Corec paced back and forth in the front hall of the High Guard administration building. The troopers posted as guards hadn’t allowed him to proceed any farther.

He’d been waiting for over an hour when Sarette arrived, coming from the direction of the military court. She was alone and dressed in civilian clothing now, no longer wearing her uniform or her gambeson-style padded overcoat with its rank insignia on the collar. She did, however, have her chainmail and padded doublet rolled up in a bundle under her arm.

“I didn’t realize you were here,” she said, seeing him.

“I know you didn’t want us to come, but someone had to be here in case you needed us to give evidence.”

She sighed. “It’s fine. I was worried my parents would be here, and I wanted to focus on the hearing first before I tell them I’m leaving Snow Crown. If they saw you, they’d want to talk, and I just wasn’t ready to deal with that yet. But then I found out no one outside the High Guard would be allowed in, so I convinced them to stay home.”

“Yes, I learned that too after I got here. What happened in there?”

“Pretty much what I was hoping would happen, I guess. Gregor has his commission back. While he technically outranks me, scouts are usually considered to be outside the chain of command, and I was the one in charge of the expedition. I was the one who made the decisions that the High Guard is unhappy with.”

“Decisions that saved lives,” Corec pointed out. It had been Sarette who’d convinced the refugees from Jol’s Brook to flee to the ruins of Tir Navis in South Valley to take shelter from the snow beasts, and it had been Sarette who’d signaled the High Guard’s secret watchtowers for help when supplies had run low. Those seemed to be the two main issues that the High Guard was concerned about.

“I know, but that’ll require a full trial. If that ass of a captain had…” Sarette trailed off.

Captain Mikhal, who’d led the patrol that brought the supplies, was also the man who’d relieved Sarette and Gregor of their duties. He’d refused to take statements from the refugees about what had happened to them, and he’d refused to allow any of them to come to Snow Crown as witnesses.

He’d also attempted to force the refugees to return home on their own, so that the rest of the expedition could head back to Snow Crown immediately, but Corec had insisted on accompanying them back to Jol’s Brook. The Council of Elders had already given Corec and his friends permission to travel within the mountains and visit the ruins, and had charged Sarette and Gregor with accompanying them. Since Mikhal had relieved the two soldiers of their responsibilities, he was forced to take on those duties himself, which meant his patrol was stuck accompanying the group back to Jol’s Brook. Corec had kept everyone at the village—or what was left of it—for an extra five days, mostly to ensure the refugees were able to obtain enough supplies from neighboring villages and farms to last through the winter, but also partly to annoy Mikhal.

“What happens next?” Corec asked.

“I’m still relieved of duty pending a full investigation, but they’ve agreed that the trial can take place when I return to Snow Crown. In the meantime, I can’t draw pay or act as a member of the High Guard, but I haven’t been discharged and I’m not guilty of any crimes. A legist will come around to the inn tomorrow to take everyone’s statements so the rest of you don’t have to come back to Snow Crown with me.”

“Why don’t we just stay for the trial?”

“That could take months, between the trial itself and waiting for statements to come back from Jol’s Brook.” She smirked. “General Rodon insisted that Captain Mikhal’s patrol will accompany the legist to the village. Mikhal won’t like that, but the general wasn’t happy when Gregor pointed out that he refused our request to take the refugees’ statements while we were there.”

“This Rodon was on your side, then?”

Sarette shrugged uncomfortably. “It wasn’t so much that there were different sides, but the judges have to follow the laws and procedures. They weren’t willing to say it out loud, but I got the impression I’d be cleared of any wrongdoing if the story is confirmed. Well, not entirely—I still broke the law. I’ll probably be discharged, but with honor.”

Corec nodded, understanding the distinction. The Knights of Pallisur he’d trained with were organized differently than the stormborn High Guard, but he was familiar with Larso’s army since the knights were expected to lead units during times of war. The High Guard seemed to be a more advanced version of the Larsonian army. There were no knights or nobles in stormborn society, so the High Guard had a full command structure of its own, with rules to ensure everything ran smoothly regardless of circumstances.

An older man came into the room then, dressed in a style reminiscent of the High Guard’s winter uniform but in darker colors and without any rank insignia. He greeted Sarette in the stormborn language, then glanced at Corec and switched to trade tongue.

“Sorry it took me so long,” he said. “I was just telling Rodon about a new ice-fishing spot I found.”

“Corec,” Sarette said, “this is my Uncle Vartus. He’s the one that trained me as a stormrunner.”

The man nodded. “Our family has produced a lot of stormrunners over the years. It doesn’t hurt to remind them of that. Sarette tells me you’re a warden?”

“I am,” Corec said. It still felt odd to claim a title he knew so little about, and that most people had never heard of. It was as if he was pretending to be something he wasn’t.

“What does that mean, exactly? All I’ve heard are all children’s stories, and yet that’s apparently enough for the Council of Elders to go out of their way to help you.”

“It wasn’t like that, Vartus,” Sarette said. “All they asked for was permission to visit South Valley. The Council agreed and sent a scout to make sure they didn’t get lost. That’s all that happened.”

“Then how did you get involved?”

“I don’t think that had anything to do with Corec being a warden. It was the oracle who insisted that I go.”

Vartus harrumphed. “Galina? Did she say why?”

“No.”

Corec said, “I’ll answer any questions you have, but I don’t know much about wardens myself. I haven’t been one for very long.”

“If you’re new to it, then how do you expect to help Sarette with her training? You’re not a stormrunner yourself.”

Corec exchanged a glance with Sarette. “That’s not how it works,” he said. “All I know is that the binding spell is supposed to strengthen someone’s magic.” He thought back to how Yelena had worded it. “No, I didn’t say that right. It improves their potential, whatever that means. I don’t have any control over it—I can’t turn her into a stormrunner. All we can do is wait and see what happens. If she needs training, that’s something she’ll have to take care of herself.”

“I’ve already been trained,” Sarette told her uncle. “Now I just need to take what you taught me and learn how to do it for real. And the binding spell is working! You heard what I said in there about fighting the snow beasts. I couldn’t have done that before.”

“Unless it just took you longer than normal to master your skills,” Vartus said, his eyes narrowing.

“If that was possible, you wouldn’t have released me from my training in the first place.”

Vartus was silent for a moment, then nodded. “Fine, but we should at least test you again to see what’s changed, if anything.”

“I can’t spend two days riding out to Runner’s Summit and back!” Sarette protested.

“We’ll do it here in town at my lodge. Tomorrow. I imagine you’ll be busy with your parents tonight.”

She sighed. “I’ve got to tell them about delaying the trial, and about leaving Snow Crown. They’re not going to be happy.”

A young woman that Corec recognized stopped in front of the group. Her name was Yana, and she ran errands for the historians at the Museum of the Before—or at least that was how the name translated into the trade tongue. The group was dedicated to learning as much as possible about the ruins in the southern part of the Storm Heights.

Yana gave him a small bow. “Warden Corec, Magister Nadza requests your presence. She would like your help with the sword.”

#

The museum was located at the eastern end of a group of buildings that the stormborn referred to as a civil academy, which was a companion to the military academy that the High Guard officer cadets attended. The civil academy taught historians, engineers, and other professions that the stormborn felt required more training than a traditional apprenticeship would provide. Corec had never heard of the concept before, but according to Bobo, there was a similar school in Matagor.

It would have taken over an hour to walk there, so Corec and Yana hired a carriage. When they arrived, Yana led him through the front entrance, which opened up into a public room lined with objects taken from earlier expeditions to the South Valley ruins. The most impressive were the statues of various animals, most of which were made of marble, bronze, or the strange metal the Ancients used that didn’t rust or tarnish. Oddly, no statues had been found of the people themselves.

The rest of the room was filled with pottery covered with geometric shapes, which was the only other art form that had survived the centuries.

Corec followed Yana past a row of vases and into a corridor with different weapons hanging from the walls, the most common being staff-spears in the same style the stormborn used. Some of the weapons were still in good shape while others were barely recognizable.

The corridor led to a room filled with glass display cases, each one presenting a weapon made from the special metal, still in perfect condition.

A side door took them to Magister Nadza’s workroom, which she used for examining and documenting the artifacts that would be displayed in the museum. The room had two long, narrow tables. The one on the left, where Corec had left the sword he’d found in the ruins, was now covered with heavy blankets. The other table held the spoon Sarette had found, along with the half dozen rusted weapons they’d discovered near the sword. Two young men were diligently attempting to clean off the rust without causing further damage.

“Warden, thank you for coming so quickly,” Nadza said. The elderly woman was wearing nondescript work clothes and had her gray hair pulled back in a severe bun. She tugged the blankets off the table, revealing the sword. “Can I trouble you to do something with this?”

The greatsword still lay exactly as Corec had left it, but the blade now glowed with an intense green light that was almost painful to look at.

“What happened?” he asked, shielding his eyes.

“It just started doing that this morning, for no reason that I could determine. When it got too bright, I had to cover it up.”

“What do you want me to do?”

She tossed her hands up in frustration. “Move it! Please! Get it out of my workroom. Even before it started doing this, nobody could use the table for fear of getting too close. No one can touch it. We’ve tried cloth and leather wrappings. We’ve tried pushing it with wooden sticks and metal poles, but the instant anything touches it, it stings us. If we attempt to move the table, the same thing happens. I had a wizard try to lift it with magic—we needed healers for him, and hewas nowhere near it.”

“Where do you want it?”

“The display case won’t be ready for another two days. Can you put it in that storage closet behind you until then?”

Corec lifted the weapon by the hilt. Green sparks danced along the length of the blade before disappearing, and the bright light faded to the pale green glow he was used to. Each time he handled the sword, the sparks vanished more quickly than before.

“You really want it in the closet?” he asked. It seemed disrespectful, somehow.

“Better than leaving it out where someone can hurt themselves,” Nadza said. “How do you carry it so easily? One of my students managed to grab the hilt with both hands, but he could barely budge it. We needed the healers for him, too. He said it must weigh close to two hundred pounds.”

Corec furrowed his brow. “Two hundred? It can’t be any more than eight pounds. It’s heavier than I’m used to, but not out of the ordinary for a blade this size.”

“Curious,” Nadza said with a speculative frown. “The pain isn’t its only defense mechanism, then.”

She opened the door to the storage closet, then backed well out of Corec’s way as he carried it inside. The shelves were filled with shards of broken pottery and various other odds and ends that Nadza had apparently deemed not worthy of public display. He leaned the sword up against the wall. When he let go of the hilt, the pale green glow disappeared, as it always did. He left it there and closed the door behind him.

“I’ll probably still be here in two days,” he said. “When the display case is ready, do you want me to come back and move it again?”

“Yes, please,” Nadza said. “Otherwise, my closet will be as useless as the table was. I suppose we’ll need to add some sort of cloth draping to the case, if the sword is going to start glowing so brightly at random times. This is more trouble than I’d hoped, but it’s still a major find. I wish we knew more about it. You said there were plaques for each weapon?”

“Yes, but they were rusted over. We couldn’t read them.”

“If the words were etched into the metal rather than painted on, there are ways to clean them. I’ll have to send someone to the ruins to retrieve them all. Let me see…” She thumbed through a stack of papers. “Yes, one of the scholars you took with you sketched out where each of the weapons was placed on the wall. We should be able to match the plaques to the correct items.”

“That was Ellerie, the nilvasta woman. It was her idea to visit the ruins.”

“Hmm…she was reasonably thorough for someone I didn’t train myself. Not many elves visit Snow Crown. I’d like to have her as one of my students.”

Corec chuckled. “I’ll pass that along, but I think she’s planning to leave with us.”

Just then, a high-pitched screeching noise came from the direction of the closet, and green light showed around the edges of the door. Nadza and her students all covered their ears and hunched over.

“What’s that?” Nadza shouted over the noise.

Corec opened the door and found the sword glowing as brightly as before. When he grasped the hilt, the screeching ended and the light faded back to its normal levels. There were no sparks this time.

Everyone in the room stared at him in shock as they tentatively moved their hands away from their ears.

“Has it ever done that before?” Nadza asked.

“No. It always glows when I draw it—just a little bit, like it is now—but that’s all. I’ve been practicing with it every day since my own sword broke, and it’s always seemed like a normal blade other than that.”

“I don’t know much about enchanted weapons,” Nadza said. “There aren’t many in Snow Crown, and this is the only one we’ve ever retrieved from the ruins. Could it be that only a warden can touch it?”

Corec stared down at the sword for a moment, trying to decide what to do. He needed a new blade before he left the city. He’d visited three smiths since returning, but none of them were familiar with how to craft a greatsword. The weapon was typically used for war rather than for personal protection, but with the High Guard’s forested, mountainous terrain, they preferred small, mobile units armed with staff-spears and crossbows. According to Sarette, they also trained with smaller swords, shields, and pikes in case they ever needed to fight in tight formation, but they didn’t use greatswords.

The weapon smiths did most of their business directly with the High Guard, or with the mining and ranching communities the stormborn had established throughout the Storm Heights. There were few threats within Snow Crown itself, so most citizens didn’t carry arms. The smiths did sell arming swords and other weapons to caravan guards and travelers, but there wasn’t a market for greatswords in the city.

“Perhaps I should take it with me,” Corec said. “I can find out if the other wardens know anything about it.”

“You know of other wardens?” the woman asked, an excited look on her face. “Who are they? Where do they live? I’ve heard of Leonis, of course, since records were kept of his visit, but that was a long time ago. He must be dead by now. I wasn’t aware that there even were any others until you showed up.”

When the Nadza and the other historians had interviewed Corec, back before he and his friends had left to find the ruins, it had become clear that the stormborn’s stories about wardens didn’t mention the long lifespan Yelena had described. He hadn’t brought it up, not sure whether he believed it himself.

He said, “The only one I know is the woman I mentioned the first time we spoke—the one who told me about being a warden—but she said there were others.”

Nadza frowned. “You still won’t tell me who she is?”

“It’s not my secret to tell. When I see her next, I’ll give her your name and tell her your people know about wardens, but I can’t promise she’ll contact you. I also know a woman who carries an enchanted blade like this one. I’ll talk to her too, and send you whatever I learn.”

“In that case, I’ll pass your request along. I can’t authorize it myself, but the Head Magister sits on the Council of Elders. She can decide whether to loan you the sword on a long-term basis. For now, just please take it away so we can have our workroom back.”

Corec nodded, and wrapped the blade in his cloak before leaving. He’d need to get a new scabbard made; the old one had worked temporarily, but it wasn’t a good fit. Perhaps he could find a leatherworker’s shop on the way back to the inn. No—on second thought, it would be better to return to the inn and take the measurements himself. The leatherworker wouldn’t be able to touch the sword any more than anyone else could.

#

“You’re certain it said Tir Navis?” Magister Borya asked.

“I don’t see what else it could have been,” Ellerie replied. “The letters looked different than I’m used to, but they were still readable.”

“I wrote them out exactly as I saw them,” Bobo added, pulling a folded sheet of paper from his satchel and handing it over.

“Incredible,” Borya said, reading the page and then standing up to pace around his office at the rear of the Archives room in the museum. “Yes, we’ve learned that the people who lived in South Valley must have spoken a variant of what other scholars have identified as the people’s language. If it truly is Tir Navis, that makes sense. It was one of the first colonies to be settled; it could also have been one of the first to be abandoned, while the language continued to change.”

“You’ve found other writings?” Ellerie asked.

“A few, a few. Sadly, no books would have survived for long under such conditions. But this…you say it was from a sign in an armory?”

“An armory is one option,” Bobo said. “Or it could have been a museum, like you have here. It’s the same room where we found the weapons.”

“Ahh, yes, Nadza showed those to me. What a find!” Borya read the page again. “Regent Milos. I haven’t heard that name before, but that’s not a surprise. We have very few stories from the people who came before—nothing other than fables with no real truth attached to them.”

“I translated it as King Milos,” Bobo said.

Borya chewed on his lip as he thought. “That would depend on whether you ascribe to Dimartes’s theory that each of the Tirs represented a separate nation, or Evgeni’s work linking them as fiefdoms under a common emperor.”

Bobo opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Ellerie cleared her throat.

“I don’t think we’re going to solve that question today,” she said. If she didn’t stop them, the two men would talk for hours. She’d been feeling more generous toward Bobo ever since he’d discovered the route to Tir Yadar, but her patience would only last for so long.

“Oh, of course,” the magister said. “I can’t wait to see this armory for myself once the weather improves. Will you be joining us?”

Ellerie shook her head. “No, we’re leaving soon. But you should know, there’s more than just the armory. We found miles of tunnels. Living quarters, channels for water—Sarette called them aqueducts— and other rooms we didn’t have a chance to explore. We had to leave sooner than we’d planned, but I mapped out what I could.” She nodded to Bobo, and he gave Borya another stack of papers.

“Miles?” the magister asked, thumbing through the maps. “And living quarters? We thought the undercity was only used for the aqueducts and maintenance tunnels. We’ve discovered seven different entrances so far, and none of them led to anything but cave-ins. We’ve never risked clearing out the rock because we thought it might collapse the buildings above.” He set the papers down on his desk with a wide smile. “With this much to explore, I may have to spend all summer in the valley. My students will be quite annoyed to be dragged into the wilderness for so long.”

“I hope what we found is helpful.” Ellerie hesitated, not sure whether to leave or to ask the question that had been in her thoughts for weeks now. Finally, she spoke. “Magister Borya, are the stormborn the Ancients? The people who came before?”

Bobo winced.

“Why would you think that?” Borya asked.

“You follow many of the same customs, your language is descended from theirs, your military is modeled after theirs. Some of your own scholars believe your people came from Tir Navis originally, before going north to Snow Crown. The Ancients must have gone somewhere. Why not here?”

Borya was silent for a moment, staring at her. “Who were the people who came before?” he asked ponderously, as if lecturing his students. “Were they humans? Elves? Some other race lost to time? Or were they a common ancestor of us all? Your own people, with their long lives, should remember better than any of us. What do they say?”

“Our records don’t go back that far,” Ellerie said. “We have nothing from before the founding of Terrillia, neither written nor oral.”

“Then your historians suffer the same curse of time that we must all deal with—we simply don’t know. There are few records from the time before. We know the names of a few of the Tirs and a few of the people, some details about daily life, and that’s it. As to your question…no. We call them the people who came before because they came before us. There are too many odnovremennyy…how do I say this in trade tongue? Happening at the same time. Contemporaneous—that’s it. There are too many contemporaneous records from the time when Borrisur created the first stormborn and led them to Snow Crown. For that not to be the truth, our people would have had to have perpetrated a great hoax on their own descendants. No. We are not the people who came before. I’m certain of that.”

#

After they’d left the Archives, Bobo sighed. “Why did you do that?” he asked. “Arguing against religious dogma rarely goes well. We’ll be lucky if he ever talks to us again.”

“I had to ask,” Ellerie said. “There were too many pieces fitting together. Do you really think one of the gods just created people out of storms? They must have come from somewhere.”

“We’ll probably never know. What does Boktar say about the origins of the stoneborn?”

“He doesn’t care to speculate.”