The wooden sword moved before I thought about it.
I had been holding it low in my left hand, the wrapped grip damp from the afternoon, the point angled at the dirt. I was looking at Brandt's face.
Then the blade was already rising.
It came up across my body in an arc. My shoulder turned and my arm followed, faster than I had managed all week practicing.
Brandt's metal forearm came up to meet it.
The wood exploded.
Splinters burst across the yard. A long shard spun past Konrad's head and rattled against the carriage wheel. The rest scattered over the packed dirt in a pale spray. What remained in my hand was a stub of wrapped grip and a jagged tongue of wood no longer than my palm.
Brandt lowered his arm.
The dark steel plates hadn't even scratched. He looked at the broken practice sword, then at me, and his expression didn't change at all.
For a moment, nobody in the yard said anything.
Then Idris stuck his hand out in front of Roen, palm up.
Roen looked at the hand. He looked at me. He let out a long, heavy breath. Then reached into his belt pouch with those enormous fingers and dropped several silver coins into Idris's palm, one at a time.
"Told you," Idris said.
"You said he would hit him with his hand."
"I said he would hit him. I never specified with what. You should have asked for terms."
Roen grunted.
Ghost stood a pace to Brandt's left. A few splinters had landed on the shoulder of his leathers. He brushed them away with two fingers.
I let the stub of the sword fall. It struck the dirt beside my boot.
"We're not even," I said.
Brandt considered that.
"No," he agreed.
"But I'm less angry."
"Great. I would hope so."
He flexed the metal hand once. The articulated plates clicked into a fist and opened again.
"I warned you," Brandt said. "About the Coliseum. What it was. That you would be almost a slave."
"Almost a slave," I repeated. "I was a slave. They gave me a number. Slave 147."
Brandt held my gaze. He didn't look away and he didn't apologize. I hadn't expected him to.
Ghost stepped forward.
"A slave," he said, "who became rich. And powerful. And a lord."
He placed one hand over his chest and bent at the waist in a slow, elaborate bow, the kind a court dancer would perform for a princess at the end of a waltz. His free hand swept outward through the air. He held it far too long.
"Lord Kaspar."
There wasn't one grain of respect in any part of it.
Idris snorted.
I stared at the top of Ghost's blond head until he straightened.
"You haven't changed," I said.
"You have." His pale eyes moved to my right sleeve and stayed there for exactly as long as it took to measure what was missing. Then they moved back to my face. "Mostly the hair. It was a terrible dye job."
"You did the dye job."
"I stand by it. The canvas was the problem."
Roen had come around the carriage. He stopped in front of me and looked down, and down, from what felt like the height of a watchtower. His scarred brow drew together.
"You got big," he said.
"Thanks. You also seem bigger. I don't know how that's possible."
He seemed to consider this a compliment. His enormous hand came down on my left shoulder, very carefully, the way a man might touch a bird. Then he patted it twice.
My knees nearly went.
"Sorry," Roen said.
"It's fine."
I looked back at Brandt.
"What are you doing here?"
"Answering a request."
"I asked for experienced personnel. I didn't ask for you."
"You asked for experienced personnel near Grenzheim." Brandt adjusted the bastard sword at his hip. "We were on the southern recruiting circuit. There was nobody else this side of the Empire without a previous mission. Nobody in a group this size, at least. High Command looked at who was closest and who could leave tonight."
"And that was you."
"That was us."
I let out a slow breath through my nose.
"It'll do," I said aloud.
Underneath it, I knew better. They were far better than I had been hoping for.
"High praise," Ghost murmured.
"I'll explain on the way." I nodded toward the battered carriage behind them. One wheel had a visible wobble. The door hung crooked on its lower hinge. "And not in that. There's a carriage prepared for us. A better one than this piece of shit."
"Hey," Idris said. "That piece of shit carried us four hundred kilometers."
"Then it has earned its rest."
Idris brightened.
"A nobleman's carriage?"
"The town's."
"Close enough." He slung his pack over one shoulder and grinned at the others. "I love missions with nobles. Cushions. Proper suspension. Someone always packs wine."
"Nobody packed wine," I said.
"Someone always packs wine," Idris repeated while getting wine from his pack.
The eastern gate was quiet by the time we reached it.
A four-horse coach waited beside the guardhouse, dark lacquered wood with the Grenzheim wall and tower painted small on the door. Someone had already begun painting a second emblem beneath it and had stopped halfway, a plain shield outline with nothing inside. Grenzwacht didn't have a shield yet.
The driver sat on the box with a heavy coat drawn up to his ears. Two lamps hung at the corners, their mana-glow steady and white.
A young clerk from the town hall stood beside the open door. He held a long bundle wrapped across both arms.
"My lord. From the Mayor. She said you'd forget to collect it from the infirmary."
"Thank you," I said.
He held my sword out, hilt first.
I reached for it.
My right arm rose. The prosthetic lifted from my side. The elbow bent. The black-plated hand came forward toward the leather grip.
And stopped.
The fingers stayed open. I told them to close and nothing happened. I told them again, harder, and the thumb twitched inward by the width of a fingernail and then went still.
A pain flared in the palm that wasn't there. As if my ring finger were bent backward.
The clerk kept holding the sword.
"Tsk."
I dropped the arm.
It fell back to my side with a soft clack of plates.
I took the sword with my left hand instead.
I tucked the scabbard beneath my left arm, pinned it against my ribs, and fumbled at my belt with the same hand.
It slipped. I caught it against my thigh. The old wound flared.
I heard Idris take a breath.
"Don't," I said, without looking up.
He didn't.
It took far longer than it should have.
When it was done, the sword sat on my right hip. The angle was slightly off. I'd fix it later.
I looked up.
Brandt was watching me. His face held nothing I could read.
"Get in," I said.
The coach lurched out through the eastern gate a few minutes later.
Roen occupied most of the rear bench by himself. Wolf sat beside him, pressed against the window. Ghost had taken the corner opposite mine where he could watch both the door and the road. Brandt sat across from me with his sword upright between his knees.
The road left the gate heading east.
I waited until the last lamp of Grenzheim disappeared behind a hill.
"There's an expedition," I said. "Academy-authorized. It's going into an old-world site in the hills east of here."
"A dungeon," Wolf said. The first word he had spoken.
"Yes."
"Who's running it?" Brandt asked.
"My father."
The carriage creaked.
Ghost's eyes sharpened.
"Your father," he said slowly. "Roderich von Hexenzeit. Duke of the North. Minister of War."
"You already know who my father is."
"I was hoping you had gotten a different one."
"House Hexenzeit is paying for it," I said. "Hexenzeit soldiers. Academy mages. The Academy provides the scholars."
"And you want in," Brandt said.
"I need to be in."
"Why?"
"Because my family," I said, "is not a good example of domestic harmony."
Idris laughed. Ghost didn't.
"The site is on my land," I continued. "Whatever they pull out of that hole, I have a claim on part of it. By law, they need to record everything they recover. By law, I get to send someone to watch them do it and make sure nothing that belongs to me disappears into a Hexenzeit wagon in the middle of the night."
"And that someone is you," Brandt said.
"That someone is me along with five Knights, because I'm not stupid enough to walk into my father's camp alone."
Roen shifted on the bench. The whole carriage leaned with him.
"So," he said. "Money?"
"Not really."
Roen frowned. It clearly wasn't the answer he'd expected.
"I don't care about the money," I said. "They can keep the gold. They can keep the gemstones and the pretty old-world junk the Academy likes to put in glass cases."
"Then what?" Brandt asked.
"Weapons."
The word settled in the carriage.
"Anything that makes it easier to kill elves," I said. "Designs. Mechanisms. Records. Whatever the old world left down there that can put more of them in the ground."
Ghost leaned his head back against the carriage wall.
"I like the idea of killing elves," he said.
"Everyone in the Iron Cross likes the idea of killing elves," Wolf said quietly.
Brandt watched me for a while.
"So this is an escort job," he said. "We stand behind you, look large, and make sure nobody forgets you have a claim."
"No."
He waited.
I leaned forward. The fitting dragged at my shoulder, and I ignored it. "Don't underestimate the dungeon. Not this one. Not any of them. I don't care how many Hexenzeit mages are in that camp, or how many Circles the man in charge has. The moment we go past the gate, you treat everything down there as something that wants to kill you."
The carriage was quiet.
Ghost's pale eyes had settled on my face and stayed there.
"You say that," he said, "like you know something."
"I have a feeling," I said.
"A feeling."
"My feelings are usually very good."
Ghost looked at Brandt. Brandt looked at Idris. Idris looked at Roen, who looked at Wolf, who looked at nothing at all.
Nobody said what all of them were obviously thinking.
The carriage swayed.
The road climbed. The horses slowed on the grade, and the wheels found ruts in the old paving and jolted over them.
Idris fell asleep almost immediately, his head tipped against the window and his mouth slightly open.
Wolf drew a whetstone from his pack and began working it slowly along his longsword. The long, even rasp settled into the rhythm of the wheels.
Across from me, Brandt had been watching my hands for some time.
He tipped his chin toward the sword on my right hip.
"How good are you?"
There was no reason to lie to him.
"I'm shit. Worse than shit."
Ghost's eyebrow rose a fraction.
"The arm doesn't listen," I said. "I can't close the fingers when I need them. Sometimes they close too hard. Sometimes they're so soft they drop the sword."
"And the left?"
"A bit better." I opened and closed my living fingers. They still ached from the morning. "But it feels like starting from nothing."
Brandt said nothing for a while.
He lifted his own metal hand from the pommel of his sword. He turned it over, palm up, and slowly closed the fingers one by one. Index. Middle. Ring. Little. Thumb.
In order. Every one of them on time.
"How long did that take you?"
"A year before I trusted it with a sword." He opened the hand again. "Two before I stopped thinking about it."
"Who built it?"
"An old man in the capital. Dead now."
"Have you ever opened it?"
Idris snorted in his sleep. Brandt waited for him to settle.
"Once," he said. "Never again."
"What happened?"
"I put it back together, and it the commands were inverted. It took me a week to figure out."
He set the hand back on the pommel.
I looked at my own fingers against my thigh. His had closed in order, each one when he asked. Mine never did, no matter how often I practiced.
It needed something more then practice.
The camp appeared around the last bend.
Tents filled the entrance.
Rows upon rows of them, laid out on the slope in lines so straight they could only have been planned on paper. Crimson canvas. The flame of House Hexenzeit stitched on every peak. Picket lines of horses. Wagon parks. Watchfires spaced at precise intervals.
Above it all, at the far end, the hillside broke open into the black mouth of a cave.
SPECIAL BASE #44.
UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
The doors still stood open. From here I could see only their shape, dark slabs against darker rock.
"Well," Idris said. He had woken at some point and pressed his face to the window. "They certainly brought friends."
This didn't look like an expedition.
It was an occupation.
How much do they know about what's behind that gate? Did my father bring an army because he knows exactly what's waiting?
The carriage rolled down the last stretch of road and came to a stop at the edge of the camp.
I opened the door and climbed down.
Behind me, the others followed. Brandt first. Then Ghost, silent. Idris, with one hand resting casually on the hilt of his curved sword. Wolf, armor rattling softly. Roen came last, unfolding himself from the doorway, and when he straightened with the iron slab in his hand, three of the soldiers behind the barrier took an involuntary step back.
An officer came forward.
He was young, maybe my age, with the red trim of a lieutenant on his collar.
"Halt," he said. "This is a restricted House Hexenzeit operation under Academy authorization. State your name and your business."
I rested my left hand on the hilt at my right hip.
"Kaspar von Grenzwacht. The lord of these lands," I said. "I will be accompanying the expedition."