LOW PROBABILITY: Lindon fails to find a suitable Path to supplement his Path of Twin Stars, and runs from the battle. He is caught by the Jai clan and executed in captivity.

LOW PROBABILITY: Lindon devises a weapon specifically designed to counter Jai Long’s spear. He acquits himself well in the duel, but dies of his wounds.

Suggested topic: powerful Paths of Cradle. Continue?

Denied, report complete.

Chapter 19

Yerin couldn’t be sure if she was awake or dreaming. Her body had no weight to it, drifting on the breeze without direction. Must be a dream, then. The last thing she remembered was facing a Highgold, so cheers and celebration to her for surviving. She hadn’t so much as torn the wrapping around Jai Long’s head, but she hadn’t retreated or died either. Her master would call that a win. She floated into memory, allowing it to carry her back to sleep.

Her arm prickled.

She glanced down, just to make sure everything was all prim and proper, only to see a spider the size of a fox suspended from the ceiling, poking her skin with needle-sharp legs.

She tried to jerk away, but whatever kept her suspended in the air also had her tied like a pig for roasting. She was held in an invisible trap with a giant spider clinging to her arm.

Yerin’s breath froze, and before she could think, she tore everything apart.

Sword madra blasted out of her in every direction, shredding the spider…and the unseen bonds that held her suspended halfway to the ceiling. She landed in a crouch, spider parts clattering to the ground in a sizzle of escaping madra. A construct, then. Of course it was. She shuddered anyway.

The walls of her room were made of rough wood that still smelled fresh. One door—the only entrance or exit besides a single shuttered window. The hearth in one wall was too narrow to let anything in besides a construct or a tiny sacred beast, and a script-circle helped ward against those. She’d checked those herself, inside an hour of moving in.

She would have recognized the room faster had she not just reduced all the furniture to kindling. This was the little cottage the Fishers had given her, where she’d stayed for less than two weeks. That almost won the medal for the longest time she’d lived in the same place.

Her robe was soft, white, a single layer, and tied at the waist. The sort of thing you’d put on a patient while they were unconscious. Whatever had tied her to the ceiling hadn’t left any fragments of rope lying everywhere, which meant it had been a Fisher technique. The spider would have been one of Gesha’s constructs.

She’d lost the fight to Jai Long, so by rights she should be dead. Instead, she was receiving healing from the Fishers.

What had Lindon done?

She took a step forward, circulating madra to her feet to keep out splinters, and her body sent her a pointed reminder: if they were in the middle of healing her, it was because something was wrong. That hint came to her in the form of a shooting pain up her leg, which made her stagger and grab the wall.

Footsteps pounded the grass outside, and she gathered madra into the steel blade of her Goldsign. It wasn’t as useful a medium as her master’s sword, but she could still cobble together a Rippling Sword technique to defend herself. If she could find a real weapon, she figured she had an even shot of cutting her way out of the Five Factions Alliance camp. Though that would leave her alone in the Desolate Wilds with no idea what had happened to Lindon. Or Eithan, but she wouldn’t shed an undue number of tears if the yellow-haired man had gotten himself buried.

The door cracked open, and the blade poised over her shoulder, on the edge of slashing down.

Lindon’s voice drifted in. “Yerin, I don’t want to seem untrusting, but…please don’t cut me.”

Yerin let out a breath as she sunk to the ground, strength leaking out of her legs. She leaned against the wall and called back, “Two steps closer and I’d have carved you into a roast.”

“That’s why I waited.” He poked his head into the door, showing off a shy smile. He was still too tall for someone so weak. “I thought I might explain what happened before you went looking for the story yourself.”

“So long as they answered my questions proper and quick, they were in no danger.”

Actually, Lindon may have been the only person in the Fisher camp that she could threaten as she was. Her spirit felt like a guttering candle, her body like a sack of tender meat, and her unwelcome guest had started to strain against its cage. She rested a hand on her red belt, with her as always, still tied into an intricate bow—the shape designed by her master to bind its power.

It twisted slightly beneath her palm, straining against the seal. It was no threat for now, but its restrictions would weaken with time.

Sand rushed through an hourglass; an incense stick burned steadily down. She wasn’t sure how many years she had left, but if she didn’t advance far enough to keep her guest suppressed with her own power…

Then she wouldn’t be herself anymore.

Now that she thought of it, someone had dressed her. Which meant someone had gotten a good look at the ‘rope’ tied around her waist and had decided not to fiddle with it. That showed strange wisdom; most sacred artists would poke a bear to see if it was sleeping.

Lindon knelt opposite her, the closest thing to a chair in the room being a thumb-thick splinter. He arranged himself carefully, sitting with his back straight true and proper. You could take a kid out of his clan, but you couldn’t pull the clan out of him with a set of red-hot pliers.

Then her eyes snagged on his clothes.

He was wearing the typical sacred artist’s outfit, which went by different names in different lands: wide sleeves that left the arms free, a loose hem hanging down to the ankles to allow a broad range of movement techniques, a cloth belt tied around the waist. Usually, the sacred artist’s sect or clan would determine the patterns and colors of the robe, and this was what had stolen Yerin’s attention.

The robe was deep blue in some places, white in others, and marked over the heart with a black crescent moon the size of a palm. She’d seen that symbol before; it had whipped these Five Factions artists into a frenzy.

The Arelius family.

So they’d shown up after all, just as the Fishers and Sandvipers had feared. And Lindon was wearing their colors. He’d joined someone after all.

His explanation of the events that had occurred while she was unconscious—told in Lindon’s way, soft and polite—painted the picture clear.

Eithan was an Underlord. She found that the easiest part to believe. He had always treated Highgolds as though they weren’t fit for his eyes, and there were times training in the Ruins where she’d caught a shadow of something in him that reminded her of her master.

Not that a mere Underlord could stand in the shoes of the Sword Sage, but he’d rule like an emperor in a distant land like this.

No, Eithan as an Underlord she could expect. But there were a few other points she found too sticky to release.

“You buried Kral? A Highgold?”

Lindon brushed her aside with an explanation of the binding he’d found in the ancient foundry, as though he were ashamed by his own contribution, but pride lurked in his eyes and his words.

An Iron taking on a Highgold, whatever the circumstances, was like the sun rising green. That was a story his grandchildren could be proud of.