Old war had opened this valley. The valley had answered with fruit.
Terrace walls followed the old cuts. Orchards spilled down the scars. The earth kept the day's warmth and gave it back slowly through the soles of her boots, and the rain of earlier days still hung in the air, carrying pollen and smoke and the close smell of things alive. She breathed it in and felt the weight of it settle.
Twilight gathered violet along the ridge and poured gold down the western slope.
Below, the camp lit itself in answer. Torch after torch, amber halos strung down paths that generations of bare feet had smoothed and war had taught to carry weight.
She stood at the head of the path and looked at it longer than she meant to.
Cookfires sent up elegant plumes. Fat hissed where it met hot iron. Honey-glazed roots cracked and spat over open flame. Salt and sugar, ash and spice. Underneath it all ran the noise of a settlement that had decided to be happy tonight.
Orc voices low and round, near enough to human at a distance, never human up close. Imps answering them, shrill and bright. Cups striking barrel tops. Somewhere out of sight a drum worked up through the ground into her boots before it ever reached her ears.
There was no malice anywhere in it. Only life.
Imps crossed the camp through gaps the orcs never needed, sparks trailing in brief controlled bursts off their hands. A cluster of them had surrounded a plate, squeaking, candied fruit stuck to their fingers. Warriors sparred close by, and steel sang on the strikes. Every footfall and every blow came up through the ground into her, whether she wanted them or not.
She pulled herself away from it.
On the ridge the air turned colder. Wind found the seams of her sleeves. It tasted of iron and wet moss and the smoke curling off the brazier beside the table, where she and her two advisors bent over a battered campaign map under one lantern's worth of light.
Something was wrong. Not the weather. Not the light. Something fine-grained and constant, like rust scraping where she could not reach to stop it.
The elder orc leaned over the map with his teeth showing. One eye had gone milky gray a decade back. The other kept the lantern in it like a bead of glass. Pale scar tissue ran in rivers the length of his jaw.
"Three patrols," he said. "No calls for aid. No bodies."
She crouched opposite him. Cold came up through her fingertips where they touched the ground. She drew sigils into the dirt, lines that curved back on themselves and crossed under her own skin, and she had drawn these ten thousand times, and tonight the ground refused them. The marks slid half a finger's width off true and snapped home again. Silver chimed at her ears. Four rings, one for each ward she had left.
"He circles," she said. "He is feeling for the edges. Testing the wards." Her fingers stopped on one of the marks. "He will try again before morning."
The goblin warlord beside her tipped his chin at the map. Burn scars webbed tight over his long arms. He smelled of ash and old leather, and he had not once looked away from the parchment.
"And when he does?" he asked.
"Then we bleed," the orc said. Vapor hung on the words. "That is how it has always been calculated."
She turned to the treeline. The trees shifted down there and whispered like something anxious in its sleep.
"Raise the clans. Sound the horns. Call the banners."
"It will not matter if the Circle answers," the orc said. He put a finger on the map. "When they move, the Pattern moves first."
The brazier popped. The three of them let the silence stand.
The orc tipped his chin lower, and fire moved in the hollow of his working eye. "One," he said. "If the land grants us a purchase, we may hold. Two, if we are fortunate." His jaw set. "If three come upon us, nothing holds."
He stopped there.
She met his eye and came to her feet without hurrying. Wind touched her cheek, cool as a river's edge.
"It will not be a battle," she said. She looked down at the camp again. "It will be a culling."
The goblin shook his head. "They will not. Three is not control. That is genocide."
"They give no warning," she said. "They remind us."
The orc crossed his arms and leather creaked under his hands. "Then let them be warned, Your Majesty."
The words stood between them. She did not correct him.
Below, the celebration crested. Boar belly had come off the firepit in impleaf pastry, fat running gold down the crust, sweet enough at that distance to turn her stomach over with want. The crowd pressed in on it, laughing. Ale went over the rims of cups and soaked into the dirt.
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An imp girl with violet eyes and purple sparks running across her knuckles tore through the middle of it, and an orc boy came after her on feet still too large for him, tusks barely through the gum.
"You cheated at cards again," he puffed.
"I did not."
A hand the size of a shield lifted them both off the ground.
"Stars," the girl complained through a yawn. "We'll miss all of them."
"They will not go anywhere," her aunt murmured.
She put her forehead to each of theirs in turn and set them back down. "Inside," she said, and pointed at the ring of huts along the square, where the smaller ones had gathered.
The imp girl groaned for an audience she no longer had and shuffled toward the nearest door anyway. The orc boy plodded after her. The door opened just wide enough to let them both through, and lamplight spilled out across a packed floor where shapes shifted: bedrolls laid close, caretakers moving between them without waking anyone. The door shut behind them.
She stayed looking longer than she meant to. The beams. The hide stretched over them. The thin smoke going up from the apex of the roof. Where the youngest of them slept.
Content, for the length of one breath, she turned back to the ridge.
Then the wind changed.
What had been sweet turned foul. The cookfires leaned low. The lanterns stuttered, and the night paused the way a held breath pauses it, and the stars began going out one at a time. A stillness moved through the settlement, thick enough that the children stirred in their sleep and turned over.
On the ridge above the camp, shapes went solid where nothing had been standing. Tall. Attentive. Waiting.
Then the footsteps came. One. Another. Then many, running.
They sounded like nothing she could name. Not hooves, not boots. Every one of them went through the cloth of the tents and into her bones. Behind the camp something enormous pushed through the grass, larger than an orc and not solely a man.
Down in the command tent cut into the hillside, an old one passed his hands along the sleeves of his aged robes.
"The veil has been torn," he said.
"Where are the horns?" a younger voice called from the dark outside. "The scouts should have come in."
"None of them," the old one said, thin as paper.
Someone screamed. Sharp. Then not at all.
Heat rushed across the basin, thick enough to choke on. Ash scoured her eyes raw and set on her tongue like grit. The ground split beneath the ridge, and flame came out of the crack, and sigils burned through the air in a long wild line. The footsteps above them slowed.
Then stopped.
Something enormous stepped out of the rift.
Magic spun around it without landing. Stone tore up under its boots and stuck to its hide, obsidian and bone melted into one surface, knife-like spurs running the length of its spine. Where eyes belonged, metal had been bent into something like a smile.
It screamed. The sound was wet and old, and it came from somewhere under the throat.
Tents went down inward. Canvas left the woodwork. Boulders came up out of the ground with a choking noise. Limbs moved through the air. A man ran past her with a spear burning in primordial fire, and the behemoth took him up off the ground, and bone gave, and he went quiet.
She was already moving, down off the ridge, cutting for the huts below while the camp came apart around her. More figures stepped out of the flame, which licked at grass gone black. One came at her through the smoke, a dancer ringed in blades, and the knives whistled like flies, and she threw herself off the path, rolled, came up running, and the steel passed through the place her throat had been.
A sorceress moved through the press of them, and the Pattern bent with her as she went, and arrows aimed at her found nothing, and blades that reached her closed on air. A killer went through the sentries at the eastern gate without a sound, and one of them lived long enough to scream. A figure in mirrored plate worked its way along the palisade, and every blade the figure's own weapon touched went quiet.
She kept on. The huts were close. She could see the thin smoke still coming off the smallest chimney, and she fixed on it the way a swimmer fixes on shore.
Then the rot arrived.
It walked the path behind her, and the grass went black where it passed. The air went sterile. A figure stood inside the rot and raised one pale hand, unhurried, and the living went gray where they stood, and then nothing moved, and the silence that came down was worse than the screaming, and red clouds rolled through the smoke.
Her sleeves were singed. Smoke crawled down her arms. The Pattern stuttered inside her like something dropping its grip. Her sword arm shook. She set it.
She did not run.
"Children!" she called. "Protect the children!"
Her voice tore on it. Flame went through her chest. Her boot heel found the ground, and she got back up with grass under her palms, and she would not go down again.
When the screaming stopped, when the fires had sunk to smoldering wreaths, she was still standing.
A hand closed on her arm. Hard. Too strong to be gentle. She did not fight it. It took her through the gore to a clearing no one had bled in, which smelled of rain about to fall.
The Suzerain was there.
She knew him before she could see him. The Pattern had pulled away from him, and reality stood close around him like a room too small to breathe in. Gold clung to him, armor or illumination, she could not tell which. The air tasted of ozone and freezing iron.
His lips moved first. Too wide. Too cruel.
Her eyes went to the edge of the camp, where one hut was still standing. Planks. Hide over them. Thin smoke going up from the chimney. Her hut. Where the youngest slept.
He tilted his head, and she understood that he had followed her gaze.
"No," she said, and it did not come out.
He did not look at her. He raised one hand, and emerald light bloomed at the fingers. The air contracted. Reality held. Timber groaned and began to move. For a moment, nothing happened.
Then everything did.
The hut folded inward. Walls came together with a violence that had been waiting inside them. Wood split. The hide roof came down over itself, one piece after another, the way a thing falls in a direction no one built for. A small sound came out of it.
The moment stretched and would not end. Dust stood up from the place where the hut had been.
Something tore through her chest, and she did not notice she had gone down until the dirt came up to meet her palms. He lowered his hand and turned back to her.
His eyes cracked open.
Emerald filled her sight, and the Pattern inside her came apart. Sound went. Everything folded the wrong way. Pain kept happening and had nowhere to live. Far off, across the basin, the mountains opened. Verdelume fell out of the sky.
He came closer. Her sight came back in pieces. Fractured gold. Wet green. The rough line of his shoulders. She would not kneel. There was light enough to see by, and the Pattern still called to her as she went.
His boot came up, and she saw sky above him. So few stars left now.
His foot came down on the earth.
Bone gave. The world held its breath for one whole moment.
Warmth.
The last thing she saw was blades of grass beside her cheekbone. Still green. No blood on it.
Night came down over them.
The Imp Queen of Verdelume died silently.