she needed it.
“I want you all to myself, and I know that is not how this works. There are others who want you too. I know I cannot decide what you feel.”
Her blade trembled.
“So I stay beside you. I try to be useful. I tell myself that being there is enough, even if I have to love you from farther away than I want.”
Derpy looked at the poison gathering around her boots.
“Lewd—”
“And then you tell me you chose to disappear into all of this.”
She pulled the trigger again.
A chain of black ice formed along his arm, ran across his back, and closed around his throat. He shifted inside it, his body dropping into a larger wolf form as fur replaced the shape she had been fighting.
The change was quick enough to put him beneath the edge of her next strike.
Then he used magic step.
He appeared beyond the mist, moved again, and left more distance between them than the training ground had required all day.
Lewd turned to follow.
Compressed shots of ice struck the ash around her. She braced behind the shield, expecting the next to hit it, but the pattern closed around her feet instead.
Frost rose in ribs and spines, building a containment before she could move beyond it.
She struck the nearest wall with her shield.
Cracks spread through the ice. Poison hissed where it touched the frozen surface.
Derpy stood outside her reach, breathing hard.
“I am trying,” he said.
Lewd looked through the fractures at him.
He had meant the ice to stop the exchange. From inside it, she could see only another decision he had made about where she was allowed to stand.
The darker edge of the mindscape expanded around Lenora.
Celica’s humanlike outline gave way to a dragon’s body, electric-blue and red scales catching the pale light threaded through the sky. Blight changed beside her, smaller, her green scales carrying a sheen that reminded Lenora of the poison Lewd had been learning to control.
Pyro’s transformation filled the remaining space.
His shoulders rose above the others. Wings unfolded like gates, and heat rolled over Lenora strongly enough that she shifted her stance without stepping back.
Size did not settle who held authority. Celica remained at the center, meeting him without yielding it.
Lenora looked past them toward a flash of ice on the distant shore.
The training had become harder to follow from here. Poison moved through the air, and Derpy was no longer in the form she had watched a few minutes earlier.
“I want answers,” she said. “And I would prefer to get them before something else happens that everyone claims was necessary.”
Celica lowered her head toward her.
“I returned to bring the calamity books together.”
“That is not the whole truth,” Pyro said immediately. “Do not offer her the safest part and call it an answer.”
Celica’s gaze snapped toward him.
“How did you even know where to look?”
“You are not as difficult to read as you believe, sister.” His wings shifted. “You know why we put you in another world. You and that dragon-wolf egg.”
Lenora’s attention sharpened at the new detail.
Pyro continued before she could ask about it.
“Keeping the abomination away was part of keeping the Dark Series asleep. If Mother learns you are back, we may lose what little time remains before her rival wakes.”
“You spoke of the Sister-Series earlier,” Lenora said. “Now you are saying Dark Series.”
“And he is using both to avoid answering for what he helped do,” Blight snapped.
Lenora looked at her. The connection between the names remained unanswered, another gap concealed by an argument that had begun long before she was born.
Blight stepped closer to Pyro.
“You do not get to decide where she is allowed to exist.”
“We were deciding what the world could survive.”
“We were ripped from our bodies and put into books because we defied Mother. Do not speak as though every cage afterward became reasonable because you were one of the people closing it.”
Flame moved along Pyro’s scales.
“We agreed to protect this world, whatever the cost.”
“And how long would that have worked?” Blight demanded. “Leave her there long enough, and they would still have awakened. Then this world would have been—”
“Fucked,” Pyro finished. “I know what failure means. That is why I am here.”
Celica moved between the exchange of heat and venom.
“I came back to help.”
Pyro looked toward the distant clash.
“By bringing someone from another world into it? He did not belong to our dispute.”
Lenora kept her attention on Celica.
“Did you ask what he wanted?” Pyro demanded.
“I did.”
“And did you tell him enough to understand the answer?”
Celica’s jaw tightened.
“He has progressed beyond what any bearer was supposed to manage.”
“That tells me what he can do for you.”
“He wielded Blight and me.”
Pyro went still.
Celica let the fact stand for a moment before continuing.
“At the same time. What if he can carry more than two, brother?”
“That should not be possible.”
“Yet it happened.”
Blight watched him absorb it, her expression hard.
Celica glanced toward Lewd’s distant position.
“That is why we are training him and the mouse girl. We need to know what they can do, and they need enough control to survive using it.”
Then she looked back at Lenora.
“She is here because you brought her. You have chosen someone too. Ask yourself why you assume I returned without a reason while trusting your own.”
An impact cracked across the shore.
Lenora turned. The ice around Lewd flared with fractures, and poison spread through one of them before the formation held again.
Sinister appeared at the edge of the gathering.
“Your partners seem to have found a more direct way to disagree,” he said. “You may want to worry about them before finishing your own quarrel.”
Lenora faced the dragons again.
“Enough.”
Pyro drew breath, but she raised a hand.
“No. You have all given me reasons to fear the others. I asked what you intend to do to Derpy.”
Celica looked down at her.
“Please,” Lenora said, the word strained but deliberate. “If you have something terrible waiting for him, say it plainly.”
Celica’s shoulders lowered.
“I made—”
She stopped.
Lenora did not miss it.
“He is my partner,” Celica said. “I care about him.”
“Then tell me what that means when caring and your plans disagree.”
“When you all fought, I kept him alive. Not cleanly. Not without mistakes. I kept enough of him intact for him to learn and continue.”
Lenora felt her mouth tighten.
Celica held her gaze.
“I believe he can change what has fractured these kingdoms. Bring people together who have only learned how to survive apart. That is why I chose him.”
The answer was more than Lenora had been given before.
It was still not everything. Celica’s unfinished words remained between them, and beyond her, Derpy and Lewd were demonstrating how easily protection could become another reason to hurt someone.
Lenora turned to Pyro.
“Do you want a partner, or someone you can use because you believe your purpose matters more than their choices?”
His heat steadied.
“You know what I am trying to prevent.”
“I know what you say you are trying to prevent. I also know what you did with Cinder.”
Pyro watched her without denying it.
Lenora drew a breath.
“I need someone I can depend on if Derpy goes too far. Someone who can help me reach him, not decide that controlling me is the most efficient way to manage him.”
“And what are you offering?”
“A partnership.” She stepped closer. “Will you be my partner, Pyro, instead of making me your user?”
For a moment, the heat around him stopped pressing outward.
“That sounds fair.”
“There are terms.”
“Say them.”
Lenora held up one hand.
“We depend on each other. We both benefit. You do not take over my body.”
Pyro lowered his head until she could meet his gaze without craning her neck.
“Agreed.”
“And when you see Cinder, you tell her the truth. What you did, why you left, and what you used her to reach. You do not leave her to invent an answer that hurts less for you.”
Blight looked away toward the training ground. Celica remained silent.
Pyro considered Lenora’s outstretched hand.
“Those terms are acceptable.”
“Then those are the terms. No additions after I wake.”
His mouth curved.
“I hope you can handle the power you are asking for. It may burn you from the inside.”
“Then you had better help me learn to carry it. That is part of being a partner.”
An ugly, delighted chuckle rolled through him.
Then the dragon folded inward. Wings contracted into covers. Scales became pages. The heat concentrated around a single binding until Pyro was a book suspended before her hand.
Lenora reached toward him.
The book vanished, and the shore went with it.
She woke beneath a real ceiling with a breath that hurt her chest.
Someone moved beside her.
Lieam sat close to the bed, clutching the fabric of a maid dress that looked as though it had been put on in a hurry. Her fingers had twisted a section of the skirt into a tight fold.
“You are a calamity bearer too.”
Lenora pushed herself upright.
The room was Vaeloria’s. She recognized its furniture, the arrangement of the chairs, the expensive stillness that remained even when everyone inside it was frightened.
Lieam looked close to tears.
“I thought something had happened to you. You would not wake, and Mother is already worried about everyone else.”
Lenora looked across the room.
Mk1 sat in a position that gave her a view of both the door and Derpy’s body. Sinister was awake beside her, watching Lenora with the expression of someone who expected her to return with more questions than she had carried in.
“Have they found Riven?” Lenora asked.
Lieam shook her head.
“There is still no sign of her. Or Mk2, Mk3, or Mk4. Mother keeps asking, but the reports have nothing new.”
Her hands tightened in the skirt.
“She is worried about Derpy too.”
Lenora held out an arm and drew her closer.
Lieam stiffened at first, then leaned into the embrace with an exhausted breath. Lenora held her until the tension in her shoulders began to ease.
Her own eyes remained open.
She watched Mk1, Sinister, and the empty places the missing dolls had left. Pyro’s warning had brought an egg, an ancient mother, and a sleeping rival into a crisis already crowded with missing people and decisions made behind their backs.
“Breathe for a moment,” she told Lieam. “You do not have to solve the room before you can do that.”
Lieam nodded against her shoulder.
“What do we do now?”
Lenora felt the unfamiliar warmth of the pact settle within her.
“We keep watching what is happening,” she said. “And we start preparing for what comes after it.”
Across the room, Sinister’s gaze briefly lowered toward her chest.
He knew something had changed.
Far beyond the waking room, Celica and Blight returned to the training ground. The ice around Lewd was cracked. Poison marked the ash. Derpy stood apart from her in wolf form, and neither looked ready to continue the lesson they had begun.
The calamities approached their partners.
This time, there was no need to create a difficult exercise. One was already waiting for them.