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  Great Eteri warships were docked along the town's large harbor, lining the coast in displays of yellow and black glory. The ships creaked with the constant movements of the water and breezes, and many masts served as meeting places for flocks of perching white birds. Past where the sands molded into plains, multiple curiously shaped stone buildings dotted the land. Most of the homes and businesses in Tal were in square-shaped structures but stood a few stories high, giving them a tower-like look. Even when the Vhiri lived along the plains, they sought height.

  We walked through the coastal town, on a mission to meet Queen Tilda's engineer, but still enjoying the sights. Tal appeared self-sustainable, though we had passed shipments of goods to and from the town to Mistral. The capital city delivered supplies and metals from the mines to Tal, while the town sent return shipments of ocean fish and wood.

  Wood. So that was where Eteri's supply came from. Ships were arriving in Tal's harbor from the south where the wildlands were. Somehow, Eteri was harvesting wood from Silvi's rainforest without bothering the beastmen. Or, perhaps the two did fight over resources, and Calder had just never had the chance to tell me. Either way, given that Eteri's lands were free of forests, Tal was so well-populated because it had to be to meet with the rest of the country's demand for wood.

  Witnessing the wood imports to Tal made me realize just how vital shielding Eteri's ships had to have been for this war. The queen was desperate for their protection because she had to be. The only land other than the wildlands which could have offered them wood in trade was located in Chairel and Hammerton. Perhaps Hammerton's natural resources were the reason the dwarven country had always had the upper hand on Eteri. It was baffling to me that Eteri had built a barrier between itself and the wildlands. I reminded myself to talk to Queen Tilda about possibly working with the beastmen in the south and opening the border. Then, not only could Eteri access trade with them and more wood resources, but the mercenary ships which often visited Silvi could bring Eteri imported goods from Chairel without the two having to work with one another.

  Tal had an abnormally large graveyard in the midst of the plains, surrounded by a short stone wall. As we passed it, I noticed a few Vhiri visiting graves and leaving both field flowers and jewelry. Jewelry meant quite a bit to the Vhiri, I'd noticed, for not only did many elves here wear rings and necklaces, but many also had multiple piercings. Perhaps it was because most of them were mages, or maybe it was merely a cultural influence.

  There were few giants in Tal, and those who were here worked near the harbor. We headed there. The port reminded me of Silvi's minus the forest since it was bright and bustling. I reached up to my neck, my fingers grazing along the necklace holding Ricco's ashes. He had lived in Silvi for the short time he'd been free. I had been waiting to release the ashes until it felt right, and it felt right here.

  The docks were mostly made out of stone and felt solid beneath my feet as I walked to the end of a long pier. It was beautiful here. With the town behind me, it felt almost as if I was standing in the middle of the ocean. The Orna cliffs rose high to my right, where the ocean waves splashed up against craggy brown rocks.

  The others waited behind me as I screwed the small bottle open, and held it out over the ocean. I did not dump it yet. I thought of Ricco, and how one mistake of mine had cost him his life. I vowed never to make such a mistake again. My friends meant the world to me. As my eyes peered at the tiny bottle, it amazed me that the last remnants of a man were within. I promised myself that I would never allow any of the others to be reduced to such a state.

  A cool breeze whistled over the ocean, and I took its invitation to turn the bottle, watching the last ashes of a tortured man escape their confines and float away, separating and dispersing into the waters.

  Death is the only true freedom. It was one of the last things Kyrin had ever said to me, and I hoped that was true for Ricco. I did not believe in an afterlife, but if one did exist, I wished he could finally be truly free.

  I screwed the bottle back onto the chain. I was not going to get rid of this necklace. Calder had given it to me, after all, and though its ashes were gone, its meaning was not. The jewelry would be my burden to bear to remind myself of the sacrifices made in this war I waged.

  “Come,” I said, as I turned and passed the others. Azazel patted me on the shoulder as I passed him, understanding my inner turmoil. After all, he'd been there for Ricco's death.

  I wasn't sure where to find the queen's chief engineer, so I decided to stop to ask one of the giants at the harbor. It was intimidating to walk up to the man even though he looked friendly enough. The giant was in the midst of unloading cut tree trunks from a ship onto the harbor, lifting up each one as if it were merely an inconvenience. Even when the man bent over while he worked, he still was many times my height.

  “Excuse me!” I greeted, waving an arm in the air. The giant glanced over from his work. Like the rest of the giants, his head was many times the size of the other races, and his nose was bulbous, the skin of it darkened red from the constant sunlight.

  “Hail,” he greeted in turn, his voice thick and robust with depth. Brown eyes the size of saucers looked over my friends, finding our variety to be most interesting.

  “We are looking for Magnilda Roark,” I told him, holding a letter to the engineer from the queen up toward him, so he knew I was on official business. “Is she here?”

  “She is drinking,” the giant replied, pointing one colossal finger at the town behind us. I turned around, finding a tavern sitting just offshore. It was two stories high and built entirely out of stone, though it had a wooden sign hanging from only one chain of two near the front door, where it awkwardly swiveled in the breeze.

  “Thank you!” I told the giant, before heading to the tavern. It was a little concerning that the woman decided to drink rather than work at this time of day. The sun hadn't even reached the center of the sky yet.

  As we approached the tavern, I heard the beating of drums within, sprinkled with the laughter of drunks. The music was harsh in Eteri, full of beats and a variety of scratchy percussion instruments. From time to time, the Vhiri also seemed to enjoy flutes with which to mellow the roughness, but I heard no flutes here.

  The tavern was a mess of epic proportions. When we first entered it, I was filled with alarm, for multiple Vhiri men were lying on the stone floor near the bar, passed out. A puddle of vomit was sprayed over the stone to our right, and a broken wooden chair was scattered in pieces beside a table that was missing one of its legs. It smelled of ale and the acidity of bile, and at the center of it all was the woman we were looking for.

  “More!” One massive fist the size of a structural stone was smashed onto the bar. Beside her hand sat a pile of gold, and pieces of it fell off to the floor from the movement, clattering around the bodies of multiple men. The bartender laughed with drunken glee and proceeded to pour alcohol into the glass before the woman and the Vhiri man beside her, who was barely a third of her size.

  Magnilda had a hulking back with terrible posture and sat facing away from us on the only stone stool of the tavern. A head full of blonde dreadlocks were pulled back into a thick ponytail, which was tied with rope given how much of it there was. Magnilda was not as large as the giants, but she had to have had their blood because she was massive. A long war hammer leaned up against the stone bar beside her, the head of the weapon nearly the size of my torso. The face of it was as large as my head and shone with the most exquisite steel. The claw of it was long and sharp and showed signs of wear.

  Both the woman and the last remaining Vhiri man drank from their mugs, though the woman finished it in two gulps while the man could not drink as fast. After half of the mug was gone, his head began to sway. The glass hurtled to the floor, shattering into pieces along the stone while its contents puddled into a fallen man's hair. Then, the man tilted over on his stool, before he and his seat crashed to the floor.

  “Ha! Again!” The woman exclaimed
, pulling the stack of gold toward her.

  “You might have more challengers,” the bartender claimed, before pointing back to us.

  Magnilda turned her head, and two large blue eyes met my own. “Well, hell-ooo beautiful! I don't want your gold, love, but I'll give ya some of mine for some of that.” One thick eyebrow lifted as her eyes rolled over me.

  I laughed softly with embarrassment. “You are Magnilda Roark?”

  “Aye,” she replied before glancing over at my other friends. “Good gods, who are you fine-looking people? Ya got one of each flavor all in a single group.”

  My stomach tightened. This woman talked similarly to Theron and Bjorn, which reminded me of them both. I assumed she'd come into contact with the dwarves, then, since that was how the two men had picked up their dialect. After all, I hadn't heard such a thick dwarven accent in years, and we were far from Hammerton.

  “We are the Seran Renegades.” I stepped over the body of a drunken man to get to her before I held out a hand. “I am Kai Sera.”

  “In the flesh!” Magnilda exclaimed, grabbing my hand with one three times the size. “Queen Tilda told me you were coming. She's had me working hard for your arrival.”

  “Has she?” I questioned, glancing knowingly at the men below me.

  “Ah, gots to keep those juices flowin', love,” she grinned. She winked at me flirtatiously. “I'm good at that, ya know.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but I have a thing for necromancers.” I glanced back to Cerin.

  Magnilda laughed boisterously. “Ah! Forgive me! I nearly forgot.” She swooped a finger in the air above her head. “The whole reason this war was started, was it not?” She looked Cerin over while nodding approvingly. “He's war-startin' worthy, I must say. Gods, all of ya are beautiful. Is it a requirement to join ya?”

  “No,” I answered, smiling. She was so full of energy I found myself amused by her. “I hate to say it, but we are here on business, Magnilda.”

  “Please call me Maggie, love.” She lifted two thick blonde eyebrows up at the letter I held. “That for me? From Miss Prissy Pants of the High Tower, I assume?”

  I chuckled. “Yes.” I handed the letter over to her, and we all waited as she read it.

  “Gods, must everything be so complicated?” Maggie wrinkled up her nose with disapproval. “Take them to do this, Magnilda. Be sure ya show them that, Magnilda. Teach me how to wipe my ass, Magnilda.” She exhaled in a rush, before glancing at the bartender. “I must skedaddle.”

  The Vhiri man threw a hand toward the door. “Oh, shove it. Like you won't be in here tonight.”

  “Yeah, I will be.” Maggie stood from her stone bar stool, towering above me at almost double my height. She made a motion to the messy floor. “Clean this up by then, will ya? What kind of a filthy establishment ya runnin'?”

  The bartender laughed, before waving her off.

  Maggie led us out of the tavern and back toward the harbor, carrying her large war hammer as if it were barely more than a butter knife. She was ten feet tall, and her war hammer must have been six feet in length. The engineer also was quite stocky and thick with muscle, though I couldn't tell if it was because of work or battle. She glanced back to us as she talked, friendly and open. “Now, these warships are of my own creation, so I doubt you've seen anything like it before. Ya guys ever been on a ship?”

  “Unfortunately,” Nyx replied.

  Maggie laughed. “Ah! Not one for the sea, ey?”

  “Just the seamen,” Nyx retorted before she and Jakan chuckled like juveniles at the double entendre.

  “Great minds think alike, love,” Maggie grinned back at Nyx. “I suppose ya all heard about the shields of our warships?”

  We followed Maggie along one of the piers, where she started to board one of the empty warships in the harbor. “We have,” I told her, looking around at the ship. It was as large as the Galleon Stallion had been and set up much the same, though I hadn't seen any cannons poking out of its sides.

  “Well, as ya probably know, the Vhiri deal in magic. Our navies tend to utilize mages of all elements, and life magic is used to shield these ships.” Maggie led us to the bow of the ship, where one large finger pointed at the wood below the railing. “Kai, come look at this. See it?”

  I walked up beside her and leaned closer to where she pointed. Copper wiring ran along the wood. As Maggie moved her finger along the wire, I could see that she had connected it to the exterior of the entire ship, including running the cables up along the masts.

  “Ya wield life, correct?” Maggie asked me.

  I nodded. “Cerin and I both.”

  “Then ya both know that shields can protect anything ya throw 'em at,” the engineer went on, her blue eyes glancing toward the masts. “The only problem is that a regular shield spell can't encapsulate an entire warship because it is not powerful enough.”

  “So how did you overcome that?” I questioned.

  Maggie turned, pointing at the tip of the bow, where a metal box sat on the wooden floor connected to the web of wires. “This stores energy from multiple life mages. There's another one at the back of the poop deck.” She motioned to the other end of the ship. “One ship takes multiple mages to keep it shielded, Kai. And as ya know, life and death are the rarest elements. In preparation for this war, Queen Tilda needs options. We have too many ships and not enough life mages.”

  “And she said that magic cannot escape the wards,” I added.

  Maggie nodded. “Correct. For now, we have been considering using wards strategically by putting them up and removing them between attacking and defending when it comes to fighting the Seran mages. Physical shields are different, as ya know. Magic flies straight through those, and the dwarven cannons can only breach them after a few hits. As ya can imagine, combining magic with mechanics makes things complicated.”

  “The energy in these boxes...” I pointed to the one before us. “How is it stored?”

  “Via rechargeable cells made of metal and chemicals,” Maggie replied. “It took me a decade or two working with Vhiri alchemists to figure that one out.”

  “How would I go about shielding a ship like this?” I asked her next.

  “Ya would shield it via this charger,” she replied. “You can try it if ya want. Act like the box is simply a person to be shielded.”

  I walked forward, building life magic in a palm, and thrust the energy toward the box. The normal zwip of the shield encapsulating its target was lengthened as the protection grew outward from the charger. The energy of the spell zipped over and through the copper wires, finally surrounding the warship in a sideways egg-shape.

  “Wow,” I murmured, my eyes traveling along the length of it. The entire ship was shielded, now. All of my friends within would be safe. “And you designed this?”

  “I did,” Maggie admitted.

  “This all is very...” I trailed off before my eyes found hers again. “Dwarven.”

  Maggie chuckled before she looked at us all. “I have dwarven blood running through my veins.”

  “You do?” I questioned, raising my eyebrows at her height.

  “I am a half-breed, love. My mum was a dwarf, my pops was a giant. And no, before ya ask, I do not know how she survived such an encounter.”

  Nyx snorted a laugh. “Very carefully,” she mused.

  “What is a half-breed of a dwarf doing in the land of the Vhiri?” I asked her curiously.

  “Ah.” Maggie looked off over the ocean before she chuckled dryly. “Mum was a miner who came to Eteri during one of the many times Hammerton and Eteri tried to play nice. Pops was a miner in Reva, where she was stationed. The two fell in love, had this bundle a' joy ya see here, and were both killed during the Reva Mine Collapse of 354 when I was a young lass.”

  “The Collapse was a terrorist attack,” I commented, having heard of it.

  “Aye. The dwarves used some explosives to demolish the place from the inside, ending the little tea party between them an
d Eteri. So my parents were killed, and Eteri no longer wanted me because they went to war with the dwarves over it all, and my race didn't bode well for them.” Maggie looked back to us. “The other half of me didn't bode too well for Hammerton, either, because I wasn't allowed to disembark in their harbors. They sent me back here, where I finally convinced Queen Tilda I'd work for her if she let me stay in peace.”

  “She must appreciate all the work you've done for her ships, considering,” Anto commented. Perhaps Maggie's story of racial judgments against her reminded him of his own.

  “Ah...” Maggie laughed softly. “She uses me, nothing more. Queen Tilda does not have subjects; she has tools.” The engineer's blue eyes moved over the harbor, where they caught on the other giants. “The giants accept me here. Most Vhiri accept me now, too. Thankfully, I resemble a giant more than a dwarf, and I have lived in Eteri for decades. Many know me.”

  I took note of Maggie's evident distaste for the queen and decided to level with her. “Has the queen suggested anything to you about our presence here that would be suspicious?”

  Maggie glanced at me. “No. Why, is she holding things from ya?”

  “Yes. There are many secrets she and the Sentinels are keeping from us. Cyrus expressed concern for our welfare here.”

  Maggie frowned. “Gods, I wish I knew why. I am kept out of the loop, myself. The Sentinels come through from time to time, and they are nice enough to me, but I am not privy to their war unless I am given directions.”

  “What do you know of Bhaskar?” Cerin asked her, taking the question straight from my thoughts.