The elk had carried Lissandra on its back for a long distance and through many obstacles. It was a friendly animal, good-hearted and intelligent. It had known the place where to cross the river.

Gundmalm and Ogarag had not noticed Lissandra leaving, two days ago. She was nearing her hill now. The brush was so thick that the endless sea of branches kept scratching her.

When the voices started the elk baulked and threw her off into a thorn bush, which made her scratches worse. They were strange voices, squeaky and near, even though she could not see who uttered them. First she thought it were the trees, but that couldn’t be.

“Trees don’t speak, silly.” She told herself and laughed.

“Come!” The voices pleaded with her. “The master, he needs your help!”

Her tummy hurt abominably from hunger and Lissandra wanted nothing more than to eat a healthy stew of her mushrooms, the big kind that grew in abundance on her hill. All would be good. Longleg would be there, alive. The man had said so. She had seen the little spider in Janna’s dream.

Her feet knew the way, somehow. Or else she was just going forward. When she put her hand against a gnarled, old pine to push past it her hand came back sticky with red sap, like blood. She frowned and wiped it off onto her furs.

Then, suddenly, it was there. Her hill, her place, as she had left it. Except it wasn’t as she had left it at all. Her hut was still smashed. That had been Gun and Oga’s work. They had definitely not painted everything red, though, as it was now.

The grass was red, dark, deep red, like blood. The mushrooms looked like bubbling blisters, bouncing up and down with an eerie life. Even the rocks and stones, they looked like the altar in the centre of the hill after an animal was sacrificed as the druids sometimes used to do.

All was red but him, the man in the black robes.

He appeared out of thin smoke in front of her, past the rocks from whence the trees did not encroach any further.

“You have come.”

He looked as she remembered him: young face, grey hair. The strange glass and wood thing filled with sand was in his hand. He turned it over, making the sand run again just as all of it was on one end of the impasse.

“Touch the stone and free me.”

Suddenly, Lissandra was having second thoughts.

“Mh-mh!” She shook her head as vigorously as she could. “You made it all red! You said it would be all well, not red! I don’t like this red, I do not! It looks like blood!”

It was a bad colour. She did not like these mushrooms either.

“Come on.” He rolled his eyes in a way she liked even less. “Just…touch it once!”

‘This is a bad man.’ She thought in her heart. ‘I should not have come here.’

His expression softened somewhat at her thoughts: “It will be fine. I will make it as it was before, as soon as you free me. Believe me, I can and I will.”

“I do not believe you!” Lissandra insisted. “Look at how red it is! How will it ever be normal again!”

“It just will.” He said, raising his hand.

As in the dream, Longleg came out of his sleeve.

‘Bite him!’ Lissandra thought. ‘Bite him and come to me!’

The feeling she felt was unlike her, she noted, just as her place was no longer itself. Even Longleg seemed strange there, on this man’s hand.

But Lissandra loved Longleg, longed for her with every fibre.

“Oh!” It came desperately from her lips without even wanting.

“If you don’t free me, I’ll break her.” He said, slowly closing the fingers of his hand. 

He didn’t have such scary, hairy, big hands as some men had, like the man in that dream of Janna’s. But Longleg was just a spider, tiny and with eight legs and eight cutesy-wootsy eyes.

She touched the stone.

-

“Looks more like an aircraft.” Laura said next to Janna, squinting at the sky. “With like three cockpits, though.”

Janna checked and found that Laura seemed to be looking at something slightly different. When she searched for the one she had been looking at, a sort of greyish one, she found another, greenish one instead.

“Holy shit, there’s like dozens of them.” She pointed, and pointed, and pointed.

Then Laura saw it two.

The things were flying. They had wings, every one, and generally the shape of an aeroplane. It was impossible to tell how far away they were, or else how big they were in turn.

As the dawn came upon Janna’s mind, the horrible words tumbled from Laura’s tongue: Dragons.

When they showed their discovery to Furio, the bearded wizard dropped the pipe from his mouth. Then he turned, never saying a word.

“What the hell is going on?” Laura asked with unmistakable fear in her voice.

The dragons were crossing the sky like airliners and nothing seemed to hint at an attack or anything like that.

Janna knew what was up: “Lissandra opened the gate. Whatever happened there, they must have come through with like a lot of other bad stuff. I think our problems just got worse.”

Laura looked as though she wanted to cry and started hugging her knees.

“It’s okay.” Janna tried to assure her, grimly as though her voice came out. “It’s just more fairy dust bullshit. Those dragons look like they’re going some place, so let’s not fuss over it. Just don’t kiss any frogs, alright?”

It would have been easier to bear had Steve been with them, and Christina. Even though she and Laura were huge, what Furio had said about minds was true and just now Janna yearned for more Earthly shoulders to share the burden.

The only thing they could do was to ignore it.

“Come on.” Janna said. “We have to go.”

When she stood up, her head started spinning and she would have fallen right onto the Horasians had Laura not been there to steady her. In her condition, it was best that Laura took charge of Furio as well, despite everything.

They just had to get going.

The knot in Janna’s belly was torturing her, but she could walk even if her legs felt like pudding.

“This man will accompany us!” Furio called out from below when Laura bent to get him.

He was referring to a man in civilian clothes, no armour, a Horasian with black hair bound to a ponytail, high cheekbones and only a moustache. A thin épée dangled from the belt slung through tight black britches, and he wore a fur mantle over his brocade shirt.

“My name is Leonidas Hatchet!” He bowed in a way that seemed somehow excessive. “I shall assist you with the governance of Albernia in the name of his Royal Magnificence, Horasio the Third!”

“I don’t really need any help with that.” Laura bristled in reply, but General Scalia riding next to Furio was not going to have it.

“You conquered Albernia for Horas!” He bellowed in his most booming voice. “Signor Hatchet will make sure that it is so!”

“At your service!” The tiny man with the black hair bowed again.

He was a queer figure, but Janna did not have it in her to look into him more.

When they set out it were Dari from Lauraville, Hatchet and Furio on Laura’s hand, as well as Janna leaning on Laura’s shoulder. The going was slow but steady, but at least the sky was dragon-free by then.

It was a little weird. They had spotted those strange things, but not gotten to see one up close, or interact with one at any level whatsoever.

“Do you feel a little better yet?” Laura asked hopefully after the first few meters.

Janna shook her head: “Less dizzy, but it still hurts.”

They had both blankets draped over Janna, Laura’s provisions from Albernia distributed into their jeans’ pockets instead. Janna had a bit of the cheese on the way, which tasted like home but sent her stomach to more rumbling.

The walk soon took them to a river that they both had to run and jump over in order to cross it.

“This is the Tommel.” Laura explained. “The border river between Nostria and Albernia.”

Then she looked around.

“We’re already in Winhall County, if I’m not mistaken. It won’t be so far.”

They followed the stream upwards, leading east.

While walking, it was all Janna could do to keep her mind focused on putting one foot before the other. It wouldn’t be long before she needed a break.

She could take it when they came upon a huge fortress, triangular with multiple, thick walls, three huge round towers surrounding an even larger round keep connected with more stone works. It was the definition of defensiveness, far as Janna could tell.

Situated on a peninsula in the river, it’s banks where sharp, jagged rocks. Singular, the connection with the shore was but a small, barren land bridge with a path on it, an outer ward with a second gatehouse and two smaller round towers offering a seemingly superfluous additional layer of protection.

“Hold on, I haven’t conquered this place yet.” Laura went ahead.

In its shadow, a few steps more eastward lay a huge village of daub and wattle homes. A watermill’s wheel plunged merrily in the stream, cow and chicken pens where there and Janna could see signs of wood work.

‘This is what you get.’ Steve had said in Janna’s dream.

It was stupid and irrational, but she couldn’t help it. She just hoped Laura wouldn’t be wantonly cruel to these people, since they were now her subjects.

It was rainless but foggy, so the population had spotted them much too late. They made for their houses first, no doubt grabbing what they could before running for the dubious protection of their fortress.

“Kneel before your queen, you worthless bugs!” Laura cheered, stomping onward on a path that would have doomed the village if she had not stopped at the castle.

She leaned over the thing, the keep reaching up to around her navel which was nothing short of impressive, underscoring how massive the whole thing seemed. Janna could not remember seeing something comparable, except for maybe Waskir in Thorwal, had it not been a dirty disappointment inside.

“There’s literally no one here.” Laura complained, peering.

On the towers flew flags with a weird device on them that Janna had seen at Winhall before.

“Fenwasian.” Laura concluded darkly and tore one of them off.

Meanwhile, the villagers really did kneel. Laura was blocking the way to their castle anyway, but Janna would still have put money on the notion that they would rather run the other way instead of submitting.

Four or five dozen people assembled at the edge of the collection of straw-roofed huts, children, old ones, everybody but any fighting age male, and bent their knees collectively before her. More and more showed up as the word spread, children running up the long winding dirt roads from house to house and farmstead to farmstead, letting everyone know.

“Oh!” Laura made when she noticed after her castle venture seemed unsuccessful. “I guess Turon Taladan sent a herald.”

Janna did not know what that meant, and she was unable to care. She only took note that some villagers were on one knee whereas others were on both, as if they were praying.

“What is this place?” Laura asked, taking a step forward and hinting to the castle to her left. “And why are there Fenwasian colours flying?!”

The observation visibly angered her.

A presumably native village elder replied: “You are in the Barony of Oakwood, this is your village of Barnhill, oh Queen, where every man and child are your loyal subjects! The castle you see is the Streamguard, seat of our Lord Arthgal of house Fenwasian who is Baron in your name!”

Laura put her hands on her hips and tapped her foot: “So it was from here that your Lord marched on Iaun Cyll? I should digest the lot of you for your insolence. But I know something better.”

She waved Janna onward and gave her a grin.

“They’re yours.” She said in English. “I know you want them. Must have been a while since you got to smush someone.”

Janna had no such desire, though, not since she had lived the village life of Bessa. If only Laura would understand.

“You shouldn’t be so cruel to the people you govern.” She said. “Whatever that lord did is no fault of theirs. He just took their sons and husbands and walked away with them. Just kill him and put like a just, lenient guy in his place.”

There were three or four hundred people, some still making their way while others recognized that Laura was so huge that it didn’t matter how close to her they knelt.

“Jesus Christ, you really are ill.” Laura replied with a frown.

She looked down on her subjects again.

“Your Lord is captive after losing in battle to Ilaen Albenblood.” She told them nonchalantly. “Who rules here now?”

The people looked genuinely shocked and hurt by this news. Whatever headdress, scarfs, felt and wool caps or whatnot hadn’t come off upon kneeling was now removed at once.

“His…” The village elder croaked and choked upon his words. “His wife then, the lady Isora Fenwasian of Tsafield-Stormrock!” He took a pause. “May I…say that it is a great honour for us to have you, your Grace, but we were told that we had one giant queen now, not two?”

“If you think you can levy questions at me, I’m going to crush you.” Laura took a step and hovered her foot above him, looking down as if she was about to kill a spider in her dorm room on Earth.

There were many innocent bystanders in the shadow of her foot, but Janna knew Laura would not care.

“Laura, don’t.” She said determinedly. “They’ve done nothing wrong and the question is perfectly reasonable.”

The villagers used the moment Janna had bought them to scurry out from under Laura’s heel, all but the elder.

It looked a tad awkward as she stood there on one leg, one foot in the air and turned her head: “These people are Fenwasian people, Janna. You don’t understand. They’re fair game. In fact, I kind of have to bulldoze them.”

Her foot touched the ground and started sinking into it, leaving no sight of the old man.

Villagers cried and moaned. People hugged their loved ones.

Janna knew how they felt.

“And will you tear down this castle as well?” She asked angrily. “This absolute state-of-the-art fortress on the very border you were so worried about earlier?”

There was no way the old man was still alive, she knew, but perhaps she could save the others. If all else failed, she would shove Laura into the river.

Laura’s eyes widened, though: “Oh, I almost forgot! I can station troops here and stuff! Brilliant!”

She looked at the castle with entirely new eyes.

“Won’t work without the support infrastructure.” Janna nodded at the village. “So, unless you’re gonna resettle several hundred people, that plan is doomed.”

Laura looked at the villagers cowering by her foot: “Fuck!”

She took a step back, a splotch of skin and clothing where the old man lay flattened.

“I’m gonna have to talk to Turon about this.” She said before speaking down again. “Is her ladyship in the castle?”

She was, it turned out, as were Arthgal Fenwasian’s offspring. The lady was thirty, her dizygotic twins, a boy and a girl, seven years of age, according to the villagers.

It looked as though they were not going to come out, though, no matter what Laura threatened to do.

“You cannot mean that.” Janna intervened at point blank when the ideas Laura brought forth became exceedingly steeped in barbarity.

“What?!” She asked, as if it was normal what she did. “They are Fenwasians, Janna. There is no place in Albernia left for them.”

Janna understood how true that was in a medieval context. She was also aware that the two of them agreed to handle local morals the local way.

That was before, however.

“You know there’s the option of exile, right? You don’t have to murder everybody. This lady isn’t even a real Fenwasian, she just married in with the pricks. And don’t people all over Albernia recognize the name? Aren’t many, like, totally loyal to them?”

“You really don’t get it.” Laura shook her head, angering Janna even more.

They were in a full-blown fight all over again.

“No, you don’t get it!” She shouted at her friend. “Go, move on, my belly hurts!”

Laura’s face darkened: “I get that, Janna, but I have to figure this out first!”

“Well, I’m going.” Janna went ahead to move past her. “Fuck you if you don’t come.”

Laura spread her arms in a gesture of helplessness, then turned to alarm, holding Janna back.

“Don’t you touch me!” Janna flared, shoving.

“You’re gonna crush them!”

Janna was so angry and aggrieved that she had all but forgotten about the crowd of people. One more step and she would have ended two dozen of them under her foot.

“You’ll need a new Fenwasian strategy, alright?” She said, impressed by the almost disaster. “Let’s just go.”

Thankfully, Laura let the lady and her kids be after that. It wasn’t right to kill them and the things she had said had been deeply evil. It seemed that to make up for their fight she tried to win Janna’s favour back with a new gadget.

“Check this out.” She said without any introduction as they walked, pulling something from the back pocket of her jeans.

It turned out to be a map, by the look of it painted onto a small sail and then waxed over to make it sturdy.

“This is Albernia, roughly.” She went on to explain. “Franka Galahan had it made for me. She’s really clever. We just were, here, I guess. That’s got to be Barnhill, given how big it is. Next up is Winhall, and the Farindel after that. We’re walking around it, practically. That there is Honingen, where we’re going.”

The map showed the four counties and many places with neat little paintings on it.

Laura elaborated: “Winhall is the county where we first made landfall, so to speak. We wiped out the city, and there isn’t much to say for the rest to be honest with you. The county of Honingen belongs to Franka Salva Galahan. She came over to me by the help of this guy I met. To its east is the Duchy of Nordmarken. The Duke had captured the city of Honingen, but Franka lured him away with a fake message about a tourney somewhere. The guy is a real idiot.”

She laughed, and Janna allowed herself a compensatory smile.

“The county of Bredenhag, as you can see, is really large. Turon Taladan, the guy who got me Franka, is ruling it for now. He used to be one of Arlan Stepahan’s stewards.”

“And Havena?” Janna asked, now genuinely interested. “What’s it like?”

Laura’s eyes widened: “It is huge! I only went briefly because…you know. But we absolutely have to go there together some time.”

She came in for a hug, happy, and Janna let her.

“Arlan Stepahan is a prisoner of the Horasians!” The young woman squeaked from Laura’s hand when they dis-embraced.

Their conversation had been in English, but the tiny thing must have understood the name. It was strange, their minuscule companions had not spoken on the entire journey until now.

As if they were pets.

“What?!” Laura gaped at the speck of a girl with a mixture of bewilderment and anger. “Damnit, I could’ve used him so good!”

She turned her head as if trying to decide whether or not to go back. Janna determined immediately that she wouldn’t allow it.

That Dari had broken the silent state of affairs seemed to encourage Furio to speak as well.

“He will be a more valuable hostage to King Finnian, rather than anybody else.” He pointed out. “But wasn’t there something Branwyn ni Bennain said about a rift between us and the Galahans? I heard you speak the name quite fondly.”

It sounded like a very important question, but Laura seemed happy he brought it up: “That’s actually only a thing with the Kusliker Galahans, namely Finnian and Branwyn, as it turns out. They are the spawn of Romin Galahan of Kuslik. When I learned, obviously, I was pretty angry. And add to that, Reo Conchobair was a bastard, did you know?”

“I did not.” Furio replied insecurely.

“Anyway,” Laura continued in the tone of a suburban coffee party, “I ate her and crushed him, and that was that. And now I’m queen.”

Janna had not even thought to ask after that. It just seemed logical that Laura, ever the little princess she was, would want to be in charge. The fact that this was entirely different from the original plan had escaped Janna, her subconscious deeming the issue unimportant.

It really told how she felt about Laura’s Albernian venture.

“Now, Franka Salva Galahan is a Honinger Galahan, with whom you have no strife. There’s actually a third branch of that house, or was anyway, the so-called Hussbeck-Galahans. Do you know what happened to them, Janna?”

“No?” Janna replied with a voice that let it be known she did not really care. “What happened to them, Laura?”

“You crushed the last of their line under your ass.”

That made Janna chuckle despite everything, even her supposed reformation.

“King Aele!” The tiny man who’s name was Leonidas Hatchet piped up. “The king of Andergast! He was not the last of their line. There was a bastard people were looking for in the succession, only he likely got himself trampled by ogres. The new king of Andergast is-”

“Unimportant.” Laura cut him off with a grin.

It was baffling how bloody huge she was, Janna noted, and how tiny the people on her hand by comparison. Laura hadn’t grown, Janna was still taller and meatier than her, but Janna’s perspective had changed.

“Can we keep going.” She urged. “I want to get to the Farindel and see if we can’t find that man.”

They had stopped when Laura brought out the map, standing uselessly in the middle of nowhere, discussing trivia about Albernian nobility that she couldn’t have cared any less about.

“Farindel is that way!” Furio pointed immediately. “That there in the distance, that is it!”

There was a hint of forest to be seen to their right, indeed.

“Isn’t it better if we go through there anyway?” Janna asked with a hint to the map.

Laura pressed her lips together: “Umm, I still don’t think we should.”

Janna let out a sigh that made her plead.

“You don’t understand. There’s, like, really weird magic in there! At Iaun Cyll there is this guy, he went into the Farindel once and when he came out again it was, like, three hundred years later! I’m not kidding Janna. With magic back, we simply cannot go in there right now!”

Janna grew only ever more perplexed by that. It was as if Albernia had made Laura forget everything that was important. She couldn’t have said exactly why finding out more about the man with the hourglass was important, only that he scared her and that she wanted him dead. He was mighty, in a magical way, and such simply could not be allowed to live. Plus, his demeanours in the inn had unnerved her.

“Fuck this.” She shook her head and went, away from the river and southward toward the trees.

Laura pleaded the whole way but ultimately had to come with her, meekly.

When they got close, however, they saw a very different picture than what they had expected.

“Oh, no.” Laura breathed, looking at the colossal, strange mess before them.

Everything was…red.

Moreover, it appeared to be infested with something. Strange webs hung in certain places, like arteries from tree to tree. It all looked interconnected somehow. And it appeared to be spreading.

“No, no, no!” Laura whined, rushing forward.

Janna did not understand a thing.

The spreading seemed to affect only singular trees or plants first, from where the corruption then wandered as if from an outpost. Viruses affected the weakest hosts in a population first, Janna knew, and could spread from there to the healthier specimen around them. She didn’t know any virus that could do this, though.

Laura went close to one such red tree, gingerly placing her foot in its vicinity.

And the tree reached for her shoe.

Janna had to rub her eyes: “What the hell?!”

“Fuck!” Laura screamed, kicking the tree so hard that it exploded into a gout of red blood.

“Get the fuck away from there!” Janna rushed over to pull her back. “What if it’s contagious?!”

Little brown things were running for Laura’s feet and it took a moment for Janna to realize that they were animals. There were different sorts, even, three deer cows, a bear, a badger, two foxes and all manner of things so small she could not have said with certainty.

Under normal circumstances, they should have preyed on and eaten one another, except the only thing that seemed to interest them was Laura’s foot. It was terrifying beyond anything, but in the moment that did not matter so much.

“Hargh!” Janna made with disgust as she stomped her foot down on the devilish creatures.

At least they seemed not to have turned red before she squished them.

“Let’s go, we have to get away from here!” Janna shouted.

While being led away, Laura explained: “This is the Red Curse! It’s back!”

She didn’t know all too much about it, only that the main symptom was red trees who’s wood seemed to have turned to meat, and murderously aggressive wildlife, even the herbivores.

“We’ll learn more about it.” Janna said with her arm around her friend, half leaning on and half shoving her back to the river. “We’ll figure this out. Let’s just add it to our list of unsolved problems.”

There were a lot of items on that list, and if they were to stay in Albernia this might become the primary one yet. The corruption had affected a huge part of the Farindel, and there was no telling how far it had gotten south. At Winhall, destroyed but for most of its walls, they still saw it and still all the way down south to the castle called Iaun Cyll.

By that time, Janna’s belly was hurting abominably, she was hungry and they were out of food. Furio also advised that it might be a bad idea to drink the local water, so she was thirsty as well.

“It’s fine.” Laura said to that. “We will rest up at Iaun Cyll in Weyringen. I left a garrison there. It’s going to be fine.”

It wasn’t, though.

The castle was a huge square with huge towers and thick walls, a walled-in village beside it. Neither village nor castle had gates anymore, however, and it looked as though something had simply overrun the place.

The garrison Laura had left there was not to be found. There was blood, telltale signs of killing, but no bodies.

“Oh, fuck!” Laura’s voice was trembling with fear. “Go, go, go, we have to make it south! What if Honingen was attacked as well!”

Janna felt as though her belly might rip open. The pain had gotten worse, she was tired, sweating and cold, and the blankets weighed heavy on her shoulders. Nevertheless, they ran.

It was like those damned mountains in Thorwal. Their existence was suddenly at stake. If Honingen was gone, what then? Janna was the first time in these parts and it didn’t seem as though Laura had ventured very far to the south either.

There was an end to the corruption, though, clearly. All they had to do was reach the nearest populated place. Janna gagged and spat on the ground as she ran against her exhaustion. The taste in her mouth was bitter, and the phlegm came out pink with blood.  

It was at that point that she wanted to say something, that she could not keep up this pace, but Laura had already discovered living souls inside a castle on a cliff, much smaller than the one she had called Iaun Cyll.

Feyrenwall, which was this castle’s name, had more natural defenses than the earlier one. It lay atop a rocky cliff, the only access being a drawbridge over a natural crevice. Whatever had attacked and overrun Iaun Cyll clearly did not possess siege engines, although, if Janna was true to herself, she couldn’t think of any siege engine capable of besieging this castle.

The drawbridge was up and there were men posted on the battlements bearing bows and crossbows.

Despite being extremely defensible, the castle was also small. Janna and Laura would not have been able to lay down in its yard, so it was clear that they couldn’t stay here, even if the corruption was decidedly less severe in these parts with only singular trees showing signs of the Red Curse.

Laura spoke a few sentences to an old, leathery warrior she named Reodred Ardwain who told her in no uncertain terms what had happened.

“We were attacked by wild beasts, animals, boars and wolves.” The man said in a deep, rasping voice that befit his appearance. “Milord grew feverish from that quarrel, so we hauled everything here. When we got the prisoners out two of them got loose. There was fighting but neither party wanted to get caught by the beasts with our britches down, so we all went our ways. Been this way once before with the Curse, you know? Wasn’t pretty the last time around, but up there is worse than I’ve ever seen. Someone might want to go look for the Moorwatch lads.”

“What about the dragons?” Laura asked next, a prudent question. “Did you see them?”

“Aye.” The leathery warrior replied without hesitation. “Lucky us they seemed as eager to get away from this place as the unicorns we saw crossing the river. Some of the lads say they saw fairies buzz through the air as well. It’s like that rumble split the earth open and unleashed the contents of a thousand children’s tales.”

Laura inquired after the health of a man named Ilaen Albenblood, the local lord who had taken a quarrel in an assassination attempt with a wound that opened and festered, but the leathery castellan could not add any additional information to that. She inquired after a singer as well, who, as it turned out, was in Honingen. It became clear to Janna that Laura had built an intimate connection with these people and this land. This was were she had gone first after Janna had brought Furio to Joborn. It had been a week ago, give or take, but it already felt like a lifetime.

It was the last thing of that day Janna remembered clearly, the rest lost in a blur of pain and dark. She awoke in the morning, famished, dried-out and in agony, but wrapped neatly in her sleeping bag beside a lake with a chateau right in the middle of it.

She could tell immediately that it had been a castle once. Then someone had added walls atop the battlements, put pointy, shingled roofs upon the towers, and added windows upon windows upon windows, all made of glass.

The water in the lake was deep black, mirroring the cloudy sky above. Janna leaned in for a drink, plunging her mouth into the icy wet until the voice of an old woman stopped her.

“Does she mean to drain my moat?” The voice asked playfully. “Or are the contents of my chamber pot so sweet that she could not resist them?”

Before a wooden litter she stood, a wisp of an old lady in an extravagant green gown. A white silk cloth held a flat-topped hat of the same colour. She and her entourage of servants were surrounded by a colourful bunch of knights in green surcoats with silver wasps on them while their shields were painted in the colours of their own heraldry. Janna saw a honeycomb on red, a beehive on white and green, a silver knight with a spear on blue, a golden bushel on green, and a yellow tower on dark teal.

The servants were marginally interesting as well, even though it was usually quite easy to overlook them. There were male and female servants present, two of the males and one of the females being people of colour, Africans, had Janna not known better.

The lady herself was pasty-faced and had three white ferrets embroidered on her chest, same as the banners that flew upon the towers.

Janna spat the last mouthful of water back into the lake.

“Oh, yes.” The lady commented, nodding. “That will improve the water. Have no fear, giant child, I take care not to have my privy shafts end in the lake surrounding my own home. Don’t shit were you eat, the peasants say. A truism!”

She gave a laugh that was crisp, short and superior.

“I am sorry.” Janna said. “I have to drink. My throat is parched.”

“And drink you shall!” The old lady looked at her as though she saw an especially stupid grandchild, which was quite astonishing given the difference in dimension. “Our new queen has already seen fit to repurpose my firefighting vessels to boil mulled wine for you. A hundred large barrels of fine red await you in my city, refined with spices from places off and beyond your imagination. How is your belly?”

“It hurts.” Janna replied insecurely. “And it’s empty.”

“Ah!” The lady exclaimed theatrically. “That must be what all that cheese is for. Finally, it all makes so much sense!”

Janna knew she was being mocked, but she was in no condition to be angry. She pushed herself up to take a look around, a thing the old, mighty trees surrounding her had not permitted before.

She saw fields laying ploughed and bare, with a hint of hoarfrost, orchards with bare trees, and pastures that at this time of year only held sheep. The city was south east of her, a little while further on. Laura stood out, crouching, only her head and shoulders visible.

From Janna’s perspective she could make out red-tiled roofs, red brick city walls and white-washed buildings. It looked refined, modern and inviting, at least by the standards of this world.

“You are Franka Salva Galahan.” She said down onto the old lady.

“Countess will suffice, giant child. You must be Janna. We were warned you crushed and ate men at a whim so I thought it prudent to postpone the introduction of my heir grandson and his wife until such time as we could determine your good nature.”

The old face wrinkled up as the countess’ tiny eyes narrowed. It was a test.

‘Do not inflict wanton butchery on my people,’ she was really saying.

She also evidently did not care so much about her own life, much as she would, given how old she was.

“Doing so put me at this impasse,” Janna tried her best at framing a reply that would match the old lady’s style, “so, I will abstain for the nonce, if I can have better. Wine and cheese, you said? That sounds a lot more intriguing than having to pick your bones from my teeth.”

The lady’s grin showed mouth full of her own teeth, which was quite an accomplishment for a person so old. They were grey, though, no doubt from excessive consumption of said wine.

“Well, in that case.”

She pulled a tiny white handkerchief from her pocket and waved it at the castle. The drawbridge was down already, but the wooden gates opened only now. Out walked, arm in arm, a tiny knight in splendid armour and a woman so beautiful that Janna almost gasped.

She remembered what Branwyn ni Bennain had looked like. That one had been a beauty. Standing next to this new one, however, she would have looked something like a washcloth, too often used.

The boy was in his twenties with a mob of dark blond hair. He was handsome enough in a boyish way, tall, slender and with a thick, strong neck.

The girl was not a girl but a young woman, unmistakably older than him by a few years. She wore the countess’ colours in a way that seemed to make the gown come to life in a very vivid way.

Janna was immediately half envious and half in drooling awe.  

“I have the honour to present the heir to Honingen, Ardan Jumian Galahan,” The knight with the honeycomb on his shield bellowed, “and his beloved wife, the lady Devona Fenwasian!”

Janna almost choked on the air in her mouth.

“Fenwasian?” She whispered before realizing that it was pointless with so many ears this close. “Does…does Laura know about this?”

It seemed wasteful to kill such a beautiful thing just for her name. If Laura wasn’t aware the heir to Honingen’s wife was a Fenwasian then Janna would make sure to keep her mouth shut about it.

The young lady heard, pulled away from her husband and rushed to throw herself down before Janna’s knees.

“It is true, I was born a Fenwasian!” She pleaded with an angelic voice uncomfortably laden with fear. “But you must believe me! I am not with them anymore! I love my husband more than anything in this world! I forsake my family, I forsake them! May they freeze eternally in the Netherhells for all I care!”

Janna shifted awkwardly in her seat, unsure what to say.

The countess saved her: “Child, you are besmirching my seamstress’ masterpiece with filth! Get up, or I will be cross with you!”

Ardan Jumian rushed to his wife and pulled her up while she had her chin on her bosom and started sobbing uncontrollably. The look he threw at Janna was a blaming one, which hurt but did not come entirely without justification as right then, at the worst possible time, Janna’s belly gave a noisy rumble.

It wouldn’t do to reminisce of how many people she had sent down there to digest them, people like Bessa, or Father, or Alrik the Younger.

The knights in the green surcoats moved protectively around their betters, shields up, hands upon their sword hilts.

That in turn angered Franka Galahan: “You stand no chance against her, fools! What do you think you are doing?!”

“I don’t want to die!” The Lady Devona Fenwasian cried out. “Please!”

“No one is going to die, stupid girl!” The countess snapped. “The queen has already pardoned you for your families’ failing loyalty!”

The way she said it was a tad queer and forced. It was reasonable to assume that Franka Salva Galahan had only sided with Laura because she had no choice. It was to bend the knee or face the bottom of Laura’s Chuck’s for the old lady, and even if she didn’t care whether or not she herself lived was she without a doubt interested in her grandson’s longevity.

The fact that he was her heir could only mean that whoever had come in between must have died, too, Janna noted only now.

“Straighten your humours, young lady,” the countess went on, “this is an ill-fated time to forget your courtesies!”

At the countess’ words, the knights stepped grimly aside, and the bubble of servants attending the nobility followed at their heels.

This left the Lady Devona exposed, with only her husband’s arm around to protect her.

“Thank you, Countess.” Janna said quickly before the pretty lady could have another fit. “I’d like to apologise to Lady Devona for having scared her. It was never my intention to do so, nor to do her any harm.”

She took the high road and swallowed her pride. If truth be told, the way these tiny nobles treated her was entirely unwarranted, and deeply impolite to begin with. She made sure her tone conveyed at least some of her displeasure.

Lady Devona, in turn, did a half-way curtsy and collapsed unconscious in her husband’s arms. That was rather disappointing.

“Gracious.” Franka Salva Galahan commented with a roll of her eyes. “In your place I would have been fuming. Nothing could have suggested you wanted her ill…other than, mayhaps, the horrified mention of her name, or your enormous size and terrifying reputation.”

She gave another one of her superior laughs and waved her hand at the servants to carry the lady away.

Janna shook her head with bewilderment.

“Tell the lady I’m sorry. And I was very pleased to meet her. And Ardan Jumian as well.”

The boy went with his wife and tossed her another angry look.

“You should go eat.” The countess suggested emphatically. “I know you will forgive me for not joining you. Old. I break my fast early and it’s around this time that I require my prunes. My bowels simply won’t move without them.”

She turned to her litter without so much as waiting for a reply, just as Janna remembered something.

“Hold on.” She said. “You mentioned Laura pardoned Devona for being a Fenwasian, correct?”

The countess turned back and cocked her head.

“There’s a, umm…” Janna had to close her eyes and search for any names she remembered from yesterday. “At Barnhill, the castle in the river, there’s the wife of another Fenwasian…Arthgal, I believe is his name.”

“Oh, yes.” The countess replied, not hiding her puzzlement over the question. “The Baroness Isora. She’s a witch, that one, to hear the peasants tell it. I happen to know her for a mage.”

Now Janna cocked her head at the sudden twist.

“Oh, yes.” The countess said again but at the same time wriggled her head side to side to lessen the severity of her words. “Quite a mundane one, really. Adepta Minor, in the speak of the colleges, and the one she attended was not particularly renowned. The Grey Guild’s pointy hats are much less unnerving than the White Guild’s pious fanatics, you must know. And so much more boring.”

She smiled amiably, hinting for Janna to make a point. Her words seemed to have raised a new one, however.

“What do you mean by fanatics?”

“Ah, well.” Franka turned her head most nobly aside. “Far be it from me to question our holy Praios Church. It’s just that seeing young girls and old women burn alive screaming upsets my delicate digestion. There’s only so much the prunes can do for me.”

Furio was of the white guild, Janna knew, but she was also certain he wouldn’t ever be involved in anything as heinous as a medieval-style inquisition. Maybe she should ask him about that, though.

“Oh.” She said in order to buy time for realigning her thoughts. “Umm, well, I would hate to see Laura kill the Lady Isora and her children. She has twins, a boy and a girl. They’re very young, and since the three of them are Fenwasian-”

The countess raised a hand to interrupt, which Janna did not interpret as a good sign.

“Does not being crushed to death in an instant seem rather like a mercy?” She asked lightly before her voice turned to sneer. “Courtesy of Duke Hagrobald, the Holy Inquisition has come to Honingen…again. They would burn a goat if its beard struck them as wizardly.”

Janna’s heart almost stopped upon hearing.

“Go.” The countess suggested, grinning.

‘Laura would not let that happen.’ Janna thought as she held her belly, half running and half limping toward the city.

Honingen’s walls were red brick growing ever larger as she moved close. The surrounding lands were idyllic in their own right, fertile land with old trees, ditches, low walls and fences, tall grass where neither sheep nor reaper thought to cut short the stalks.

There was not a sign of the Red Curse here, just prosperity, the only blemish being Laura’s footsteps that defiled the countryside like boils on an otherwise immaculate face.

Janna had no eyes for it now, of course.

Laura had almost gotten Furio killed at Winhall. She was reckless, stupid, negligent and immature. It was entirely thinkable that if Furio got in trouble she would simply not notice it.

The city walls were over ten meters tall with wall walks enclosed in stone with red tile roofs. They looked impressive, but they were not a meaningful obstacle to Janna.

As soon as she stepped over them, she had to slow, however. Houses she could avoid, because they were big and immovable, but people were a different matter.

“Make way!” She hissed at the tiny, stupid heads that turned toward her, trying to run for Laura who sat amongst rows of trees in front of a very large, rectangular building.

At its longest point, the city was some fifteen or so meters in diameter, a lot smaller than she would have thought. The population, nevertheless, were several thousand people, crowding the streets under her feet. It was no good if she didn’t want to end up stepping on someone.

“Laura, where is Furio?!” She called out instead, knowing that the whole city had to listen.

Laura turned her head and smiled: “Oh, hey there, sleepy head! It’s almost noon!”

“Where is Furio?!”

She looked hurt: “I’m taking good care of him, Janna. I’m sorry about what happened and I will never let it happen again, okay? I know how important he is.”

“No, where is he?” Janna reiterated heatedly. “There is inquisition in the city!”

“Furio is here with me.” Laura returned, surprised. “And who told you about the inquisition?”

Janna made her way over more carefully. When she looked down, she saw that everyone on the street had already moved carefully aside. Someone even drew their hat at her in a most comical fashion.

When Janna was standing over the yard framed by trees in which Laura was sitting, she received an explanation: “I was just telling these fine gentlemen here that I will not have any wizard burning in my city.”

Laura had chosen the local tongue to bring whomever she was speaking to back into the conversation.

“But this is mandated by our holy Church of Praios!” A man in white and golden robes pointed out, seemingly not for the first time. “If you wish to defy the will of the highest of gods then eternal damnation in the Netherhells will be your penance, giantess!”

Laura turned back to English to explain her predicament: “You see, the trouble is that this dumbass religion was here before us and some of them seem to believe in it very, very much. I can eat them, crush them and fuck them to death, but for some it seems they’d rather be afraid of something imaginary.”

‘The woe of a tyrant.’ Janna thought unbiddenly.

It also sounded oddly familiar.

Seen in that light, religion suddenly seemed to have its merits, had it not been so entirely horrible otherwise.

“And your course of action is to argue with them instead of stomping them flat where they stand?”

It was almost unbelievable to Janna, and her English salted with cynicism.

Laura shrugged: “It’s the same problem, really. I mean...after Thorwal, who is to say that Praios doesn’t exist, but he certainly doesn’t seem to give a fuck about Honingen. The real trouble is that these little nutters believe the Church speaks for him. Yeah, but try telling them that.”

Janna held in for a moment, then laughed. Things had reached peak cynicism.

“You’ll not let them burn Furio?”

“What, are you kidding?!”

Janna breathed a sigh of relief.

“I was told there would be food and mulled wine?” She abandoned the subject at once. “I’m really hungry.”

Laura took that as a positive sign and referred her to the central market just a few steps away. It was large enough to sit in but not do much else. Honingen was pretty crammed.

‘Pretty, though.’ She noted, taking a knee where it was possible to examine what was going on with her breakfast.

In the city, there were several tall and large buildings of note, many temples, manors with their own yards, some with fields attached to them. She saw a Boron temple that was a large, black square with a cupula and a sizeable graveyard next to it. Sticks or stone pillars fixed with the lower half of a wheel marked the dead there. The general style of house was nice too, whitewashed or just half-timbered gable houses, many even with glass windows. That was the scene at the market, of course. Lesser quality quarters existed as well but seemed to be banished further outward.

“Mulled wine, mi-giant-lady?” A bald man with an apron called up to her.

Comparatively gigantic vessels of cast iron or bronze were resting on blackened stones and smouldering over fires. They were what Franka had meant. Their contents were being stirred by sweating men who by the looks of them were more than a little drunk from the fumes.

“I’ll try one.” She smiled, reaching for the nearest pot.

“Ah!” The man called out. “Don’t burn your giant fingers!”

She had to go for one with a fire that had all but burned down instead. To her, the container was the size of a thimble, so the whole affair of drinking was rather bothersome, although miles better than drinking from wooden barrels. The taste was exquisite. It had been long since her tongue had last been treated to orange, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and honey, not to mention that the wine they had used was sublime by any standard she knew.

It worked like balm on her belly as well, even though that was probably the alcohol.  

“Pretty awesome, huh?” Laura called over from her yard.

Janna could only agree. She had already tasted the local cheese but having it with wagonloads of bread and barrels worth of butter was an entirely new thing, and the local honey mustard went with it like a charm.

“Those are Honinger Crackers.” Laura explained when barrels upon barrels of boiled sausages caught her attention. “They’re a local delicacy.”

They were almost cold at this point, but nothing short of delicious nonetheless. Supposed to be eaten with regular yellow mustard she soon discovered that they went even better with the honey mustard that came with the cheese.

It was heaven.

“And what is that?” She asked when two wagons full of tiny light-yellow items rolled onto the market square.

Laura did not answer immediately, as if it shamed her to say it: “That is soap.”

-

“Janna woke up, for better or worse.” Dari told Léon when she returned anxious and almost shaking to the brothel. “The city folk say one of them was bad enough already. Lot’s of dragon talk, though, as well.”

“What times are these, exactly?” An unrelated patron was just telling the whore on his lap a little measure too loudly. “First ogres, then giants and now dragons. What next?”

“I heard they saw unicorns at Feyrenwall.” The copper-skinned bedwarmer told him while putting her arms around his neck and shaking her thick, shiny hair. “I wish I could see one too. They say they’re very beautiful, just like in the stories.”

Léon could have chosen any inn in the city, up to and including the famed Honinger Land Hotel. Instead, he chose the brothel of Seven Tulamidian Nights, a place full of light, colourful drapes, low tables and stuffed cushions. It was a well-kept place, not a ghastly dive by any stretch of the imagination. Only the flaunting whores and the thick, white smoke from the water pipes were slightly irritating to Dari.

The place was surprisingly full for the time of day with men smoking and seeking the entertainment of exotic girls in wide silk britches, pointy shoes and open, brocade vests. Outside, she had heard no less than three street preachers call that the end was nigh and it seemed that some men wanted to spend the meantime as best as possible.

“Stories are supposed to stay stories.” The patron objected with a slap of his whore’s arse. “I’m selling paper for the Karjelins. Who will buy it now when everyone is gazing frightfully at the sky, I ask you?”

She pulled his head between her ample bosom: “Fancy men, such as who can write, no? It’ll be lots of fancy men doing lots of fancy writing.”

“Aye!” He re-emerged, both from her breasts and his sombre mood. “Lot’s of fancy writing about dragons and unicorns and giants, just as if they knew what they were talking. Ha!”

The thought seemed to uplift him enough to finally abandon his pillow and lead the girl to one of the silk-drape booths where the fleshier part of the business was concluded, in hearing of the entire solar.

“Well, he’s not wrong.” Léon said, having listened to the same exchange. “And we certainly could do with more fancy writing about these subjects.”

He was nose-deep in ancient scrolls and books that looked as though they might fall to dust upon being touched. They had gotten them from the Hesinde temple’s under vault with the provost’s permission, which, along with his consent of taking the valuable works with them, they had received with the help of Laura.

Dari did not agree with Léon’s choice of establishment, but it was good to be off the giant hand again and out of the giantesses’ shadows. She just wished he had chosen a place with wine. Many Tulamids believed in Rashtullah, and even if some of the girls in the Seven Tulamid Nights were plainly not Tulamid at all did the bawd take care to make things as authentic as possible.

Instead of drink, there were waterpipes to be had, the pipe weed of which, judging by the smell, was spiced heavily with apple.

Dari had not wanted to come with the giant monsters in the first place, of course. Laura had simply taken her, nothing she could do to stop it. In Honingen, finally, she could get away. Anyone could vanish inside a city, she more than anybody.

In Honingen, though, Laura suddenly seemed remarkably tranquil. She had not killed any person since coming back here, far as Dari knew, whereas before she had embarked on a veritable rampage in the west that left thousands missing.

Even Janna seemed not overly murderous for once, which was likely due to her affliction. Dari still prayed that it would kill her, but so far that hope seemed to be in vain.

Her venture into the city close to midday had only taken one single life, a beggar that she could reasonably be excused for by the fact that he had been sleeping in a bundle of rags.

“Any news in these scrolls?” Dari asked to get her mind off the scene and the repugnant apple smell that seemed to penetrate every pore of her body.

Léon scratched the place where he had shaved off the beard on his chin: “Not much I did not know, like the time of dragon emperors before the kingdoms of men.”

He had already told Dari about that. It was a long time ago and dragons had supposedly ruled over men in a station somewhere between gods and kings.

“The only news is something I found regarding what types of dragons there supposedly are. Quite interesting.”

“They are not just dragons?” She asked, plopping down on the sinfully soft cushion opposite him.

The thick air made her dizzy and tired.

“Ah, yes, well…” He chuckled. “They are all dragons, but not all mighty, fire-breathing beasts. Tree Dragons for instance are poor, tiny creatures, barely larger than a large man in body. Supposedly they hoard all manner of glittery things, like a common magpie, whereas mightier dragons greed only for valuables such as gold and gemstones. There are kinds mentioned beyond count like the Pearl Dragons, Cave Dragons, Westwind Dragons, Emperor Dragons and so on as well as Purple Worms and Lindworms.”

“Why are they called worms?” Dari looked up from the fig she had decided to devour.

Léon studied his papers: “I believe this is because they do not fly.”

“Does not sound like a dragon to me if it doesn’t fly.” She commented, chewing.

He looked at her and shoved over a loose page from a book with an ink illumination: “A Lindworm has three heads.”

“Oh.” Dari swallowed hard. “Do they grow very big?”

Greedy, gargantuan, maiden-eating monsters were apparently not enough, now dragons had to be added into the mix. She had to get a measure of how dangerous they were, and also remember that terribly funny jape she had just come up with.

“Emperor Dragons, befittingly, are the largest.” He lectured from his scripts. “Eighteen steps, tip of the snout to point of tail.”

“That’s barely a fifth of Janna’s size.” Dari said, shocked. “Are they really so small?”

He seemed perplexed: “Your time with our gargantuan friends seems to have bedazzled your perspective. They are huge.”

“Not when Janna is standing next to them.” She said with a lightness that surprised herself.

She had been worried while wandering the streets, picking up gossip and taking the general measure of things in the city. Ever since Laura had returned and Janna was back on her feet she had been close to constantly terrified. Now, she felt strangely at ease.

“Well,” Léon started shifting through the scrolls, “their wingspan is even wider, so they would appear a lot bigger than they are.”

For a reason she did not understand, Dari started to giggle: “But not if they fold them! And speaking of wings, your Lindworm has wings too. What does it need those for if it doesn’t fly?”

Léon snatched a passing whore by the arm and pulled her gently.

“My sweet lady,” he said with a cock of his head, “is there Mibeltube in these pipes, per chance?”

She gave him a sweet look and travelled her hand up his arm: “Well, Signor, that depends upon who is asking.”

“The governor of Albernia by the grace of his Royal Magnificence Horasio the Third?”

“Oh.” The whore still smiled but withdrew her arm. “In that case, no.”

Then she left him smiling to himself.

“I chose this establishment for its thick walls and alternate interior.” He said ponderously after a moment. “I hoped it might help calm your heart.”

It was true that for this alone the whorehouse had been a good choice. Janna’s and Laura’s voices boomed through most other establishments, unless there were people being loud. In the Seven Tulamidian Nights all that could be heard was the soothing sound of bubbling water pipes and the faint, giggly play of pillows.

“I fear it might have put you at ease a tad more than I intended.”

“Maybe that’s just what I needed.” Dari replied, her head so heavy that she had to lie down on the pillow. “Maybe a bit of sleep too, or a bite to eat. Mhh, I could eat a horse.”

Léon gathered his papers and gave a silverling to a fat, bald eunuch to keep them for him. Then he took Dari by the arm and half pulled, half carried her outside.

“Well, let’s just say you are a witcher!” Janna’s voice could be heard complaining. “Now you stand accused and we are just going to torture you until you confess. And then we will burn you, alive. I might be tempted to squeeze a confession out of you right here and now!”

It sounded like the tranquil time was already over.

“Dragon flight is believed to be part magic, did you know?” Léon made conversation on the way. “According to some of my records, mightier dragons are capable of casting spells such as communication, illusion, control and so forth. The source of their magic is their carbuncle, which sits either in their head or in their chest.”

“Heh, heh…” Dari chuckled so much she could barely speak. “Laura and a dragon, right? One is a gargantuan, maiden-eating monster, and the other is…a dragon!”

She couldn’t stop giggling whilst people in hearing turned their heads in disgust. For one, Laura was queen now and such talk was not to be made about queens, not publicly, least of all about such a dangerous monarch. For the other, Laura had devoured Branwyn ni Bennain, King Finnian’s maiden sister outside this very city, dipped, so Dari had heard, in Honinger honey. There were rumours that she had done the same and worse things with other damsel maidens all over Albernia as well.

“Well, how about this?” Janna’s voice boomed. “If you burn anybody, I will stomp you flat! Where do you reckon your god then, huh?!”

“The lady is having roast horse and a cup of cool water.” Leon told the serving man after putting Dari down at the Honinger Land Hotel.

“Fuck water!” She piped up. “Bring me wine!”

“Signor!” The servant objected, almost stiffly discreet. “This lady is neither befittingly dressed nor does she comport herself appropriately! I will give you this one chance to leave with your honour intact before I call the guards and have you dragged out by your feet!”

The part about Dari’s clothes was certainly true. To avoid being spotted by Laura and Janna she had swapped her skirts for britches again, her chest sticking in a brown, fur-lined vest and she wore a wool cap on her head.

Leon gave a most noble smile: “Did you know Queen Laura carried us here on her own hand? Perhaps we should discuss this with her?”

“Yes!” Dari added, laughing even though her head was so heavy she had to lay it down on the table. “I was trained to lick her cunt!”

She had decided to rest her dry and watering eyes, only when she opened them again, she found herself in a different place. It wasn’t the Honinger Land Hotel, but not a hedge-tavern either, more something from the middle of the available spectrum. That surprised her.

“Did threats of having Laura eat him alive not persuade that stupid man to leave us be?” She asked with a groan.

Léon sat opposite her and smiled: “They would have, had I been able to explain myself. You, however, shouted for garlic. You wanted every clove in the whole world, you said, because it went so very well with horsemeat. Well then, eat.”

He nodded to the table between them. Dari could not see its surface because she had been lying on a bench.

Sure enough, there was a platter of roasted horse haunch, cleaved to chunks and a bowl of peeled, fresh garlic next to it.

It was the best thing in the world.

The ale of choice was brown, thick and malty, a thing so rich Dari could only stomach something similar once a month or she’d grow to abhor the feel of it.

Just now, though, it was exactly the right thing.

This new inn wasn’t as smoky as the whorehouse had been, nor as lofty as the Hotel. It was a homely place, brown, friendly and familiar to anybody. Drinkers sat around on long benches or in adjacent alcoves while dim light fell in through narrow windows of glass.

In the middle of the common room, back to back, two musicians with lutes were getting ready to sing a song. Honingen had a tourney of bards every four years from the seventh to the tenth day of the month Peraine. Next Peraine was due to happen the next one. There seemed to be a mock version of it going on at the inn, as if the people could hardly wait.

“We didn’t need to seek a brothel.” Dari noted between sips of ale. “I don’t hear a thing just now.”

“Man at arms!” The younger singer began a most unusual tune before the other answered. “I did not sleep for a week and a day and a night!”

Léon was still smiling: “Laura went east to scout for Nordmarkers. Janna is sleeping.”

“My nights are restless.”

“And that is good, I suppose?”

“For I have seen horrors.”

“Man at arms!”

“Well, that depends.” Léon studied the underside of the fried bass before him.

“I am not the strongest nor cunning and do feel that my days are numbered.”

“I find it hard to call any of this good with a clear conscience.”

“Aye, aye, aye, I will, my lord. Whatever you say, and if it be that I fall on my sword.”

“Nostria was lost, aye.” Dari said. “But there wasn’t much left of it toward the end. Albernia seems like a worthy substitute.”

She savoured an especially fatty bite of horsemeat, nibbled on a garlic clove and washed both down her throat with ale.

“Fight for your Lordship, kill for your Lordship, or die for Lordship?”

“Man at arms!”

“Perhaps a pipe at the Tulamidian Nights would help me share your enthusiasm.” Léon frowned.

“Great wealth they said and glory you’ll find!”

A question crossed Dari’s mind, a very important one. She did not know what Léon’s game here was. Scalia had ordered him to be governor of Albernia, ensuring that it did, in fact, become some part of the Horasian Empire, the way Havena had before.

“Man at arms!”

“My loved ones faces blur in my mind.”

“The truth is,” Léon went on, “Laura’s doings here have displaced a lot of the connections we had built. We must renew them. I will need your help.”

Dari tossed a clove of garlic into her mouth, weighing the gist of what he was saying against the sharpness cutting into her tongue. It was a lot more mundane than she had hoped, the garlic considerably more interesting. One could almost have said that he didn’t have a game at all.

That was different for her. Janna’s disease proved that the giantesses were not impervious. Hard to kill, yes, but with the right amount of the right poison, perhaps she could make it happen. Honingen was a city of almost three thousand people. There were alchemists here. Dari did not have a chance to pay a look into their stores and cabinets yet, but with enough time she certainly would.

Outlook on that sort of front was dubious, however. It was simply unreasonable to trust with certainty in finding the sort of substances she needed in this place. In Gareth, yes, but not here. But who knew? Sometimes good things spawned in the most unlikely of places. It would be better if she could cast her net a tad wider, though.

“Of course.” She smiled when the two singers had ended their song amidst vivid approval from the common room.

“Garvin Blaithin and Cathal Ardwain!” A stout lady of bar maiden with veritable utters for breasts boomed over the ruckus.

Léon nodded and gestured from his seat: “I heard Laura mention that name at Feyrenwall. Perhaps, we should speak to that man, see what there is to him. You should make arrangements, discreetly, if you please. This is your first task. I trust you are equal to it?”

Dari remembered it as well. She just couldn’t imagine that the singer was any good to talk to. Not particularly tall and rather thin-built he looked more like a well-dressed boy than a man. The frightful way his eyes darted around did not help that either.

“Garvin Blaithin.” She breathed with a smile. “Consider it done.”

The monstrous barmaid continued right away: “To win your favour, the two of them have bought the house a round of ale!”

That got them even more approval. On the table between Dari and Léon lay a collection of tokens; a tin man, a polished stone, a tiny piece of wood carved to something resembling a lute and a remarkably black and coarse ball of fur. This was the measure by which the patrons voted for their favourite performer, only Dari did not know which token belonged to which act.

“The next performance for you this evening comes from our troubled neighbours of Nostria! We give you, the Cruel Fool!”

Dari sat upright in her seat at once as did Léon. Their eyes were glued to the centre of the common room where a man with almost soot-black skin in blue and white motley hopped on top of a stool to begin a slow and sad but well-melodied tune, most unlike anything Dari had heard him play before.

“Get that shit skin away from me, he stinks!” A burly man bellowed, but most patrons seemed to give the fool a chance, even with small reservations.

Most songs of Krool’s were cruel, mocking, fast and unnerving to listen to. They could be witty at that, but they always had an evil feel to it, far as Dari recalled. This one was different. He still had those ugly, yellow teeth, but for once he sang with a deep, clear voice, instead of a shrill and rasping one.

“Greetings town of honeyed maids, I’ve come to gaze upon your braids.” His first line covered the room like a blanket for it lifted. “But high above us her head in the sky, I saw a face that left me terrified. And I asked the gods how could good folk fall so low? Well now I know. She is the queen - of weasels.”

The harp played a continuous sad melody accompanying the lyrics like a charm.

“A spy, do you think?” Léon whispered in an almost inaudible fashion.

“Unlikely.” Dari shook her head. “Too obvious.”

The next verse of the song lifted in volume but went still a tad darker on the notes: “Your home was once this kingdom’s pride, now it rocks beneath her stride. No joy is left inside your red brick wall, soon it will go the way of Sword King’s hall. And what’s left will bloom in the red of an evil curse, as you deserve. For she’s the queen – of weasels.”

The notes on the harp came quicker now, the song growing louder and louder. Krool had almost been whispering when it began.

The lyrics in turn appeared to be meant to scare the people away, or else to shame them.

The voice grew stronger still, as did the playing: “And out in Nordmarken she saw, ten thousand heroes maybe more. Men Albernians thought less than them, came the evil crushing tide to stem. And a flash of good robbed the light from those monstrous’s eyes, to her demise. So dies the queen – of weasels.”

Dari found the verse queer, like wistful thinking. Laura had left to scout for Nordmarkeners, aye, but she was unlikely to encounter anything that could kill her, much as Dari would have liked that.

Now Krool was almost screaming, tearing at the strings on his harp so hatefully that she was certain they would tear: “And your preachers bowed and prayed! But the gods were long dismayed! Hear my warning that you might live on! Or you’ll never be with Boron! When the flood rains fall, you will know that my words were true! Then look upon you! So drowns the town,” the playing stopped abruptly and his voice went soft, hardly even singing even though the words were drawn out torturously, “of weasels.”

He plucked a few more times on his wood harp and the song was done with a bow.

No one cheered. The audience had been mildly captivated and moved in the beginning, but by the end the feeling of the song had become strange.

The black man hung his shoulders and moved for the door to leave.

Outside Léon and Dari had no trouble finding the fool moving up the street. Léon had to turn and silence the shouting barmaid with a fistful of coins about them leaving without having paid, so Dari ended up ahead of him.

The question what Krool was doing in Honingen was burning on her mind. They were about to find out, she supposed, but only if he didn’t spot them pursuing him.

The black man in motley stood out like a black sheep in a flock of white ones, so she judged this part to go over relatively easy. Unfortunately, though, passers-by spotted the fool too, pointing, laughing and ogling at him, creating crowds that slowed first him and then Dari.  

Krool’s sombre mood seemed to clear up, however. He was full of mischief. He kicked a man in the arse while the latter was relieving himself unseemly into a gutter, upon which the fool suddenly ran and the other chased him shouting angrily with his britches around his knees.

A cloth monger cried his woollen undertunics  and Krool went suspiciously behind his back without being spotted. There was a silvery flash, too quick for Dari’s eyes, and the monger’s purse split open to unleash a torrent of coin onto the streets.

She shouldered through the crowd of opportunistic purloiners that gathered, and when the last set of people was behind her, she saw the fool at the end of the street, far further on than she had expected.

He was looking at her with his yellow-black eyes, his horrid yellow teeth glistening in a smile.

She cursed and made a run for him, but he had already vanished around the corner.

When she cut around that corner, she bumped into a hard, heavy chest, black and made harder by the mail beneath it. White hair framed an uncomfortably angry face of coppery skin and golden beard that would not quite fit in there.

“Watch where you’re going, street rat!” The man cursed, shoving her to the ground.

He was attended by henchmen with clubs, all wearing rough-spun robes with the all-seeing eye of Praios faintly painted on them. The man himself bore a sun sceptre, the ritual weapon of Praios priests, even though he clearly wore mail and his surcoat was black.

Dari felt a distinct tingle in her neck, so bad that she had to cringe her neck to keep it from driving her mad.

“Women shouldn’t wear britches!” The man berated her loudly. “Seize her and strip her naked for a lesson!”

The henchmen moved and Dari jumped to her feet, darting around them to pursue the fool. But suddenly her knees went out from under her and her chest rocked and heaved. She was laughing, like someone who had lost their mind, so much so that it hurt her belly.

The henchmen wanted to seize her arms but dropped her immediately when she laughed even harder.

“What is the meaning of this?!” The cleric scowled at her while the henchmen took step after step back from her in fear. “Are you mad?”

Dari was afraid too, but she was laughing, laughing, laughing, until she couldn’t even be on all fourths any longer. She rolled onto her back, heaving, looking up into the sky.

While the cleric screamed something, Krool’s face grinned down upon her from above. He was standing on the roof of the house over the street.

Dari didn’t understand, even less so why he held a brushwood broom in hand. Then it all came together, when the henchmen seized her and he dropped the broom, vanishing over the edge of the roof.

-

Janna was behaving weird, Laura thought as she kicked through another Nordmarkener farmstead. She found the inhabitants huddled against a wall and proceeded to sift through them with the toe of her sneaker. A groom-ish-looking boy looked interesting, so she picked him up. The rest she turned into a smear.

“It’s like she’s changed.” She told the groom before tossing him into her mouth.

He only screamed incoherently.

“I mean,” she slushed him around, “she looked happier to see Furio again than me. I don’t even know if she still loves me.”

She swallowed the boy and went on in search for more prey. As weird as Janna’s behaviour was, she couldn’t really be sure how much of it could be blamed on illness. It couldn’t be over with their relationship, or their prison-like lesbian affair or whatever she should call it. They only had each other, far as she knew.

Nordmarken, or at least this part of it, was a remarkably fertile land full of grain fields. They were stubble fields now, of course, but any granary Laura stepped on had been amply filled. She crushed a mill too, which had left her shoes dusted with flour.

It was a lazy stroll such as she hadn’t been able to take in some time. There was so much work to do. This was a time to relax, be herself and reflect on things. She was due to hold court, only the inconclusive business with the stubborn inquisitor had taken up all her morning and part of her afternoon.

She was zig-zagging the countryside, driving fleeing peasants like a shark swimming through a school of fish. The number of people was swelling as further she went, as was the count of smushed, flattened bodies in her footprints.

It was nothing personal, as ever. None of these people had done her any wrong, it was just that they were powerless to stop her.

“Excuse me.” She banged her fingernail against the door of a daub and wattle structure that she had seen someone vanish into. “Hello? I will commence the demolition with you inside if you do not open.”

A farmer opened the door, brown woollen jacket, leather hood and grey, sandy britches. He gaped at her as if his eyes could not fathom how huge she was.

Laura felt powerful.

“Excuse me, I am the Queen of Albernia, and I have decided there should be a by-pass route to Honingen here. Unfortunately, the plans have it go directly through your house. I’m afraid I’ll have to flatten it.”

He still gaped at her for a few moments before finding his speech: “A b…a b…a b-by-pass route? What’s that?! And we’re not Albernia, this is Nordmarken!”

He was apparently none too clever, which might have been in the first place why he had opened the door.

“Be that as it may.” Laura put her hands on her hips and smiled. “The plans were publicly available at the Honinger city hall for the appropriate period. I will commence with the demolition now.”

“B-b-but my wife is still inside!” He pointed.

She stepped behind him, onto the house. It all gave way easily before her might. There was the sharp scream of a woman, then silence.

The farmer yelped in alarm and jumped away from her foot and his home.

“Whoops. Guess I smushed an occupant.” Laura grinned and twisted her foot in the ruins. “Complain to the city magistrate Belisa Tibradan within the appropriate time to receive compensation. Or not.”

She crushed him as well, but just because she believed he might actually be dumb enough to show up and demand coin. Her school of peasants had not come very far in the meantime, and it was easy to catch up with them again.

The terminus gave her a strange, radical idea, however. And she was queen. She could actually make it happen.

“Show of hands, who here can read and write?” She asked, even while trampling men and women into the muck.

No one heeded her, but she knew the answer anyway. Peasants in this society couldn’t do it. She wondered what would happen if they were taught.

Her lazy chase continued through more fields, meadows and little patches of trees. It wasn’t sexual either. She had shoved a girl down her panties at the beginning to maybe get something going and blow away her insecurities over Janna’s behaviour. But it was just no good. She wasn’t in the mood.

She pulled the girl out of her underwear with her fingers and told her as much. Then she tightened her butt cheek and gave herself a slap. The girl came back splattered on her palm, as she had predicted.

That was when she noticed the army. A long, broad track was moving, disregarding the road. They were already in combat formations, a huge host of riders out front, so stupefyingly many bodies that she had subconsciously mistaken them for a patch of landscape before.  

She saw more banners than she cared to remember just now, plus they were too far away to really tell them apart. The exception was a huge standard in blue and green, showing a crowned, silver bass, the emblem of Nordmarken.

There was no doubt in her mind that Duke Hagrobald Guntwin of the Big River was back after discovering he had been fooled. The countess of Honingen had arranged for a rumour to spread amongst his soldiers, saying that a huge tourney in his honours was taking place somewhere in Nordmarken.

Ever the rash, unblinking warrior he was, he departed immediately, thus enabling Laura to take back the city without having to crush any of the infrastructure.

Franka had predicted it. And so it had happened. She had predicted that he would come back too, fuming and looking for satisfaction.

Laura was not entirely sure if she wanted to deal with him just now.

His army was a veritable carpet upon the landscape, suggesting thousands of men, if not more. She didn’t see any artillery, but long lances on the riders, meaning they were able to hurt her if she gave them a chance. Behind them lumbered their baggage train, though, defenceless if she was quick enough.

She judged that they could hurt her and she them.

‘Who would win, though.’

This might be a bad gamble to take alone while in enemy territory.

But if she fled they might take that as encouragement to pursue her. They might follow her to Honingen, where fighting them would be inevitable. Janna was there, but she was ill, and behaving strangely. Franka Salva Galahan did not have the troops to help her out against this many enemies either.

It was a bad situation to be in, and if truth be told, Laura already had her hands full. The Red Curse appeared to be spreading in her Kingdom again and she had no idea how to fight it. Inquisitors wanted to burn wizards and torture people suspected of witchcraft as well. The ogres would occupy Nostria, her neighbour to the north, sooner rather than later.

Not to mention that there suddenly were dragons, and who knew what else, although she hadn’t seen any trace of them since that first day. She hadn’t even gone to see how Turon Taladan had fared in securing the rest of Albernia for her. She should probably also put in an appearance at Havena, the capital in the marshlands.

‘How do I make Nordmarken go away off my list of problems?’

She continued stomping peasants for the moment. Killing things helped her think.

‘Well, if I win, they will probably take some time to recover before they bother me again.’ She thought and looked again at the approaching army.

They were slow, slower than slow, but definitely more than ten thousand. It made sense. She was a big girl after all, and Nordmarken was nothing if not militarily strong.

‘Can I beat them, though. If I try and can’t then I’m in real trouble.’

Was it a sort of mental block? Thinking of how tiny the people were and how fast she could move, being cautious of them seemed almost silly. She could dance around them, lead their horse a merry chase, run through the bulk of them, again and again, each footfall diminishing their numbers more.

The idea of bartering for a truce with them occurred to her as well. That might last even longer than defeating this army, because they would not turn around and raise a new host to attack her – if they agreed and were beholding to it.

‘But how to talk to an army that size.’

She wished there was someone to discuss it with beforehand.

Giving violence a try was still tempting. The more she thought about it, the more logical it seemed. But she was alone. Janna wasn’t with her.

‘Whenever one of us leaves the other, we get into trouble.’ She remembered.

That settled the issue almost at a deontological level.

‘A truce then.’

That stank, but there were more than enough other problems to deal with first.

“Aw, did you come to save your peensy-weensy little peasys?!” She called them, mocking, while twisting her foot on the ground. “Aw, itsy-bitsy lil’ peasys, so hapwes and tiny, aw!”

She stepped up her murder game below, running her sole over people at an angle, burying them in dirt and crushing them flat under her soles.

For them, it must have been insult added to injury. The gargantuan monster dispatching their lives now talked to them, and about them, in a baby voice. It didn’t make much difference, of course, far as their terror was concerned.

“Come quick!” She called. “The big meanie is stomping all over your lil’ fwiends!”

She couldn’t help but laugh about herself and her actions. It was silly, indeed, even though the reasoning behind showing off her size and strength seemed solid.

When she had edged close enough to the approaching army a horn was blown. The riders at the front were the vanguard, the hammer meant to smash a foe and tender them up, like pounding a cutlet before throwing it into a frying pan.

The vast majority of the force behind the vanguard were levies, though, common men dressed up in arms, but she saw a fair deal of professional soldiery as well.

She could see the banners more clearly now and make up more separate parts of the army as well. That did not change anything, though. She guessed that there were two men per square meter before her, far as that was possible with the misshapen formation. Squashed into a flat square one side would roughly have been slightly longer than she was tall.

She wasn’t sure about the maths, but this seemed to suggest that she was standing in front of more than twenty thousand souls. Her heart thumped in her chest and she was breathing rapidly, her hands trembling with fear.

It was exciting as much as it was scary. Twenty thousand was a number almost incomprehensible to her mind.

At the blow of the horn, she expected the vanguard to break into a charge. She meant to avoid getting caught by them for fear of their long lances that she already knew could penetrate her shoes and give her needle pricks if she wasn’t careful.

Maybe the missiles would loose instead, or at the same time. But none of that happened.

Instead, the horses parted to give way to a party of Praios priests. That seemed to make more sense than anything else, given the circumstances. Behind a banner of white with a sort of sun eye with wings painted upon it they came, thirty-odd, maybe, and those who wore cloaks over their white and golden robes disbanded them.

The army in and of itself was still far enough away to mount a charge. Laura did not know how aware they were of the fact that she could change that with merely three quick steps.

First, though, the stage belonged to the clerics. She was already familiar with their kind, not least because of her dealings with the pestering inquisition. Hakan Praiford was the designated inquisitor for Albernia, a man with long, silvery hair, copper skin and a golden beard. Franka had joked that he looked like the contents of a coin purse, though not in his hearing. Other than the priests he wore chainmail beneath a surcoat that was black, not white, but with the same sun eye symbol emblazoned upon it.

He brandished the same golden sceptre wrought into the shape of the sun as these men, however, and like crusaders bearing crosses they had golden suns at the end of long staffs as well. But priests were not the only ones coming forth. Furio had told her a tad about the Praios’ Church’s Holy Inquisition. It had emerged from the Order of Praios’ Ban Ray, a militant bunch of unforgiving fanatics who were, in truth, naught but acolytes. The inquisition thus also featured warriors in mail and plate, as did many among the eleven other churches. This discovery had laid to rest Laura’s initial understanding that only the Church of Rondra maintained warriors in its ranks.

The priests knelt and started praying, and the warriors joined. This meant that those of them who were mounted had to climb off their horses as well. A tall man with white hair caught Laura’s eye because he was dressed from the neck down in white enamelled plate with a blazing sun of gold upon his breast. The white cloak streaming from his shoulders was framed with white fur, and even his fur boots were white.

Laura sensed that this would be an uncomfortable conversation, perhaps even worse than Praiford who wasn’t here.

“Oh, no!” She took a step forward and broke down on one knee, twisting and turning as much as she could without falling. “What is this?! This cannot be!”

A jubilant cheer went up from the common soldiers. They did not want to fight her after all, it seemed, which befitted her plan.

The priests started praying harder and wisps of their voices were carried over to her ear. It sounded like Latin, only she knew that it was probably Bospharan which they spoke, the semblance of medieval Catholicism uncanny.

Maybe she could be like Martin Luther and reform it, she thought, before remembering that Martin Luther’s reformation had spawned one of the worst and bloody periods in all of human history.

A ray of sunlight broke through the clouds, shining on her head to perfect the illusion, or else it was the same thing as in Thorwal, much to look upon but hardly effective. In any event, the army of more than twenty thousand men seemed certain to be witnessing a miracle.

Sceptres outstretched before them like crucifixes, the priestly procession edged forward. Keeping up the ruse for so long was exhausting.

“You’ve…got me!” She groaned and fell down on both hands and knees.  

This allowed her to remain and rest and already set her up for getting up quickly should they suddenly attack.

Her eyes searched for Duke Hagrobald, the ruler of Nordmarken. She had no idea what he looked like, though. She thought he might be the man in white enamel plate before finally spotting another man atop a green- and blue-barded horse, clad head to toe in silvery armour and wearing a full-helm crested with the silver bass of Nordmarken.

“I cannot move!” She shouted. “But if you attack me, I will be freed and I will kill you!”

It was uncertain if the clerics understood what they were doing. The army haltered. The clerics still came on.

“Back to the Netherhells, demon!” One of them called out. “Away with you! In the name of Praios, the highest amongst gods!”

Laura gave a scream of pain for show, which all of this was. The sunlight on her head did feel awfully warm. But it was sunlight, feeling so only because her skin had been cooled by the winter air.

‘Great.’ She thought. ‘And now what.’

She had to keep doing something and keep control of the situation. The good news was, she supposed, that there did not appear to be any wizards in this army, a thing that, in retrospect, she should have made sure beforehand. This was of course because of the inquisition going rampant. The tiny people, thus, were probably shooting themselves in the foot by fervently ridding themselves of one of the strongest weapons in their inventory.

The man with the bass on his helm had his army halt, approximately the length of one of Laura’s steps away from her face, while the priests still came closer. She could now make out their voices more clearly, although there was a lot of background noise coming from the twenty something thousand mouths, twenty something thousand bodies and sets of gear, as well as forty something thousand feet scraping over half-frozen fields.

“I wish to treat!” She said loudly. “Let us come to terms and make a truce so I will no longer butcher your smallfolk!”

The peasants she had mocked and annihilated were past the army now, all but forgotten.

“Keep that ugly tongue beyond your teeth, monster!” The white enamelled fanatic pointed with his sceptre. “This is the day you die!”

“Duke Hagrobald?” She called on the only specific person she could. “I will destroy you and your army if we do not speak!”

It was that or scare them into retreat, which attacking them would almost inevitably boil down to anyway. She was confident that she could win a battle, but she would never be able to kill every last one of them if they fled into every direction at once. There were simply too many of them.

‘Maybe it would be good to get a few thousand of them off my bucket list, though.’

The man she thought was Hagrobald Guntwin of the Big River removed his crested helm. His eyes were brown pools of mud, the rest about him a bushy affair of wild beard and long, wavy hair, all in black and pressed flat by helmet and perspiration. He was a thick man, probably in his late thirties, although such was ever hard to say with men who were manly like that. His breed had grown scarce on Earth but it was more common here, to be sure.

He called out with a deep, booming voice: “Chosen One, say, what do we do with this…thing?!”

The man in white enamel rose to answer. Laura could see him more clearly now as a sixtyish one with a hard face of lines and full white hair and whiskers well kempt.

He looked as immaculate as General Scalia, had the same high cheek bones and his voice was more droning than anything: “We shall ban her to the Netherhells from whence she came! Stand with me, all people who are pure in their convictions! Burn her carcass and end this nightmare once and for all!”

“We have to form a circle around her.” One of the priests noted. “Do it!”

The robes and fanatics moved, which was not something Laura was going to entertain. Duke Hagrobald had a reputation for being stupid, though, or at least that was what Countess Franka had said about him. Maybe he needed to observe their failure in order to treat with her.

Laura’s heart beat even quicker as she struggled to stay still. She also had a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach, a feeling that told her she was embracing a foolish idea. Already, the shaky plan faltered inside her head.

‘I should do something!’ She started doubting herself. ‘But what?!’

Twenty thousand men had about as much body mass as she did; or more, or less, or whatever. This was unchartered territory on so many levels.

The priests were moving too slow for her anxious heart, the dimensions of their foe simply too big for them. She wanted to drop her façade at once but was scared of that too.

‘I’m dumb.’ She realized. ‘I’m nothing but a dumb, little girl.’

“I am the queen of Albernia!” She had everyone know out loud. “I should treat with the Duke, not you preachers!”

It was the Chosen One who replied to her: “Your lies will not serve you, wicked demon! In Lord Praios’ name, I pray! Banished be this festering creature of evil!”

Duke Hagrobald looked on with his muddy brown eyes and didn’t appear to be doing anything. He was a great fighter, Laura had heard, fond of tourneys, hunts, battles and marksman competitions. Had she been a common foe nothing could have stopped him from leading the charge.

“You got that all wrong.” Laura sighed and moved up, going back to one knee. “I’m no demon, just very, very big. Your priests cannot do anything to harm me.”

It was stupid, she resolved. She should have gone with her gut and just trampled them all. They were many, but their heads barely peaked over the white rubber rim of her Chucks.

‘How could they ever think to be able to hurt me?’

Somehow, somewhere in her mind, she wanted Hagrobald Guntwin to live. She liked to know what her opponents looked like. It gave her peace of mind.

But as things stood…

She leaned and snatched the first priest within reach, then proceeded to make his face meet with his feet in between her fingers. His little body had nothing to offer in terms of resistance. Whatever was in the way, the natural extendibility of ligaments, his spine, all caved meekly to her power.

Then she began to roll him like a ball of clay. For how much of it he was alive she couldn’t have said, only that he ended up surprisingly spherical, surprisingly quickly. She flicked the bloody man ball at the army to announce her verdict.

“You should’ve listened.”

Boom, she was on both feet again, deadly determined to crush the Chosen One under her foot and then run through the army and onto the baggage train. That should cause enough chaos to begin with. Then she would see what she’d do. She would have to stay cautious till they routed, at what point she could slow down and employ her feet or maybe her calves and butt cheeks to flatten as many soldiers as possible before they were too far dispersed.

‘I am a force of nature.’ She thought. ‘I am a goddess, and woe is you for I am real!’

It did not transpire the way she wanted it to, however.

Thousands of shouts rang up at once. Horses screamed. Men pissed their britches.

Only the Chosen One brandished his stupid sun sceptre at her, droning, and a white flash of light sprung forth from its artificial rays.

Laura’s world went white. She couldn’t see the sky, nor the horizon, nor the ground she walked on. She stumbled forward, something went squish under her shoe. She slid, plunged forward and more things squished underneath her hands.

She felt movement, and sharp pain stinging her skin.

“Ow!” She cried out, pulling back her arms.

She almost fell face-first into their army before finding her balance again. She scrambled forward and almost slipped in liquefied bodies. There were so many screams of man and horse alike.

She still couldn’t see.

‘Back!’ She thought in terror. ‘I have to make it back! Janna!’

“Janna!”

The call went unheard, of course. Laura cursed herself for being so foolish. She took the best guess for where home was, but at this point all was dubious. She had never been blind before, other than that one time that boyfriend she had had convinced her to wear a blindfold.

But that which could put a refreshing twist on sex was a terrifying thing in war. The possible long-term implications were even worse.

‘I am blind. I will have to live, blind. I will have to find Janna, blind. I will never find her. I will end up alone somewhere and die of starvation or thirst. I love you, Janna.’

She couldn’t even feel her eyes at this point and was surprised when she felt the tears run down her face. She ran like she had never run before.

-

When Dari came back to her senses she was in a room and someone had upended a pale of ice-cold water over her head. Guards surrounded her with the Honinger colours on their chests, a quartered shield showing the Albernian crown and Honingen’s Three Tower Gate, silver on blue, as well as a honey comb and the Jar of Holy Theria, a local Peraine relic, golden on red.

Bands of iron fixed her wrists and ankles to a wooden chair that had an odour of roasted meat to it, as well as blood, urine and night soil. Facing her, sitting at a long table, sat two scribes shoulder to shoulder with none other than Hakan Praiford, appointed inquisitor to Honingen. Of all men, he had been the one she ran into, only failing to recognize him from up close and in the heat of the moment.

She could also smell the burning coals. A torturer to her left was turning a glowing red iron in a brazier. Her heart went cold.

What had happened? She had laughed, unaccountably, unreasonably, incoherently. Had Krool bewitched her? Was that even possible? Being able to make people go down cringing with laughter seemed a useful spell to a fool, but what sort of mad wizard would device such a spell in the first place? No.

It was more likely that it was a belated after effect of the Mibel smoke from the Seven Tulamidian Nights.

But the odd order of events...

It seemed just as unlikely that Krool had nothing to do with it.

She noticed that there were quite a few people behind her too, priests or some such most likely, muttering to each other. Perhaps it was best if she started talking.

“I beg your pardon, milord.” She addressed Hakan Praiford. “I did not mean to laugh at you, I was bewitched by the black fool, is all.”

Common gullibility often did the trick with men. She was just a girl, after all. Surely, this would clear itself up quickly.

“Silence, speak only when the inquisitor addresses you, witch!” A scribe snapped at her.

“Such a black fool was seen.” Praiford pursed his lips in a way that seemed to suggest he did not grudge her for speaking. “Issue a warrant. If the witch names him her accomplice we shall whittle the truth from him as well.”

“Accomplice?” Dari echoed, “No, milord, you misapprehend. I’m no witch. I was chasing after…an enemy…an enemy of Her Grace, Laura, our-”

“Undress her.” The inquisitor waved a hand and the guards tore Dari’s tunic first open and then off her body.

She was cautious of her small breasts and instinctively tore at the fetters to be able to cover them. It was no use.

“No!” She could hear herself becoming more anxious as the torturer approached her with the glowing-hot poker in his gloves. “Milord, I’m Her Grace Laura’s confidant, I am her friend, she will be terribly – ahhhhhhh!”

Her scream echoed from the rafters of the stonewall room and the scent of her own roasted flesh penetrated her nostrils. Her eyes were full of tears and the pain was excruciating.

It was bearable, though, she thought. She could do this if she had to, only she shouldn’t have had to at all. This was all wrong, none of this was supposed to happen.

“She will kill you!” She screamed before the torturer poked her naked belly again with the glowing iron.

Where was Léon? Where were the city’s magistrate, judges, any of those? Laura was momentarily gone, and Janna was asleep, but surely there was someone who could get her out of this?

“Do you have a name?” Praiford inquired, his hands folded up before him on the table.

“Free me from this chair!” She cried instead, furiously fighting against the iron and wood. “When Laura learns about this, she will kill all of you! She will stomp you! No, wait, she will eat you, alive too! No, better, she will shove you up her cunt and-”

“Not so hasty.” Praiford raised a hand, looking at the work of his scribes. “Your evil tongue condemns you, witch, but, pray, give us a chance to keep up.”

Then the iron poker plunged again onto her skin with a sharp hiss.

“My lord inquisitor,” a female voice entered the room, “you are committing a graceless blunder! Her Grace has instructed you-”

“Not to burn any wizards.” Hakan Praiford cut her off, whoever this was. “This is a witch. Are you come to interfere in my duties, Magistrate, or have you come to advise? Shall we mark you down for an investigation of co-conspiracy?”

“My lord,” the woman protested, “this achieves nothing!”

“You are right.” The inquisitor inclined his head and Dari allowed herself to hope for a moment. “Confessor, I believe your iron has gone cold. And try a different place of her, one that might yield deeper truths, if you please.”

“Isn’t cold, milord?” The torturer grumbled through his leather mask.

He demonstrated it on the nipple of Dari’s left breast. That was a different kind of pain, worse by far. Dari could only scream.

The city magistrate argued with the inquisitor for her entire respite during which the iron poker went back into the coals. No one heeded her here. When Dari looked down, she could see that where her left nipple was supposed to be only a black, oozing hole remained.

Then the iron came back, even hotter, and ruined her other one as well.

-

When the first beginnings of shapes reappeared before Laura’s eyes, she cried all over again. She had stumbled and fallen during her blind run half a hundred times. Her knees hurt and her hands were scabbed from more than the cuts of Nordmarker blades.

Everything was still white in the beginning and she could not see very far. To her, it looked as though someone had pained the world with a very soft pencil, trees, fences, bushes and fields. She found a cobbled road that looked old and cut through the through the landscape like the bulwark of civilization it represented. It was well-maintained but absolutely littered with old horse dung.

The scent of it was everywhere near the road, even at ninety meters high.

She would have put money on the fact that the Bospharan Empire had once built these roads, just like the roman roads in medieval Europe. The dung had to come from several thousand horses, but it was unlikely that the Nordmarkener army had overtaken her.

This gave her hope.

Where west lay was a tad difficult to determine without landmarks, the sky thick with grey clouds. She couldn’t see the sun, and the shadows were not sufficient in this light either. She took her best guess and went.

It wasn’t long before she found a settlement, a large village with stockade walls in disrepair. There were a few burned ruins here, which gave her more of that strange sense of hope. The Nordmarkers had come through here, she reasoned, which seemed to imply she was going in the right direction.

On a hill, amidst lovely wild gardens, stood a castle, or a palace, or something in between. It had an odd familiarity to Galahan Palace, Countess Franka Salva’s seat at Honingen, but it also had outer walls with towers and an unmistakable outbuilding.

‘The glass windows!’ She realized when her eyes understood what they were looking at. ‘That’s why!’

Other than that it also featured plentiful little towers, almost adorable.

She knew she had gone into the right direction when the people started kneeling before her, except for those too stupefied by her size.

“Knees, fool!” A man at arms cursed at a peasant who seemed to be dressed in nothing but raw flax.

He gave the man a hit with the butt of his speer and sent him sprawling down, upon which the other whimpered. There were several hundred villagers, she could see, of all shapes and ages.

Laura’s vision was slowly coming back to her. By now, she could already tell which roofs were newer, the more yellow ones, and which were older, the greyer ones flecked with green.

“Welcome to Andoain, Your Grace!” The soldier called up to her.

She had never been here before but they knew who she was, likely only by her size. This meant they would have called Janna ‘Your Grace’ as well, which was a thing that peeved Laura a little.

“What’s this place called?” She asked the man below.

“Why, this is Andoain, Your Grace!”

She squinted and blinked a few times, before remembering her map.

She could not read the names of the places the mapmakers had scribbled down for her, but she guessed that it had to be the singular place between Honingen and the Nordmarker border along the road.

When entering Nordmarken, she had chosen a different route, probably more southern. Otherwise she would have come by here before.

“Heh, yah!” A figure came galloping down from the palace atop a huge grey stallion with a silver head.

Laura had to squint again.

‘No,’ she thought with her mouth all drying up, ‘this is a unicorn!’

It wasn’t, though, merely a horse with armour on its head that some crafty smith had attached a steel horn onto. The horse was grey with brown and white spots otherwise, a huge cold blood and clearly no unicorn material.

The man atop was a stout noble in his sixties with grey hair dressed in green and white. At first sight, Laura almost thought the Chosen One had found her, but that was because this man had almost identical whiskers, if not for the colour. Befittingly, the man’s coat of arms showed a white unicorn on green, but Laura could not put it anywhere particular just now.

“Welcome, Your Grace!” The man jumped off his horse, handed the reigns to a soldier and knelt. “What a most unexpected pleasure!”

“Uh,” Laura was a tad awkward, “well met, Sir…?”

“I am your servant Ordhan Herlogan, Your Grace!” The man shouted at his boot. “I have the honour to be lord over this place, and Baron of Lower Honingen!”

“Rise, Lord Ordhan.” She said, blinking as her eyes got better. “I am very happy to see you, but I’m afraid I cannot linger long.”

He rose: “Your Grace must not judge us by our unpreparedness, I pray you! Allow us to host you for one feast at least, I shall have my cooks begin the preparations momentarily!”

Medieval life was slow, Laura understood. To a normal-sized queen it wouldn’t really have mattered if she lingered till the evening, or even stayed here for a couple of days. That was different with her, though.

Soldiers had taken position over the kneeling peasantry, and now they started beating people and shouted at them to decorate the village. It was a rather unsettling display of violence that she had not expected. One in three of the men at arms had whips and did not hesitate to crack them across the smallfolk’s faces, leaving bloody marks.

“This will not be necessary.” Laura raised a hand to calm everyone down. “I must be going. There is a huge army of Nordmarkers coming this way. If you must prepare, then prepare for siege.”

Dismay was written on the smallfolk’s faces, even those that had been whipped.

“Please, Your Grace, we are tired of war!” A woman shouted somewhere and was promptly set upon by three men at arms.

Laura bit her lip, undecided over whether or not to intervene in the savage beating that followed. Albernia had serfdom, bondage under the feudal system, which was one step short of slavery. Far from every peasant was a serf, however, and the proportion of free men to serfs could vary dramatically from place to place.

Somehow, she had the feeling that the fewest people here were their own masters.

“Bloody Nordmarken!” Lord Ordhan cursed noisily, paying no heed whatsoever to the woman being beaten up ten steps away. “Your Grace must know that His Highness Duke Hagrobald came through here before, on his way to Honingen. He left a force stationed here and had them build towers, alas, before they were finished they all ran away, so we burned them.”

He pointed to a nearby island of trees in the stubble fields where the charred remnants of the siege engines remained.

The beating of men’s fists on the woman’s body along with her helpless grunts were unnerving Laura, but the Lord spoke right on.

“Your Grace should know that I have sent coin to Honingen to curry her favour. Has it arrived? It is not as much as it might have been, had not Nordmarken emptied my smallfolk’s stores. I had to buy food to bring my peasants through the winter, and we yet have to rebuild the homes that were burned.”

One man at arms was holding the woman by her arms now, locking them away from her body while two others each pounded her belly and face.

“Stop it, you are killing her!” Laura snapped. “Come here, all three of you, now!”

The soldiers stopped at her words but seemed rather perplexed about it. Two even exchanged a look.

“Is ought amiss, Your Grace?” Lord Ordhan inquired between glances. “Oh, I see. Stay your hands men! Her Grace has a gentle heart!”

The villagers meanwhile had begun to disperse, and some where already putting up cloth and string garlands in Herlogan and Albernian colours. It was absurd.

“Oh, yes, my lord, I have such a gentle heart.” Laura scowled down at the soldiers, almost boiling inside with rage.

While the woman was being carried off, one man at arms came quicker that the others and accompanied by a shriek from the crowd she balled a fist and pounded him into the ground.

“How do you like that, huh?!” She shouted. “How does that feel?!”

He was a pulpy mess in the imprint of her fist and gave no answer, but the other two froze.

Ordhan Herlogan seemed taken aback: “Your Grace, m-my apologies, I, uh, did not know…”

“You didn’t know having three men beat up a defenceless woman was wrong?!” She scowled at him as well.

She shouldn’t mess with the world so much, her inner anthropologist told her. As cruel as it was, displays such as she had just witnessed were clearly normal here.

“I will see the other two whipped.” She declared. “Make it happen.”

“Your Grace,” the lord gestured something, “if it is your wish I will have them hanged immediately!”

“I’d sooner squelch them myself.” Laura replied. “But I have decided to be merciful. In any event, I must leave you now.”

“Your Grace,” the way Ordhan Herlogan began his sentences was starting to unnerve her, “I pray you, at least take one meal with us! What would my fellow noblemen say if they knew I had you here and you turned down my hospitality? I could never speak to them again!”

Laura rolled her eyes: “My lord, I do not know if you are deaf or just plain stupid. There is a Nordmarker host coming our way!”

He pursed his lips: “Two dozen thousand men, or close enough as makes no matter. Aye! But we do not see them yet, and if they are the same men as were here before they will not trouble us before the morrow.”

They had been moving slow, Laura had to concede, so she ultimately consented: “Fine, my lord, but just one meal.”

Ordhan Herlogan clapped his hands together and shouted commands, and the posse before her dissolved further.

When the preparations were underway, the lord bid her follow him and his horse to the gardens. They were quite nice, Laura had to admit, but she knew that all of it was bought with blood and sweat of those men and women in the village.

“Your Grace,” he began another time, “I must confess to you that I am flustered. I would have expected you to beat Hagrobald in the field.”

Laura swallowed, thinking of what might have given it away. Then she remembered her hands which she rubbed on her britches almost in shame.

‘He’s right.’ She realized, terrified. ‘I was beaten.’

She couldn’t tell anyone, of course. If she did so, her authority would come into question and people would likely start to scheme behind her back.

“I just believed it more prudent to attack and finish Hagrobald once he was invested and bogged down.” She lied. “I want him to attack Honingen so his men will be caught between me and the city.”

Ordhan’s face did not give away whether or not he believed her.

He just nodded thoughtfully and asked: “Then I suppose I must be a prisoner in my own home once more?”

“You have my sympathy,” she assured him quickly, “a-and thanks! But this is necessary.”

That seemed to satisfy him: “Your Grace, nothing would please me more than to play my part in your plan. I know it is unbecoming of me, a little baron in the border region, to ask this of you, but I have a matter in which I require off Your Grace a, um, return of favour?”

She sighed, more for show than anything else, really: “Well, my lord, whom do you need squished?”

“Begging pardon, Your Grace, uh,” he seemed taken aback yet again, “Uh, no one! This regards my daughter, one of them, to be exact.”

‘He wants a match.’ Laura wagered with herself. ‘He wants some rich, important man well above his station to marry his girl.’

“Do you happen to know of my daughter Caia?” He asked her with a raised, grey eyebrow.

She shook her head: “Whom would you like for her, my lord? I hope she isn’t old or ugly?”

“Ugly?” He cocked his head. “I would not know, Your Grace. She is one and thirty, a woman grown, but matrimony as once I had in mind for her is out of the question.”

‘Thirty one years and unmarried.’ She thought. ‘That’s a bitter pill for a girl in this day and age. She must be hideous.’

He seemed to understand that he had to explain himself more thoroughly: “Your Grace, you see…Caia vanished on her way to Weyringen Castle where she was to present herself as a bride choice for Count Bragon Fenwasian and was not heard from for many years afterwards. We thought her dead, and I grieved bitterly. I think it may have been what killed her mother some years later, after she birthed our son.”

“It grieves me to hear that.” Laura threw in the common courtesy she felt she had to observe now, as queen.

“Well,” he swayed his head, “She re-emerged, as it were, according to Count Bragon’s sister, the lady Devona Fenwasian, at least. The Fenwasians have a deep connection to the Farindel. This is where Caia is now, supposedly, bound by a spell of some sort, some pact with the fairies to ward against what men call the Red Curse.”

That was an entirely different tale than any Laura could have predicted. It was also not a triviality it all, if it was true.

“But the Red Curse is back, and in force!” She breathed, thinking.

“Precisely, Your Grace.”

Their eyes met for a long moment.

“I will do what is within my power to find her and…do for her what I can.” She vowed. “This might be very useful. You have my thanks, again, my lord of Herlogan.”

They returned to the village after that, exchanging pleasantries and chatter as Laura supposed was expected of her. Ordhan had two sons and one other daughter besides Caia. Cei was the name of his youngest son, an undistinguished hedge knight with the hope of making a name for himself to gain a place in King Finnian’s Knights of the Crown, the royal bodyguard, but had thus far not been successful and would now certainly have to rethink his plans. He was somewhere in Albernia.

His other daughter, Ciria, was apparently in Honingen where she had attended the countess for a time, although that seemed to have ended. Where she was now, he could not even say, neither did it appear as though he cared very much either way.

His other son, Callan, was a Thistle Knight, stationed in Newall. That was even more awkward than Cei, the youngest son, because not only where the Thistle Knights deathly loyal to Laura’s sworn enemies, the Fenwasians, but she had also flattened Newall Castle and turned the corresponding Barony upside down. She also remembered squishing a lance of Thistle Knights at their tower there, which at the time had felt like a great victory.

It was complicated.

Albernia had been in existence long before she had been queen, and the nobility was naturally interconnected with each other. She felt like she should say something but didn’t know what.

‘I am so terribly sorry, my lord, but I seem to have smushed your baby boy under my feet and laughed about it. Hah, oops! No hard feelings, right?’

She could feel herself redden. At least he had another male heir to fall back onto, if Laura hadn’t inadvertently crushed or eaten him at some point during her journeys.

“What lance was…I mean, is he with?” She asked and caught herself almost giving it away.

Ordhan Herlogan looked up at her: “He was building up a new one. Bragon Fenwasian is a greedy bastard where his Thistle Knights are concerned. It seems he can never have enough of them.”

She couldn’t do it, she decided. She had to ask.

“You do know, though, that Count Bragon and his family are my enemies?”

“Aye.” He gave a nod. “And I also happen to know what Your Grace did to Newall.” His head lowered and darkened before he looked up again. “My son was not among the ones you slew, if that is what you fear. He is married to Grainne of House Albenblood and was at their home in Caornsgrove when you fell upon the barony. He sent a rider from Feyrenwall, informing me. He has forsworn the Fenwasians and for the nonce serves his wife’s brother, the Baron of Niamor.”

“Phew!” She made, wiping imaginary sweat from her brow before she recalled vaguely the family members of Ilaen Albenblood that she had saved. “Oh, I saw your son with mine own eyes, I remember now, and your little grandson as well! He’s so cute!”

She sighed again, relieved. It really moved her more than she had expected. Ilaen’s sister added yet another layer of interconnectedness, but luckily in this instance all was well. That would inevitably not be the case with all the nobles in Albernia, however, and to make matters worse Laura did not even remember exactly which men and women of blue blood she had killed.

‘I should’ve made a list…’

In any case, the nobility married amongst each other and situations like this would certainly arise again, sooner rather than later.

‘And there’s no way there aren’t some circular branches on those family trees.’ She added in her mind.

It seemed like a good question to ask of Ordhan: “My lord, if there is conflict, such, let’s say, as there was in this Hedge Feud, and one noble son kills another, or slays a daughter, or…or rapes her or some such, how do you highborn folk live on with each other after that?”

He gave a bark of laughter that frightened his otherwise surprisingly serene horse: “Hah! Oh, there are ways beyond count! Some scheme for revenge, or at the very least hold grudges. Icy courtesy! Open hostility is also not unheard of.”

“Does anyone ever forgive?” She asked, biting her lip.

Lord Ordhan frowned and shook his head, then swayed to say: “Not unless forced to do so, but you should never turn your back upon a family you have hurt.”

‘Then I shall never turn my back on anybody.’ She sighed, resting the topic at that.

Once the business about Caia was out of the way, the feast itself was a hasty affair. It seemed he had only needed a pretext to tell her about it in private, as well as get the measure of her.

There were many dishes, most some or another sort of stew to be filled in bread trenchers. There was rabbit, beef, chicken and mutton to be had, only the cooks had apparently underestimated Laura’s size and the appetite that came with it. There simply wasn’t enough food, even though she and Ordhan Herlogan were the only ones eating, out in the gardens were the food was served.

A bread stew was served in three barrels for Laura, but it tasted awful and wasn’t nearly enough either. She marked it down as a snack and did not blame it on anybody. The lord tried to save grace by offering to butcher a few more cows, but she declined.

It was time she got going anyway.

But just as she was about to say as much did the lord’s henchmen bring up five women to her.

Ordhan Herlogan cleared his throat: “Your Grace, here’s a personal gift from me to you, courtesy of my dungeons. We were told you like them comely?”

Two of the women had red hair, two were blond, one brunette. They all looked innocent as young peasant girls often did. The brunette was plainly pregnant, however, strangely the only one not crying profusely when she looked over them.

It was a step too far.

“You mean to feed me your own smallfolk?!” She rounded on him. “You are aware that I have not suspended the laws of this land when becoming queen, yes?!”

‘I have only broken them a couple of thousand times.’

“These are criminals.” Ordhan replied with a shrug. “The mud-haired one is a thief, the flax-haired ones are…what are they?”

“They sheltered the thief, milord,” a man at arms told him dutifully.

“Ah, yes. And the rusty-haired ones are harlots, caught in state of fornication with each other.”

Of course, he had remembered that one.

“My lord, you must have mistaken me for some kind of-” She broke off and sighed, because whatever he thought she was she certainly was, which was a monster.

It was okay, she supposed. She killed people all the time. She tried not to do it too much to her own people, though, which was why she had gone to Nordmarken in the first place. But as brutal a regime as Ordhan led here, like as not these girls would end up brutalized anyway, if not dead, so what if she ate them.

If truth be told, her belly was already rumbling for the tiny women. It wanted them, wanted to digest their tiny little bodies and split them up before sending them further on where they would be broken up even more until nothing but shit was left of them.

Her mouth watered, not for the pregnant one, though, and it would be bad if word spread that she was some sort of tyrant. She couldn’t risk her populace run away from her kingdom because she still needed them to make food.

“I appreciate the thought.” She inclined her head. “But I must refuse this gift. I hereby pardon all of these women, and if I hear that so much as a hair was harmed on their heads I will come back and smash everything, including you, my lord.”

Perhaps she should do that anyway and deny Nordmarken whatever they could plunder from this place. Ordhan Herlogan was certainly a mixed bag, far as lords went. He was upright and truthful with Laura, he had confided in her and they had common interests. She did not agree with his style of lordship, however.

“You do not want them?” He asked with some surprise. “Or is it that you shun outlaws?”

She did want them, was the problem. The red-haired ones were lesbians too, which was properly exciting. It had been a while since she had been able to make drowsy, always busy queening as she was.

Her hand shot out to grab one of the women but hovered there as a million thoughts crossed her mind at once. She shouldn’t be timid but decisive, she was huge and it was okay, but word might spread and everyone would know her as a monster, except they likely already did that after Winhall, and Aiwall and Newall and all that. Besides, she was amongst likeminded tyrants here, the village was far enough away, and even if they saw most of them were serfs and tiny, worthless bugs whose word did not count anyway. She just could not, never, never ever, eat the pregnant woman.

When she was about to eat the blondes, the brunette with the big belly gave a shriek, her knees giving out beneath her. Water poured down her legs and it looked as though she had pissed herself.

A man at arms commented as much, but Laura knew better.

“She went into labour, you complete fools!” She spat. “Get a midwife, now!”

She didn’t want to stick around for this. Not only was birthing a child without the proper medical facilities unfathomably messy, but also was this baby likely to be stillborn. The rate had to be high anyway and this mother to be was absolutely terrified out of her mind.

It was actually heart-wrenching to see.

She was still going to eat the blondes when she remembered that all they had done was shelter the brunette, who in turn had likely been stealing food to feed her unborn baby.

“I meant what I said.” She shoved the blondes aside with her fingers and grasped both red-haired girls. “I’m not going to eat you. My lord, thank you for your hospitality. I hope Nordmarken will not pester you for too long.”

They would pass him by again, she was certain. There had not been any siege engines. What she would do when the host arrived at Honingen was an entirely different quandary, one she did not know the answer to which made her stomach churn.

She needed troops, and lots of them.

An army was also needed to move into the Farindel to slay the beasts, cut down the red trees and turn up whatever there was to stop spreading the corruption. If Caia Herlogan was the key to that would only be seen once the woman’s whereabouts had been determined.

Albernia had too few troops at the moment. Almost everything other than the forces of Honingen and Abilacht had been with King Finnian in the west. She would hire every sellsword she could get her hands on, she decided, but knew even that would not be enough against Nordmarken.

To forget all her troubles at least for twenty minutes, she chose a nice, empty valley far enough away from Andoain or any other hint of civilization. It wouldn’t do to spread rumours that the giant queen of Albernia was sprawling in the countryside playing with her pussy.

But she had to, as well. It was a distraction she felt she badly needed now.

“So,” she smiled down upon the two girls kneeling on her hand, “you two are lovers, eh?”

They were already hugging, and now they moved even closer together. She took that for a yes.

“When you were caught making love, what did that look like?”

No response.

“You love each other.” She laughed. “It’s fine with me, I get it, I am not going to scold you for it?”

‘Right, I’m just going to fuck you to death.’

The whole situation had a bit of a sad undertone, somehow. Suddenly, she couldn’t even tell if she really wanted this or not.

One girl looked like she had cut off her own hair with a knife. She was also covered in freckles. The other’s hair was bound to a knot, more feminine, as ever. That was just a thing with lesbians Laura had noted over the years. Maybe it was a stereotype, but she couldn’t help it.

“You know,” she reflected, “I have just lost an important battle against Nordmarken. I can’t really tell anyone about it. The whole situation is shit. I’m not taking your silent treatment. You will answer me now or I will start yanking your pale, little arms out.”

“What do you want us to say?!” The freckled one called out in desperation.

It was a fair question.

“Uh…” Laura had to chew on it for a moment.

Thorwallers had been decidedly more fun because they weren’t so damn timid about it, or anything else really. Perhaps she and Janna should’ve stayed in Thorwal City and endured the snows.

Even Thorwal’s religious fanatics were more fun. She would have chosen Thorgun Swafnirson over the Chosen One any day of the week. If only she had real companions in Albernia, full of mischief. Branwyn could’ve been just that, but she turned out to be a bitch and Laura had eaten her, not to mention she didn’t want to share power.

‘Other than with Janna, perhaps.’

“Make love, now.” She decided. “Get that cloth off your shoulders and show me. I want to watch.”

Both girls blushed despite their tears and the freckled one beat her fist into her lap: “How?”

“How?!” Laura echoed. “You mean to tell me, you two are in love with each other and you didn’t even know how to…well…fornicate…as it were? What were you doing when you were caught?”

The freckled girl timidly took the other’s head with both hands and leaned in for a kiss. That was it. It didn’t even look to be one involving tongue.

“Aw, man.” Laura groaned, questioning her very existence.

She popped the button on her pants, shoved a hand down and probed her state of arousal, finding herself as dry as a desert of salt.

‘What’s happening to me?’ She thought.

She didn’t even want to kill the girls anymore.

‘Am I becoming an adult or am I so overworked with queening already that I can’t even get myself off?’

She wondered if this was how big CEOs felt, although men probably did not have this problem so much, depending on what type of man they were. Laura had once briefly dated a young banker, only when they tried to have sex he couldn’t get hard, started crying and told her about his anxiety and depression.

That had been the end of the relationship.

‘Is this depression too?’

It might as well be shock. She had been blinded after all, not to mention all the other stuff that was going on.

She closed her eyes and rubbed them with her free hand.

“What does she want from us?” The other girl finally found her speech, whispering to the one with the freckles. “What does she want us to do?”

“I do not know, my sweet.” The answer came, all broken with woe.

It was no good. Laura needed wine and a talk with people who were actually useful.

“I was going to make you please me.” She explained. “But it turns out, the two of you are not worth my time. Here’s what I want you to do. Come with me to Honingen and live there. When you want to make love, start with kissing and go from there. Ultimately, fornication is about the part between your legs. I want you to rub it, kiss it, lick it. Talk to each other. Whatever feels good to you, do it. Don’t repress yourselves. Is that understood?”

The more modest girl looked shocked, but the short-haired one pressed her lips together and said: “As our queen commands.”

That was a lot better, a bit more intriguing. But Laura had already wasted too much time.

At Honingen, where people had ultimately removed the horse shit from the road, she set the girls down by her feet and left them. Then she went to the city hall to inform Belisa Tibradan of the possible attack. There were preparations to be made.

Belisa was the city’s magistrate, which was a sort of executive officer put in place by Countess Franka Salva Galahan. Her older brother, Meredin, was first amongst the Immen Knights, Franka’s bodyguard.

Belisa was a bookish woman in her forties, well-read, competent, but also with an air of moneyed aristocracy about her. When she did not administer justice, which she did unfailingly on precedent up until Laura’s rule, she was always found surrounded by a swarm of well-dressed ladies.

It was these up-jumped, well-dressed ladies Laura encountered now.

“Where’s Belisa?” She asked. “Is she hearing someone?”

The ladies were afraid of Laura to differing degrees. Some seemed to see her as a chance to jump to even higher stations, whereas others could hardly speak a word in her presence. A short, fat, young woman in a pink gown was of the former type, a daughter of family Vialligh who owned most beehives in and around Honingen.

“The inquisitor Hakan Praiford arrested a witch, Your Grace!” She chirped. “It is so good of you to come. Our lady has been in there quite some time, trying to keep him from doing anything rash!”

Normally, Laura couldn’t have cared any less about any some woman, but now, with her two lesbians in her city, she had another reason to curtail Praiford’s doings. She hated him. The inquisitor unnerved her to no end, firstly because he wanted to burn Furio whom she had left with Franka Salva Galahan for the time that she was away, and secondly because she couldn’t just willy-nilly smash him.

“I forbid it.” She said. “Bring them all out here, now.”

They were already coming, roused by her voice.

Hakan Praiford looked triumphantly, the lady Belisa distraught. A fat, burly man with gloves and a leather mask over his head and shoulders was carrying a minuscule, unmoving woman with short hair, naked and covered in horrifying burn marks.

It was Dari, from Laura’s village, the realization rattling Laura so much she did not even know what to say.

“Well, Your Grace?!” The inquisitor challenged her with a ring to his voice that made her blood boil. “We have a confession! This woman is a witch, in addition to claiming to be an assassin and murderer!”

He nodded at Dari in the torturer’s arms.

“You did this to her?!” Laura asked aghast. “Is she still alive?”

“Aye!” The inquisitor smiled and put his arms behind his back for officiality. “She will burn on the morrow!”

Laura felt stupid for having left him alive and run free, but she feared being seen as a queen that broke with the rule of gods. Royalty claimed divine right. That didn’t go very far without at least some semblance of religion, a religion that the people adhered to.

But he had gone too far now.

“I expressed that you were forbidden from doing anything like this!” She snapped. “Which part of don’t burn anyone did you fail to comprehend?!”

“I told him the same thing, Your Grace!” Belisa piped up, almost meekly.

It was clear that she was no equal to Hakan Praiford and his shrewdness.

“Your Grace, in defiance of divine law and all things holy, has forbidden me from burning wizards, she will recall.” Hakan beamed. “This woman is a witch.”

‘He enjoys this, this maniac.’ Laura realized.

“Give her to me.” She said immediately.

Furio had to look Dari over, see what he could do.

The torturer forfeited his life by first looking to Hakan, who nodded, upon which he stepped forward and dumped the girl unceremoniously to the ground.

Laura flared and wanted to cast some official-ish sentence, but all that crossed her lips was: “To the Netherhells with you, maggot.”

The ladies shrieked in terror when she extended a finger and brought it down upon the torturers head. He folded, first in the knees, then his torso and legs were crushed between her fingertip and the cobble stones as she pushed a hole into the ground with his puny body in the way.

“You have other torturers, right?” She turned to Belisa who stared at the grizzly sight in shock. “Take Inquisitor Praiford into custody. I expect a lengthy confession before the sun is down.”

The inquisitor’s golden beard quivered.

“You have no right!” He pointed at her. “Not even a queen, a real queen has that right!”

“Save it for the confessor.” She spat back at him. “He might be interested in what you have to say.”

Lady Belisa caught herself, however, with her bookish side coming out: “Your Grace, condemning the torturer to death was your prerogative, but you cannot do this. Hakan Praiford’s station, I am begging, most humbly, your pardon, entitles him to a proper trial!”

Laura snorted, then closed her eyes again to calm to down.

“Who presides over such a trial?” She asked, already guessing the answer.

“The church!” Hakan Praiford grinned broadly and brazenly at her.

“Not quite.” The magistrate replied. “In this case, which entails a transgression against a command royal, a tribunal of local, clerical and royal judges must be called upon. His Reverence Ronwian of Naris, Her Grace and either myself or the highborn Franka Salva Galahan would be the logical choice.”

Hakan’s lips vanished inside his mouth, even while Laura was chewing on hers. How she would decide was clear, as was the case with Ronwian of Naris, provost of the recently rebuilt Praios temple in Honingen, the second largest in Albernia. That would tie the vote.

How either Belisa or Franka would decide was not as clear as Laura wished it to be, however. She now had a real law case on her hands that would demand her attention. She hadn’t imagined before that being queen would require her to keep track of so many things at once.

There were more important things, right now, too.

“Fine then.” She said. “Keep the inquisitor in irons until the trial. In the meantime, prepare our walls for battle. Nordmarken is sending an army this way.”

Belisa looked up at her in surprise: “Your Grace, weren’t you, um…taking care of them?”

 “Just do it.” Laura replied sharply while fidgeting gingerly with Dari’s body to get it off the ground without any further injury.

Back at Galahan Palace she found the countess, her extensive entourage and Furio in the countess’ rose gardens, brooding over what seemed to be the flattened ruins of a bush. Her grandson and his wife were there as well. Janna lay asleep outside the gardens.

“Ah, Her Grace is gracing us with her presence!” Franka said with her hands on her hips, sharp-tongued as ever. “Does she care to know how long this bush of flowers has been in my gardens?”

“No.” Laura replied, crouching. “Furio, something bad happened. That inquisitor got Dari into his hands. I need you to fix her. You can fix her, right, with magic?”

The wizard was puffing on his pipe and leaned on his cane, looking somewhat exhausted. Franka Salva Galahan could do that to people, men especially.

Laura lowered the girl to him, gently releasing her into the strong arms of Sir Meredin Tibradan with a honeycomb on red upon the shield slung over his back.

“Best bring her inside.” Furio puffed over Dari’s naked body. “I will see to it.”

“Without momentary hesitation.” Franka mocked him with her voice before looking up. “What is this woman to you, Your Grace? Must I remind you not to squander the powers of our beloved friend wizard?”

“I am in no mood, countess.” Laura warned. “We must mobilize troops. Duke Hagrobald is on his way here with an enormous host at his back. Have your Immen Knights see to it.”

The countess looked as surprised as Belisa had been: “Are these men of Hagrobald’s suddenly grown or are they still the modest proportions of common men, pray tell me. Why is this necessary?”

‘Because they have a god-damn fundamentalist with the equivalent of a flash grenade, you old, witty fool.’ She thought angrily.

Instead, she pressed her lips together and searched for a different answer. What she had told her two tiny lesbians in the woods was very, very true. She couldn’t say out loud that she had lost to Hagrobald and the Chosen One, whoever he was. If she did so, as she had already determined, her power might be called into question, people would start scheming to remove her and not fear her anymore.

‘Just do it,’ would not cut it with Franka either, but perhaps the lie she told Ordhan Herlogan would serve.

“Well,” she began, “he has twenty thousand men and I mean to kill them all, for which I require them to engage in siege.”

“Ah, ya.” The countess nodded vigorously. “It is so very important to kill every last one of those poor fools, and to get a good number of our own poor fools killed in the bargain. Well then, Sirs, you heard her. Should write to Abilacht for more aid? Oh, I forgot.”

The tone she used made it clear there was something wrong.

“What?” Laura asked, unnerved. “What did you forget?”

“Oh, only the tiny matter of a rebellion.” The countess waved off. “It seems the populace are not so keen on the recent change of ruler. Succeeding a king traditionally involves some sort of royal death, you see.”

Laura had to rub her eyes again.

‘Sure, why not. Add a rebellion to my list. I should start writing things down. I’m losing track.’

“Furio,” She asked instead, “could I speak to you for a moment before you go?”

The tiny wizard turned back from Sir Meredin and Dari, looking up: “Certainly, Laura. What is on your mind?”

“Privily. And I would like to speak to Devona as well.”

It was a dumb attempt to kill two birds with one stone, which wasn’t even what this was. It was more like a combination of two meetings in order to save time, and gain some trust, perhaps, as well.

Of course, if Devona had to come, Ardan Jumian would not part from her side. Laura was alright with it. The two were a package, like two friends who married one another, except to call these two friends was early yet. It was another construction site for Laura, way out of priority.

“I do not mean you any harm.” She told the stunningly beautiful woman when she had carried her meeting sufficiently far out of earshot. “I just mean to ask you something. Furio first, though, what do you know about the Chosen One, does that name ring any bells with you?”

The wizard puffed: “Mh, this is a title of order. I would have to know the context to know which one.”

“The Holy Church of Praios?”

He nodded: “Master of that order then, in this case the Ban Ray of which I have already told you, you will recall. In this instance, the Chosen One in question would be Praiodan of Whiterock, a Bornlander by birth who employed his homeland’s cruelty for the Holy Inquisition.”

‘More inquisition.’ Laura thought, despairing.

Furio’s tone did not hide any misgivings about the man. He looked up at her, no doubt wondering why she brought it up. Franka would have asked directly, but the wizard was already better trained than that.

“I lost a battle to him, Furio.” Laura broke out. “I was going to crush the Nordmarker host but he blinded me, somehow. I couldn’t see anymore. I was blind! Now I am terrified that they will come here and I cannot defend us.” She looked at the other two in turn. “I am trusting you with this secret. It must not become widely known, do you understand?”

They looked at her with big eyes and nodded, while just in the same instant Laura realized that she had confided in her lesbians and then forgot to send them to their graves. It was too late now.

Furio stroked his beard: “I see. Are you asking me for some kind of solution?”

“Do you have one?” She asked hopefully and perhaps too quickly.

She couldn’t make it too obvious how desperate she was.  

He puffed again: “Anti-magic, perhaps. A sufficiently large amulet would have to be crafted, but my knowledge in artefact magic is too limited for this kind of task. How did this blinding come to be?”

She told him about the flash after everything went white.

Then there was more beard-stroking: “Anti-magic might yet be powerless against divine intervention, but perhaps we should keep at this idea anyhow.” It looked as if he did not say the next sentence with full confidence, as if he had to persuade himself to say it for some reason. “This would help ward your mind against influence of arcane nature.”

“So, some future project. Well.” She bit her lip. “The problem is, Praiodan of Whiterock and Duke Hagrobald are marching here right now. They could be here by nightfall or by the morrow, I don’t know exactly how far away they are.”

They were mostly footmen who took aeons to get from place to place, but it surely wasn’t beyond Hagrobald to send his mounted vanguard ahead, smelling victory as he probably was.

“I have no immediate solution to this, Laura.” Furio puffed another time.

Ardan Jumian Galahan, the blonde boy of knight and heir to Honingen, flicked his thumb from his beardless, manly chin: “What of the Basilisk Tale, my Lord Wizard? This appears to be something of the same nature, no?”

“Ardan!” Devona beat his arm. “Are you comparing a servant of your lord god to a Basilisk?”

She said it queerly, and Laura knew why. The Fenwasians prayed to Farindel more than any of the Twelve, which she actually started to like about them.

“In the Chosen One’s instance this is not wholly unwarranted, my lady.” Furio interjected with a wad of smoke.

Laura had to ask first in order to understand: “What is a Basilisk?”

“A giant, snake-like creature,” Furio replied, “a monster of tales, such as some believed dragons were, until recently. It has strong venom in its fangs but the most terrifying thing about it are its eyes which turn a man to stone when he looks into them.”

If from whatever hole all the other fairy tale stuff had crawled out of Basilisks had been released into the world too, Laura would have good cause to finally be terrified.

“In the tale,” Ardan Jumian took over eagerly, “a brave knight sets out to slay the Basilisk, but he encounters many who tried before him, frozen to rock where they stood. So, he bought himself a steel shield and polished it to a sheen!”

“And he used it as a mirror so he would not be turned to stone!” Laura finished in his stead. “This is brilliant! If I can avoid the flash, I can trample the Chosen One flat and squish the rest of the army to porridge! It will be like stomping grapes in a vat! He, he, Chosen One, for sure, because he is the first one I choose to mush!”

Momentary euphoria had gotten her carried away on the rhetoric, she saw, evident by Ardan’s and Devona’s petrified stares.

“No, Laura.” Furio gestured with his pipe. “Ardan, why don’t you tell Her Grace what happened to the knight.”

“He was bitten and died.” The boy finished, frowning. “The lesson from the tale is not to underestimate an opponent, even if you have a way to circumvent his strongest weapon.”

“Right.” Laura lowered her head, suddenly feeling hot.

“The notion is not half bad.” Furio gestured again. “But not fool-proof, as it were. Making a muck of it would mean to lose an expensive gamble.”

‘Only for anyone in the direction I run to when I am blind.’ Laura thought.

But he was right.

“What of a catspaw?” Devona asked timidly into the silence that followed. “Would that not be more prudent?”

Laura was happy that the woman said anything at all but had to ask again: “A what?”

“An assassin?” Devona repeated while groping for Ardan’s arm when he turned away from her. “I know it’s not the Rondrian way to kill a foe, but if I recall my lessons, the same thing is true for blinding.”

“That is…true.” Ardan scratched his head and grappled with the realization.

Laura was enticed.

“An assassin to creep into their camp and kill the guy.” She thought out loud. “That would be even better. Do we have someone like that?”

She had heard something to that effect recently, but her head was just too full of things.

“We do, I will see to it.” Furio replied after some short brooding. “Bring me to the girl now so I can repay her for saving my life as once she did.”

Yes, that was it, Laura thought. Hakan Praiford had said that Dari had proclaimed to be an assassin. To be sure, torture was notorious for producing bad results, but Furio could not have known about Dari’s confession so Laura bit her lip and decided that it was good enough for her. She had to trust, eventually, and Furio was better in this regard than anyone else she knew. If he trusted Dari with this, then so would she – if after all it was Dari he meant to employ.

She brought him back to Galahan Palace where the countess was waiting for her.

“Your Grace,” the tiny, old woman smiled, “if it please you, you wished me to remind you to hold court. I have made arrangements on the fields outside the city for the morrow, provided you still mean to rule?”

“I do.” Laura nodded. “On the morrow, fields outside the city.”

Back where she was alone with Ardan and Devona she wanted to make some more idle conversation first in hopes of cultivating some loyalty.

“Do you feel well?” She asked. “All this must be terrifying to you.”

The boy knight put an arm around his wife who lowered her head.

“It is better.” She replied. “I am no longer so frightened as I was before. I still fear you, but I know that you can be gentle when you want to. But I fear for my family, my brother most of all.”

Devona was Bragon Fenwasian’s sister, Laura knew. Under normal circumstances, she would’ve squelched the girl, or rolled her in honey for a treat, but she was simply too beautiful to do so and Laura needed Franka Galahan’s loyalty more than anything else she might get in the bargain.

“He’s probably well.” Laura consoled her. “No doubt he sailed with King Finnian to kick our Horasian friends in their arses. They had it coming, the arrogant pricks.”

She smiled and Devona returned it, albeit only as a courtesy.

“I do not think so.” She replied. “I cannot believe my brother would go away so long, especially now where our forest is hurting.”

“You heard about the Red Curse.” Laura concluded.

Devona nodded, deeply and sad.

“Well, it is for this that I wanted to speak to you.” Laura said. “Ordhan Herlogan, the baron of Lower Honingen, bid me find his daughter Caia for him.”

She prayed in her head that she got the names right from memory. That was always a challenge.

Devona looked up with wide eyes: “Caia! Oh, no!” Her voice broke to crying. “She is in there! She is supposed to keep…the spell! Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no!”

Tears ran down her face in rivers at once. Ardan enclosed her in his arms, pressing her face to his armoured chest. Perhaps it was because Devona was so beautiful, or perhaps because of Laura’s state of mind, but whatever the reason, she closed her hand a little tighter, brought the other behind it and hugged the two tiny nobles intimately against her chest.

When she released them after a long moment, her own eyes were wet with tears as well.

The issue remained unresolved and Devona could not offer any additional information about the Red Curse, nor any more specifics concerning the whereabouts of Caia Herlogan. She had been travelling between Iaun Cyll and Feyrenwall when Caia had manifested to her, telling her the bit about the spell. That was all.

Then Laura made a decision: “I am looking to send a force into the Farindel to get to the bottom of this curse. We must fix it, and as true as I stand here, I swear I will find a way. Ardan Jumian Galahan, would you do me the honour of leading this expedition?”

“I will go too!” Devona put in before her husband could answer. “The Farindel needs a Fenwasian!”

That left the tiny, gallant knight precious little choice in the matter.

-

Whenever Dari closed her eyes she could smell the scent of her burning flesh. She was on her back, in a room, naked, staring at the ceiling. Furio Montane was with her, but she did not care to cover herself. The ceiling was all there was.

The stucco in the edges showed wine stocks and grapes. Then came frolicking weasels from the Galahan banner. In the middle of the room, white on white, spanned a sun with the stern face of a man on it, the god in who’s name she had been tortured.

“You are very beautiful.” The wizard remarked from his chair.

He had stolen more than one glance at her physique. Dari didn’t care. His magic had removed the burn marks from her skin, restored her nipples and all else that burned away, but those scars on her mind were a different matter. She wanted nothing so bad as to go to the Seven Tulamidian Nights and smoke ten water pipes in a row until her head was as empty and hollow as a well.

Finally, the wizard draped a cloth over her nakedness, and soon serving women entered in order to bathe her. She sat through it all, as did he, watching her as if there was something on his mind.

“Where is Léon?” She asked when the women had departed. “Signor Hatchet, where is he?”

The wizard smoked continuously, one pipe after the other. Whenever his weed was done, he dumped it to the floor, knocked the pipe twice upon the table and stuffed it anew, lighting it with a splint of wood and a candle.

“This exceeds my knowledge.” He replied. “Was he not with those who demanded you be set free?”

That hurt, Dari reflected. Had he not tried to save her from the inquisition? What was he doing? Did he judge Krool the Fool more important than her? There could be any number of reasons why the soot-skinned man had departed from Andergast. Perhaps he thought Varg might grow tired of his grotesque stunts and crush him at a whim.

“Was he caught by the inquisition as well, perhaps?” She asked. “We were doing something important. There is a man from Nostria in the city, someone close to the Ogre Queen!”

“If so, he is safe now.” The wizard assured her. “We just learned that Laura has arrested the inquisitor and will put him on trial on the morrow. I will inquire after Signor Hatchet’s whereabouts momentarily.”

With a puff of his pipe he pushed himself up and walked from the room on his cane, only to return shortly after. It seems he wasn’t done seeing her naked yet.

“Why has she done this?” Dari asked him, finally deciding that it would be a good idea to keep her hands on her nipples over the steaming bathwater.

He cocked a brow: “For you, I presume. We heard she was spilling with wroth when she found out. She crushed your torturer on the spot, they say. The city folk are quite anguished.”

Despite all the misgivings Dari harboured towards Laura, this news was music to her ears. She just wished she could’ve seen it, but if Hakan Praiford was to be condemned on the morrow then surely she would get to watch him die, at least.

She could hardly wait.

The torture had been bad. When the big, masked man with hair on his arms worked the glowing iron into her body the mental fortress her mind was supposed to be caved in as if it was made out of wool. They had shoved it into her belly at first. Then they had burned her nipples. Finally, with a big bulge in the torturer’s britches, they had opened a hatch in the chair they had chained her to and fucked her with it.

She had confessed without even hearing herself speak through her own screaming.

“I would like to be alone.” She said, fighting with the memories. “If you would be so kind…”

Furio had touched every part of her body that had been burned, she was uncomfortably aware now. She had already woken up by that time in the arms of strong knight with a silver wasp on his surcoat, carrying her.

“Of course.” The wizard nodded but did not move. “There is…something Laura requires of you. It is very important.”

Shortly after, wrapped up in white linen cloth, Dari was picking a gown that fit her from Devona Fenwasian’s chests. She could not get over the irony. Someone had found a way to beat Laura in battle, and she, Dari, would now set out to kill him. The only thing that convinced her to do it was the fact that it was an even greater monster of inquisitor.

“You did not strike me as a medicus.” The wizard had replied when she asked him how he knew of her original profession.

Apparently, it was common knowledge that a hired blade worth their coin were knowledgeable in the insides of human bodies. Otherwise, he said, she might have been a black wizard, which had not struck him as likely, given her undeveloped gift. For any righteous doctori, barber surgeons and the like, body-stripping was a grievous crime against Boron.

The name of Dari’s target was Praiodan of Whiterock, a man supposedly somewhere in his sixties. He was with a Nordmarker host, marching on Honingen. Dari already had her plan laid out, which was why she needed a gown for the occasion, as well as riding clothes and a horse.

A dress in dark yellow with a black bodice caught her attention. It was not too extravagant, which was a requirement for the courtesan role she resolved to play. There were always camp followers with a host, and while most of them wore wool and spread their legs to anyone who could pay them, some more expensive whores could sometimes be along to satiate more classy tastes.

That was her reasoning, at least.

A man on campaign would fuck anything with three holes was the common wisdom, but there had to be some with more noble desires, as well as a disposition against a too often used woman. In any event, if the Chosen One did not indulge whores then at least would the disguise get Dari into the encampment. It also enabled her to charge a high price, which should save her from arousing too much suspicion when declining customers.

For this purpose, the dress was perfect, and she found a white ermine cloak to go with it.

“Black, yellow and ermine fur.” The voice of an old woman commented from the door of the chamber. “Careful, men might mistake you for the Lady Devona Fenwasian, if by some mishap she fell into a sewer and rats made away with her hair.”

Dari spun, seeing a lady in her seventies, dressed in green and white. She curtsied immediately to gather her thoughts and search for the correct title.

“Your highborn!” Her voice came out as a squeak. “Countess Franka, my lady, I was tasked with…”

The old woman waved off and smiled: “I already know, child. Nothing that happens around here escapes these old ears of mine.”

She said nothing after that, so Dari said: “How can I be of service, my lady?”

The countess chuckled: “I only came to look upon you, girl. I must say I was very surprised when I learned of our wizard friend’s choice of catspaw. You have knowledge of some kind in this trade?”

The old lady looked perfectly innocent, if it hadn’t been for her eyes. They were pale, but somehow still piercing like sharp daggers. To make matters worse, Dari felt herself redden, giving the lie to whatever she would respond.

The countess cocked her head: “Well, you can’t be very good at it when you blush so at someone asking, mh, child? What if some Nordmarker asks if you came to kill him?”

Dari’s mental fortitude had suffered greatly. It was true. Seeing it affect her trade hurt her more deeply than even the iron poker had.

“Well, they normally don’t ask such of whores.” She finally replied meekly.

The countess laughed: “Aye, that is true! I suppose there’s no harm in letting you try. Here, I brought you a couple of things you might find useful.”

Dari could not shake the suspicion that the countess had sought her out for an entirely different reason, but what she had brought in substances to enhance female appearance was a veritable wealth of things, many of which were Horasian, and all of them distracting.

There was wheaten flour, ground lily root and cyclamen root to whiten her face. Lip balm made of beeswax and wine, coal for the line of her eyes and Liegerfeld’s Ladies’ Red Powder for Dari’s cheeks, all were in the countess’ inventory. The range of perfume extended from Terdilion’s Rahya Angelica to Stoerrebrandt’s heavy Odour of Love.

To freshen up when she got there, Dari was also outfitted with a piece of stained glass, framed in stoneoak and with a handle.

“There.” The countess said when they were finished on her face. “What man could resist you now? You were pretty to begin with, but now look at you. It’s only your hair that makes me doubtful.”

That was true. Short hair did not befit a courtesan, at least not in Albernia. In Gareth, with its excess and plenty, that was a different story, even though Dari had also worn hairpieces on several occasions.

The countess had one of those as well, a very well made one.

“I grew too old to wear this.” She said reminiscently as she stroked the piece in her hands. “Sometimes I go back and brush it just to remember how much fun I had with it. It fooled Raidri Conchobair, don’t you know.”

Dari did not know who that was, although the name Conchobair had been amongst the many Laura had mentioned at some point.

When the hair was on her, the countess oohed at her again, shaking her head: “I hereby forbid you from stepping into the presence of my grandson. You do rival his wife, which few enough women can say, so let’s not put any ideas into the little fool’s head.”

“I cannot thank you enough.” Dari rushed in kissed the old lady on a wrinkled cheek. “I do not know if I can repay you.”

The countess’ eyes flashed piercingly, accompanied by another warm smile. Somehow, Dari had the suspicion that there might be more work waiting for her when she got back.

Before she went, she remembered something and turned around again: “Your Highborn?”

“Yes, child?” The countess was still looking at her.

“I heard Hakan Praiford is to be tried on the morrow? I was hoping to…to see him-”

“Die.” The countess finished and laughed. “Oh, blimey, you’re afraid you might miss it! Hah, child, it will rain heavily on the morrow. Her Grace’s court will have to be postponed. How do I know? Old. My old bones always hurt when there’s a rain coming, and I fear I will need a lot of wine to close my eyes tonight. Now go. Kill the wretch! The only good Nordmarker is a dead Nordmarker. Always remember that.”

A rain-proof bundle with a perfect red and black gown and a black sable cloak tied to the back of her saddle, Dari set out that day. She did not go look for Léon. There were others taking care of it. She was dressed in boots and riding clothes, a heavy cloak and hat, the mission clear, the name of her target remembered.

She tried to recall the last time that she had been in this situation. She couldn’t. But as the road pounded under her horse’s hooves she remembered another feeling, a deeper one, one she had yearned for all this time.

She was feeling alright.

‘Why, though.’ She pondered, noticing that as she looked upon the world that once she saved, she did not care whether or not even a smidgen of it remained.