She followed the footprints.

Erida felt the all too familiar sensation of being watched. She wondered if the ghosts of the people who used to live here still clung to the stones. Were they following her now, whispering about the Queen of Galland as the rest of the world did?

She imagined what they might say. Married to a nobody. Four years a queen with nothing to show for it. No conquest, no victory.

Just wait, Erida told them. There is steel in me yet.

She found Taristan and the wizard in the old chapel, in front of the single intact window, its glass blue and red and golden. The goddess Adalen wept sapphire tears over the body of her mortal lover, his chest torn open by hounds of Infyrna, a realm of fire and judgment. Their forms retreated in the back of the glass, burning and unholy. Erida knew the scriptures. Adalen’s mortal gave his life to save the goddess from the fiery hounds. Strange, the scriptures never gave him a name.

Red Ronin knelt near the window but did not pray to it. Instead he put his back to the goddess while he whispered, eyes shut, his voice too low to hear. In the shadows of the chapel wall, Taristan prowled, a tiger with naked claws. His courtly attire was abandoned, traded for rough leathers and the same weatherworn cloak he’d first arrived in. He looked as far from queen’s consort as a man could be. The Spindleblade flashed in his hand, drawn from its sheath. The steel was clean, a mirror to the blue-and-white sky.

His eyes met Erida’s like lightning finding the earth.

She stopped walking, holding her ground. The air crackled between them, the work of a Spindle. Torn or close enough to feel. Burning or willing to burn. She sucked in a breath of air, wanting to taste it.

“Is it done?” she said, her eyes darting.

But the chapel looked unremarkable. Old stone, broken rocks, moss and roots. The trees weren’t old enough to form a new roof. She saw nothing out of place, nothing to hint at a Spindle torn, a realm opened, another gift given, be it an army or a monster.

“Not yet,” Taristan answered, his voice as deep as she remembered. She could still feel his fingers in her hair, still see his blood on her bed.

Erida glanced to Ronin, then back to the broken castle around them.

She took another breath. She couldn’t taste a Spindle, but she tasted truth. “An earthquake destroyed this place two decades ago. People said it was the will of the gods, or a simple act of nature. But that isn’t true, is it?” Sunshine filled the window, making Adalen glow. “There is a Spindle here, closed but waiting. It broke the castle, not anything else.”

The wizard’s eyes snapped open, his prayers cut off. “Your histories said as much, for anyone with the mind to see it,” he hissed. “Even the echoes have power.”

His red-rimmed glare ran over Erida’s skin from her wrists to her neck. It was like a glowing poker, close enough to throw off cloying heat, but not enough to burn. She raised her chin. The wizard would not best her with tricks.

It was Taristan who stepped between them, breaking Ronin’s raw-eyed stare.

“I thought you’d like to watch,” he said, silhouetted against Adalen’s tears.

Overhead, a cloud passed over the sun, plunging them all into shadow. The wind found them in the corpse of the castle, pulling at her traveling clothes with invisible fingers. It stirred the hair falling from the braided crown around her head, blowing a curtain of ash brown across her vision.

She held Taristan’s gaze.

“Indeed I would.”

He turned on his heel, stalking to the stained-glass window, his empty hand raised in a gloved fist. Without so much as a grunt, he punched clean through the goddess’s face, shattering blue and white onto the mossy ground. A few shards punctured his knuckles and he picked them out with a wince.

He still feels pain.

Erida looked on, filled with fascination.

“When you first came to me, I wondered if this was all a trick,” she murmured. A few drops of blood welled up in Taristan’s cuts, falling to the grass before the skin knit together again.

He tested his fist. Not even the glimmer of a scar remained. “Does this look like a trick to you?” he rumbled, glowering.

The ground muffled her footsteps as she moved, skirts wheeling around her legs. “A con man and his pet wizard,” Erida said, turning his fist over in her grasp. The blood was still there, but nothing else. “Using petty magic to ensnare a queen.”

“Petty magic,” Ronin spat, his scarlet robes like a gown around him. He rose smoothly to his feet, his face flushed like his clothing. “You know not of what you speak.”

Erida glared, her gaze like a volley of arrows. Very few upon the Ward would dare speak to her with such a tone. “Then enlighten me, Wizard.”

It was Taristan who answered, raising the sword in his other hand, the hilt clutched in his fist. It reflected his face, the scratches below his eye turned to pearly white scars. “I took this sword from the vaults of Iona, winding deep beneath an Elder fortress. They called me a thief for retrieving what was mine, wielded by my ancestors, even when my own brother carried its twin.”

He ran a finger down the strange steel, etched with runes in a language Erida could not read. She tried to picture the Elder enclave, hidden from the world, surrounded by mist. And ruin crawling within, a Corblood mortal with a deathless grudge and iron will.

“That day was long in coming. It was Ronin who found me, told me what I was. The red wizard pulled a mercenary from the mud of a Treckish war camp and made him a conqueror,” Taristan continued, his voice low but strong, reverberating in Erida’s chest. He passed the sword through the air errantly, without thought. “I knew in my bones I was not the same, not a man like the ones beside me, content to fight and fuck and farm, drinking their money and pissing their lives into nothing. I wanted the horizon more than I wanted any cup or coin or concubine.”

Ronin raised his chin, looking on Taristan as he would a beloved son. He passed by him, brushing a white hand over his shoulder. “Such is the way of Old Cor. Of all your like,” the wizard said, moving on. “It’s the Spindle in your blood.”

“You are children of crossing,” Erida offered, remembering her lessons as best she could. As the heir to Galland, she had been taught the tales of Old Cor as much as any other part of her birthright. Her father used to tell them at night, like any other bedtime story. Children of crossing, children of conquest. Destined to rule every corner of the Ward, but they fell. They failed. We are their successors.