Chapter 2

Gates are perfectly circular and always invisible, but they're typically surrounded by some structure that marks them. Sometimes that demarcation is "natural," like a tree branch that's warped in shape to not pass through the center of the portal. Others, humans have stumbled into and then built ring-shaped decorations around.

Maybe if I'd been allowed to study spellcraft, I'd know why the universe loves circles. But searching for them—and, memorably, finding them—is probably the root of my preoccupation with patterns.

The thing about leaping through a magical portal was there was no way to know what would be on the other side.

There was no reason a Gate couldn't have been so high in the sky Liris would have crashed to her death. She could have landed in a cave full of angry bears too big to fit through the tiny cactus Gate.

So Liris was actually relieved when she merely landed on her shoulder with about the same force of impact as if one of her martial arts teachers had successfully thrown her.

She rolled through an incredible sludge—mud—no, mud and slime, there were lizard-green swirls through the gloppy brown mess—and got shakily to her feet.

Liris ran through her mental catalog of things in muddy climates that produced iridescent green slime and stared at her caked and now glowing body. Her skin wasn't burning or numb, which was good because she didn't have any supplies anyway. She hadn't been willing to risk the delay. Probably it wasn't poisonous? It looked like she was going to live for at least the next few seconds, and if anything in her immediate environs was actively trying to kill her, she didn't know about it yet. So that was settled.

Good, fantastic. Abandoning her entire life was off to a great start.

Liris took a breath and looked around—and her eyes pricked with tears.

She stood on the bank of a murky pool of water surrounded by spindly, crooked trees, everything twisted together and overlapping, and she had never seen so much life, and green, all in one place. Even if it wasn't clear whether the plants were trying to choke each other or were growing out of each other.

Even if it was all shrouded by haze she couldn't see far through.

Even if she could hear all kinds of noises that were probably horrible insects that did in fact want to kill her.

It didn't matter because it was different and thus perfect and she'd made it.

Liris looked back in the direction she'd fallen from, at the branches of different trees that had grown twined around in a circle. The center was the only clear gap in the swamp.

She had no idea where she was, which direction to go. But she was alive, for now. She had to make it count.

Liris carefully peeled the last of the petals off her hands. She couldn't leave a trail. Grimacing, she shoved her tunic and sash into the mud at her feet to cake them and cover the blood, and put them back on. Wherever she ended up, no one was going to argue against burning her clothes, which would mean fewer questions about how she'd gotten there.

Then she pulled herself out of the swamp and started running.

When armed guards accosted Liris, bound her wrists and ankles, and tossed her into the back of a cart, she knew she'd overstayed her welcome in Yenti.

She didn't bother fighting—partially because she was laughably outnumbered, but also because she needed to find out how, after a month of no problems, she'd caught anyone's attention. The best way to do that was to find out where they were taking her.

Once the cart got moving, Liris carefully sat up. A middle-aged blonde woman with a forbidding expression, forbidding arm muscles, and even more forbidding glint of sharp steel within easy reach glowered at her, but made no move to shove her back down when Liris peered over the side.

Mossy mud, tree branches that reached out like they were trying to grab her, yellow slitted eyes peering at her from the darkness, that was all fine. Just normal swamp things, she'd totally been handling this.

She squinted through the haze in the direction they were headed and finally glimpsed the stone of stumpy Yenti Castle peeking through the fog.

Liris frowned at the guard's chest.

The woman fingered her sword hilt. "What do you think you're looking at?"

Her speech marked her as local: the language here was a Senic derivative mixed with indigenous loan words, and people from the towns spoke this exact dialect with broad vowels that dropped a truly impressive number of written consonants.

Liris lifted her gaze. "Your armor. Aren't guards supposed to look official?"

The guard narrowed her eyes. "We get the official crest stamped onto our leather. Mine's old; it's worn off. What's it to you?"

So not an easily swayed newcomer to guarding, then. Too bad. "Just confirming I've been abducted officially rather than by bandits."

"Why would bandits want you?"

"Why does the castle want me?" Liris countered.

The guard shrugged. "Not my business to know."

Liris blinked. She supposed it had been too easy to maneuver her into that question for that to work, but—"It isn't?"

"Nope. Just told to pick up a newcomer to town apprenticed to Dyer Ayass, a young woman with brown skin and long wavy darker brown hair."

Liris opened her mouth.

"If you're thinking of telling me there are other brown-skinned young women around, you'd be right, but you're the only one I don't recognize and also I can smell."

Void it. That was a problem with taking up work as a dyer.

Liris had thought that had been a stroke of luck. Ayass' last apprentice had gotten himself killed by mishandling toxic ingredients, and the dyer had shockingly not been overwhelmed with applicants hoping to replace him.

Liris had never worked with Serenthuar silks, but she'd memorized every detail about their production that could be used to emphasize their quality to foreigners, which gave her a running start. In a strange way the work made her feel closer to Serenthuar than she had living there.

Liris had been taken to observe Serenthuar dyers at work, but she hadn't been permitted to interact. Or rather, she'd understood the implicit threat behind those field trips:

Fail one more test, and you'll never, ever be free.

It was some kind of cosmic irony that as soon as she was out, she ended up leaping at exactly the work that would have trapped her before.

"You really don't have any guesses?" Liris asked the guard.

The woman drawled, "In my experience, you're the one most likely to know what you did."

"Of course I know what I've done—since I woke up—I just don't know why the castle would be interested."

"Since you woke up?"

"Did they not cover that in the briefing? Yes, I stumbled starving and dehydrated out of the swamp, collapsed before I made it to civilization. Rescued by a stranger, woke up feverish, no memory. Everyone says it'll come back, but I'd apparently rolled around in the toxic blood of a snapping snake and it hasn't yet. So." The guard recoiled, and Liris shrugged. "If the castle wants to know about something I did more than a month ago, they're going to be disappointed."

She'd been surprised how easily people had trusted that answer—but then, Yenti was a politically insignificant place in the realm of Etorsiye, so why would a spy bother infiltrating? Serenthuar wouldn't have any contacts here, which made it perfect for Liris' primary goal of Not Dying, though she had no idea what contacts Jadrhun could muster.

Hopefully not demons. Liris suppressed a shiver.

Now the guard looked unimpressed, and maybe even a little smug.

"Whatever you did," she said, "the lord of Embhullor will find out."

Embhullor? The home of the elite university?

And with it, the most advanced spellcasters of the Sundered Realms?

An elite spellcaster looking for her specifically was, to put it mildly, very bad news.

"Embhullor?" Liris echoed stupidly, because she couldn't think what else would be in character to say. Void, she needed more practice talking to people.

She wasn't going to get it. The castle was looming through the haze now.

Liris had thought she'd been... managing, if not excelling. She'd at least successfully escaped imminent death, and she'd negotiated not having any practical skills. The appropriate next step was... more complicated.

The only people she'd had contact with who lived outside Serenthuar were obligated to Serenthuar, which meant they couldn't help her. Meanwhile, no stranger would believe a person with no connections making claims of an unknown but impossibly powerful language gifted to demons by a realm with the unimpeachable reputation of Serenthuar. The first thing they'd do was contact Serenthuar, and she couldn't risk that.

So Liris had three tasks:

1. Stay hidden, so Serenthuar couldn't drag her back as a sacrifice.

2. Make connections, so someone with the power to do something would believe her.

3. Write a guide to Thyrasel, so once they believed her the casters would have everything they needed to dispel whatever Jadrhun threw at them.

Liris hadn't yet figured out a way to make the second goal happen without sacrificing the first, so she'd focused on the third.

Evidently, she had nevertheless made a critical error.

Possibly it was that she should have tried to fight the guards earlier, because when the cart pulled up to the castle, even more leather-clad guards with visible stamps came toward them—this was official business then, void it—bringing the number she'd have to deal with to escape even higher.

"Should I be flattered you think I'm that big a threat even tied up, or do you people really have nothing better to do?" Liris asked incredulously.

"We've been a little slow on action lately." The guard shrugged. "But between you and me, impressing the lord of Embhullor is also a solid career move, so no one's going to miss this chance. In case you thought you could talk me into fewer guards."

Liris rolled her eyes as if that was not in fact exactly what she'd been trying to do, even as her heart thumped faster.

That meant they'd be working extra hard not to let her go.

Could she use that? If their clear advantage in numbers made them overconfident—

Then the guard leaned back, mockingly shrugged the same way a certain apprentice merchant did, and Liris knew all at once what they had on her, too.

Okay. Okay, that was good and bad.

The good news was that now she knew they were going to talk to her about languages, this lord of Embhullor wouldn't shock her into revealing something she didn't want to.

They couldn't know much. Surely? She thought fast.

Working as a dyer had introduced her to the traders who brought supplies like paper to the castle, and that introduced her to one young apprentice who had been exactly what she needed. Tenoti was smart and wanted to move up in the ranks, and no one would help him. She sympathized.

Even more pertinently, he had access to stacks of paper she needed to record a Thyrasel curriculum, so Liris bargained with what she had: teaching him a language his seniors didn't speak, so he could get better deals and make a name for himself without their help.

Letting anyone know how many other languages she knew was a risk, but minimal given what a backwater Yenti was. Tenoti was invested in keeping her secret because if he lost access to her, he lost access to her knowledge, and he wasn't stupid.

Or so she'd thought. Then again, he probably correctly figured that the lord of Embhullor could set him up better than she could, and she couldn't have predicted that this lord would appear in such a backwater without warning. Fortunately Tenoti only knew for sure that she knew that one language, which wasn't so damning—she could have been lying about the rest.

So, now Liris knew where she'd gone wrong... but not what she should have done differently. And that was the bad news, because that meant that even her best effort wasn't going to be enough to keep her away from Serenthuar.

But that was a problem for Future Liris. Right now, she had a new goal:

Wait for—

No.

Createan opportune moment, and run.

Again. Her heart kicked up in readiness.

She was going to be running for a long time.

Finally prepared for her—or so they thought—her guard gave the order to unbind her ankles and let her walk herself, so Liris had done something right.

Or maybe she hadn't done anything right after all, because they blindfolded her instead, like she really was a spy.

If only. She'd have had resources, in that case.

So Liris was boxed in and trapped, again, this time in terrain she didn't know. She was still trudging through hallways—gray stone this time, less dusty, still suffocating, and who knew if they were decorated with anything she could use—and Liris' panic sharpened her focus like a moth to a flame.

She would not go back.

The guards hauled her to a stop, and a door groaned shut behind her.

Blindfolded, Liris realized another flaw in her dyer plan: her nose was so consistently overwhelmed she couldn't rely on that sense.

All she had was silence.

Into it, a deep, masculine voice that sent gooseflesh erupting over her skin spoke: "Why is she bound?"

Not a local boy, this one: his accent was much softer.

A pause, in which Liris imagined her guards' confusion. "To make sure she doesn't escape, Lord Vhannor."

Lord Vhannor.

Oh gods. When the guard had said "the Lord of Embhullor," Liris hadn't realized she didn't mean just the lord from Embhullor who was visiting, she really meant the Lord of Embhullor.

Since Liris hadn't specialized, she didn't know many names associated with Embhullor, but Lord Vhannor was at the top of the list.

He wasn't some elite student. Lord Vhannor was the leader of the most powerful region in one of the wealthiest realms, so while this had already been bad news, it turned out this was the worst possible news for her.

This man would absolutely have diplomatic ties to Serenthuar and the power to do something about them. What was someone like that doing out here?

"Did she resist arrest?" Lord Vhannor asked in a cool tone, and ice slid up Liris' spine.

Liris had never even seen the man before, and even she recognized the inherent danger in the question.

The guard said grudgingly, "No, my Lord."

If she hadn't been blindfolded, Liris would have blinked.

That was a surprise. The guard could have easily thrown Liris under the proverbial cart.

Which could mean a few things. Maybe the guard just had a sense of integrity.

Or maybe the Lord of Embhullor had so much power that she believed he'd find out anyway, whether or not that was the case.

Or maybe he simply commanded that much respect.

"So," Lord Vhannor said crisply, emotionlessly, like he was simply, routinely gathering facts before digging the guard's grave, "you're treating her like a criminal for what she might do rather than what she has done, then."

"My Lord—"

"Am I wrong?"

Silence.

"My orders were only to bring her to the castle," Lord Vhannor said. "You'll release her at once. With my apologies for the untoward treatment."

His voice did not give any indication that this was a matter of compassion, or that he was angry.

The Lord of Embhullor had given an order, and he expected it to be obeyed precisely. That was all.

Liris' heart kicked up as a guard cut the ties around her wrists and moved behind her.

So Lord Vhannor, not the marshal of Yenti Castle, had been the one to order her brought in, but now he made a show of releasing her. And stating his apologies rather than instructing the guards to offer theirs? This only made sense if he needed her cooperation for something—

The blindfold came off.

Liris' eyes had adjusted to darkness, and for a moment the only part of the room that came into focus was Lord Vhannor.

She judged him in his early thirties, maybe a couple of years older than Jadrhun. The same golden skin tone as Jadrhun, too, and eyes with epicanthic folds, though Vhannor's were narrower and his spiky black hair cut short, the wildness contained. He was only a little taller than Liris, but he filled the room with his presence.

It wasn't just that he was beautiful; he didn't appear to be using that at all. There was something in his square jaw and broad shoulders, in the way he wore no symbols of his rank at all beyond the expensive material of his otherwise utilitarian pants and short coat, in his calm but unyielding certainty as he regarded her with the full focus of his attention that said nothing would stop him from getting what he required.

Or maybe it was his piercing eyes, an almost lavender-gray that practically gleamed against his dark hair.

This was a man who knew exactly what he was capable of, and it was a lot. He would not hesitate or be swayed, and that meant she was in danger.

A blink, and the rest of the room came into focus.

An office: Lord Vhannor stood in front of an impressively massive slab of a wooden desk covered in papers. Nothing she could easily make into a weapon, especially not with him in between.

Only two guards now, on her sides and not between her and the door. Possible. The faded rug they stood on covered most of the room, but there was uncovered stone at the edges—

"This is her," Tenoti piped up eagerly.

Liris kept her expression even with an act of will as Tenoti stepped forward from the wall.

"I am no one worth your attention, my Lord," Liris said past the hot ember burning in her chest, forcing her gaze to drift to the ground like she was overwhelmed.

"Liris, don't be like that, I already told him about all the languages you know," Tenoti wheedled.

Liris bit her lip as if embarrassed. "I may have, ah, overstated the breadth of my knowledge—"

"Oh come on! I showed him the one you're teaching me, and also what I remembered from your notes, so he knows—"

Voidit, he'd seen Thyrasel. Or whatever approximation Tenoti had reproduced. This wouldn't work.

Liris abandoned the pretense and glanced at Tenoti at last. "My secrets are not yours, to violate or to tell," she said coldly. "But I see you will sell whatever you hold to the highest bidder. Let the world bear witness to how you honor your bargains."

Tenoti blanched. "No, wait, that's not—"

Lord Vhannor cut in. "We don't have time for this. Liris, please come here."

She didn't move; he needed her for something, and she would use that. "Tell me why."

His eyebrows shot up. He wasn't in the habit of people not leaping to do his bidding, apparently.

And that did what she needed it to do.

One guard took that as a signal to seize Liris' arm and drag her forward, and she braced herself and tugged him sharply toward her.

The guard stumbled, and now she moved.

Liris snapped her fingers at his eyes, sending him stumbling back off balance. As the guard from the cart stepped toward her, Liris turned and swiped her leg behind the ankle of the guard's foot still on the ground, sending her toppling over.

Liris rolled away toward the door, used the momentum of sliding on the stone to bring her faster to her feet—

The door banged open, and Liris barely managed to change direction in time to keep from getting smacked in the face with it.

That was enough. The guards behind her were back on their feet, boxing her in from behind, and guards from outside blocked the doorway.

Bile rose in her throat. That quickly, it was all over for her again. Just one miscalculation.

"Enough," Lord Vhannor said coldly, and Liris shivered.

Then she squared her shoulders and turned.

As long as she was alive, she could fight.

"Liris, let's try this again." Lord Vhannor strode toward her implacably, brandishing a piece of paper. "Right now I don't care who you are, where you're from, or why you're here. All I care about is whether you can read this."

He shoved the page in her face, and Liris blinked.

She kept her face blank, fully prepared to pretend regrettable ignorance, but she studied it nevertheless.

On the sheet was a diagram of layers of circles. Inside there were mathematical equations winding in an odd path she couldn't quite place, similar to the command form of Thyrasel. Then there was a layer of archaic musical notation for the Sotruthian drum dance, punctuated with—

Her head tilted as she frowned at it.

"You can read it," Lord Vhannor breathed.

And not in the tone of someone who'd found the quarry he was hunting.

Like someone who'd found water in a desert just in time.

She had another decision to make, and fast.

She'd just learned that the risk she'd taken with Tenoti had landed her in deep shit.

On the other hand, if she didn't take another risk, she could admit that Future Liris wasn't going to have any options.

And void it, she did not have a good feeling about this diagram, and if it was Thyrasel, this soon after she'd left her notes with a demon servant, in a realm connected to Serenthuar by an unknown Gate—

"It's nonsense," Liris murmured, her head tilting further as she followed the scattered Thyrasel letters. "That doesn't make any—" She took a breath; looked up at his intent lavender eyes. "Do you have paper and ink?"

His reflexes were even faster than Jadrhun's.

And the thing that Lord Vhannor of Embhullor, home of the most elite spellcasting university in the Sundered Realms, needed her to read was a spell.

Liris accepted the paper and pen and right there, surrounded by guards, began running calculations, clearing out the mathematical clutter.

"I've already isolated the symbols of the written language," Lord Vhannor told her briskly.

"You can't have put them in grammatical order. I think the equations are directions—"

"Yes, that part too. Look at this."

This time Liris followed him to the desk.

The papers were all scratchwork laying out the pattern and content of the spell in Traditional Enchor characters, separated into sections.

Liris met Lord Vhannor's gaze and held it.

This close, she could see that his icy purple eyes were gold on the inside, and that fire was flaring now. For her.

Keeping her secrets safe had served her well, but then again, biding her time in obscurity arguably hadn't.

It was possible this was an elaborate trap for her.

It was also possible it wasn't, and Jadrhun had already made a move that no one else would be able to counter.

The moment stretched. She might not be able to read emotion in Lord Vhannor's eyes, but they radiated an intensity she wanted to believe was drive to do something.

She had to risk it. If Lord Vhannor betrayed her—well, it wasn't like she cared about him, and it wasn't like he'd be the first.

Liris bent over the papers, and focused.

She compared the shape of the spell, rearranged three sections, performed new calculations on the first connection. Wordlessly, Lord Vhannor started work on the second.

He asked her no questions, just kept up as they worked.

With increasing dread on Liris' part as it became clear what they were decoding.

Hopefully not demons.

"This is a spell to open a portal to the void, isn't it?" Liris murmured.

A guard behind her sucked in a breath; her cart guard cursed.

"Yes," Lord Vhannor said with detachment. "I copied the diagram from an active spell inside the swamp, surrounding what I believe is an unidentified Gate. It's already eaten enough ambient magic to ping the castle's sensors, which is why I was here to investigate at all. The portal's not big enough yet for a demon to fit through, but it won't be long."

Liris faltered. "Shouldn't you evacuate?"

He slashed the thought away with his hand. "There's no time. I've never seen a spell this simple grow so powerful so quickly. If I don't take it down today, reinforcements will never have time to arrive. No guards or casters present are trained to fight a demon of the size that will be able to enter."

"Except for you."

His gaze was glacial, hard and unyielding. "Yes."

The dour female guard's voice broke into their bubble. "A language only she can read, and it came from inside the swamp?"

Oh no.

Liris' gaze flew back to Lord Vhannor. His jaw was clenched, and he wasn't looking at her.

"I know this handwriting," Lord Vhannor said, "and it isn't hers."

Liris' heart about stopped in shock.

She blurted, "You know Jadrhun?"

Nowhe looked at her, his purple eyes spearing into her gaze. "You know him well enough to recognize this?"

"No. I taught him the beginnings of Thyrasel, the language he apparently used to put this together. And then I ran for my life before he didn't have any more use for me."

Lord Vhannor blinked.

Her guard scoffed, "No memory?"

Liris rolled her eyes. "Yes, I do remember everything about the demon servant and my own government out to kill me, and certainly the first person I'd trust with that information is a guard who doesn't even ask who she's arresting."

Lord Vhannor lifted a hand and commanded, "Later. Can you focus?"

Liris snorted. Could she focus.

She glanced back at the pages, closed her eyes, breathed.

Opened them, lifted her hand, and let her pen fly across the paper. This state was like a light trance, and Lord Vhannor was as much as he appeared, because he fell right in step beside her.

It felt like only seconds later when she looked up and jerked away from the light of all the torches guards were holding around them. The sun had set.

Still the same day, but late.

Liris met Lord Vhannor's gaze. The determined light in his eyes matched what she thought her own must look like.

"Will you come?" he asked.

He asked like she had a choice, with demons on their way.

Liris had run from Serenthuar and Jadrhun; she couldn't run from this.

No; that should be her only reason, but it wasn't. She was afraid, yes—she wasn't stupid enough not to understand a demon could kill her in an instant.

But her mind was on fire, and though her heart raced, she felt like she could finally breathe.

"I wouldn't miss it," Liris said.

Lord Vhannor's gaze was clear and steady with a hint of heat burning through for the first time, and when he nodded his acknowledgment of her Liris felt a dam burst in her heart.

He snapped a gesture that had all the guards stepping back, and together, Liris and the Lord of Embhullor ran for the demon portal.