In the darkness there is a line, a snake, a cable twisted from threads of light. It coils and thrashes and sings under unbearable torque.
And at the same time, there is a hillside covered in elves, all paused in awe and fear as skyfire strikes seven times in the same place, brighter than any have ever seen from any natural storm.
And at the same time, there is a silent place, seething black, which is perhaps a battlefield, or perhaps two wrestling figures, or perhaps only the figment maybe-shapes glimpsed within clouds; where virulent fire rages against churning, drowning mist, where an antlered titan of shadow grapples a crowned giant made of sickly-pale, intense flame.
And all these are one thing. Each movement of an elf on the hillside is the twist of a thread; each flex of fighting colossi is the strain of history's skein toward an outcome; each thrum and sway in the cable sends elves ebbing and flowing across the field, meeting, parting, winning, dying.
And Amaranth Pepperidge opens her eyes.
The knoll seems deserted; the skyfire's shockwave, she realises, has flung all around her to the ground like a child scattering twigs.
It seems she lives.
Her ears drone as if her head is now a beehive. She dimly hears, as though miles away, the sounds of battle and panic. She slowly levers herself up on one elbow.
The Stormcrow lies face down in the scorched grass. Unpleasant smoke curls from her.
Pepperidge staggers to her feet, and casts a shaky look around. She is no general, but things look grim. The Termist forces shaky and faltering, stunned at the show of magical might. The Fürstens' forces are scarce better in the moment, but they have the numbers, the discipline, need only draw together and advance to break the Termists and carry the day.
The titans strain. The cable thrums.
The Professor is a line of light. Longeye, lying in the mud insensible, burned lividly across her face, is a line of light. The banner of the Fist o' Ribs, fallen to the ground, is a thread of light.
Her hands grip the pole. Something in her shoulder pops and grates as she lifts. The wind catches the cloth and billows it, the Stormcrow's swirling entourage of zephyrs lifting it high.
The threads twist. She sets her sight grimly on the distant Fürsten, glittering behind their army.
"Blood of the Heart!" the Professor screams, and pushes one leaden foot in front of the other. The antlered titan opens its mouth, vast and dark, and roars —
— roars from a thousand Termist throats at her back —
— and the bright cable leaps like a bowstring, hurling her across the battlefield at the enemy's heart.
All things blur in her vision, each racing, burning step across the hillside melting them into one another, a bright torrent of movement and rage. The rangers who leap to her side and keep pace, berserker howling, are elves and shadows and threads and bees and mist. The Fürstens' lines, shattering and routing, are the desperate flailings of a king of otherworldly fire, embers on the wind, a ragged tapestry of defeat.
She hardly knows when or why they stop moving, dimly aware that she is bent double, heaving for breath, heart and Heart hammering in lockstep, blazing traceries behind her eyes, threads shimmering from the roots of time into the writhing uncertainties of the yet-to-be, weaving the width of the world.
And the twist of the threads brings them before her with the Ecclesiarch's helm. They gently support her, coax her, guide her shaking hands into its writhing briars.
When it snatches the Heart from her, she is hurled into the tiny silence of her own head. She cries out, only then aware that she has been endlessly talking, fragments of the terrible sights spilling from her lips. She flounders, starved for breath.
"Lilli," she manages to choke out, and burrows gratefully into clutching arms, even as her eyes roll up in her head.
She awakens, for the first time in months, in a bed. Lilli is curled up beside her, fully clothed atop the quilt. The elf looks exhausted.
Pepperidge gingerly sits. She feels weak and heavy, and terribly thirsty. She strokes Lilli's hair for a moment, then turns to slip out of bed.
She jumps and gasps.
The figure by the bedside sits in an ancient, gnarled chair of age-blackened oak. He is lean, angular, and within the shadow of the Ecclesiarch's terrible helm, antlers wide against the room.
In the face-occulting darkness beneath it, a pair of bright eyes slowly open.
"Heyo," Taelin says in a scratchy voice.
"Oh," she says. "Oh, no. Captain. I'm sorry."
He smiles, a little, and waves a hand. "Ah, no. It's ours. It's our burden. Be thankful, rather, the helm was on hand — I think you'd have been used up entire, else." He closes his eyes a moment. "One thing I'll grant you, mind — this is a ridiculously large hat."
She laughs dutifully, ending in a dry-throated cough.
"Ah, Professor, your pardon — sleep's been short, I'm thoughtless — Omer! Omer, lass!"
They are, Pepperidge realises, in an elven croft. She sways back uncertainly, twining fistfuls of blanket, as the door to the room rattles and an elven child pokes their head in.
"Yes, Uncle — " the girl starts jauntily, then sees Pepperidge and squeaks, frozen, eyes wide like a wary rabbit.
"Water for the Professor, please," Taelin says patiently.
The child stares until he pointedly coughs, then squeaks something and vanishes, the door banging in her wake. Her footsteps rattle beyond earshot, only to be followed by a distant, loud and self-important proclamation.
"The Wolf of Underhill's awake!"
"Oh, gods," Pepperidge says quietly, rubbing her forehead. "Where are we?"
"We're at the croft of my brother Cauley, on the river north of our own clan lands. You've been asleep a week, Amaranth."
"I have?"
"You have. And your hair's turned white."
She claps a hand to her head, tries to pull tufts within view to scrutinise their colour.
He gestures to the door. "And you're a war hero," he finishes cheerily as Omer bursts back in with a jug of water.
Pepperidge is torn between greedily draining clay cupfuls and attempting to argue. "But all I did was pick up a banner and run with it! In a most inadvisable fashion."
"I was there, Professor. I know what you did."
She scowls. "You've been encouraging this."
He makes a tiny gesture, which might be a shrug if he weren't weighed down with the helm. "I have seen inadvisable charges before — not my first battle, Professor wolf. I don't believe I've seen an entire army break and run for one woman with a flag."
"I had you on my heels." Pepperidge knows this as a fact, not just with certainty. She should not, and hesitates over it.
Taelin hums softly. "I wondered if you'd remember aught," he murmurs. "You had much to say. Things long past, things far afield, things yet to come...forgive me, Professor, but you'd be the better for never touching the Heart again."
She remembers little, but — "Agreed." They're silent a moment. "You bear it to protect me?"
"Everyone!" he says swiftly. "...Ah, fine, you most personally."
She stares into her cup, then silently raises it in salute. He smiles.
In the tiny, wobbling reflection in her drink, her hair is indeed white. She gingerly touches her head again. "Hush, bumblebee," she says absently as Lilli mutters in her sleep, then jumps enough to spill the water when her voice makes the elf bolt upright.
"Amaranth!" Lilli wails, flinging her arms around the Professor. "Oh, Amaranth!"
"Lilli, Lilli, hush." She tucks the elf beneath her chin, and remembers that Omer is still lurking, jug clutched in both hands, raptly interested. "Child — a private moment, please?"
The girl shuffles reluctantly.
"Out," Pepperidge adds, teacherly firm, and Omer sidles smartly out, leaning round the door to keep them in sight as long as possible before closing it.
Taelin chuckles. "I'll leave you two to reacquaint," he says, levering himself up. "Not long, mind, Professor — you need to eat."
It is, she realises, very true. "A short while," she murmurs, stroking Lilli's hair.
He chuckles again, deep in his throat, a close enough echo of the old Ecclesiarch's rattle that the hairs on her nape bristle. "I'll be sure to knock."
The door closes on the two of them. Pepperidge holds Lilli closer.
"They say I slept a week," she murmurs. "You look as though you did not."
"I feared you'd die if I didn't watch you," Lilli mutters into her shoulder.
"It's not my time," the Professor says, and shudders at her own uncanny certainty. "Oh, Lilli, it is the strangest feeling to know that." She swallows, and runs her fingers through the elf's hair.
"The Heart's a terrible thing." Lilli rearranges herself, throws a leg over the Professor's, burrows closer. "I was so afraid," she adds, low and choked.
"Well, here I am." Pepperidge coaxes Lilli's face to turn up to hers. "I live, I breathe." She strokes the elf's cheek. "I'm sorry none of this was as you imagined — you showed me the Old Glen, and I met your family, and you took me to Hightop — "
Lilli sputters out a laugh.
"You should sleep," Pepperidge says softly, and brushes a kiss on her lips.
"No." The elf shakes her head a little, even as her eyelids flutter tiredly.
"You should. For me, because I love you."
Lilli opens her eyes, wide. "You do?" she says solemnly.
"Oh, trust me. You are a very pretty bumblebee, but if that were all, I'd have gone home at the first sign of ghosts and Hearts and everything." She plants another kiss.
"I love you too," Lilli whispers shyly.
"Oh, bumblebee." The professor ruffles her hair. "I knew that before you did...rest. I won't be far."
She tucks the quilt over Lilli, freshens herself as best she can, and dresses.
"Taelin," she greets him when he returns. "It seems the only clothes I have now are new ranger uniforms." She gestures at herself, watching his face.
"Any other of your people, I'd tell them what an honour I do them." He looks back seriously. "Professor — do me this honour."
She drops him a sardonic bow. "I liked that shirt," she says mildly.
He grins. "It's with your things."
"Thank you."
He offers his arm. "A late breakfast, madam?"
"Gods, yes."
He nonetheless tactfully evaporates when they reach a long dining-table, scattered with battered survivors; stew-bowl cradled in her palms, it's no mystery to Pepperidge why. She takes a breath, a tension she hadn't realised easing within her.
"Heyo, Longeye!"
The ranger bangs down an ale mug and turns, beaming. "Professor!" Her face is bandaged, right eye covered; her smile dips for a moment. "Ah, they'll be calling me One-Eye now, you see."
"I'll be calling you the friend who kept an old fool scholar alive on a battlefield," Pepperidge tells her, and closes the distance to embrace the ranger. "It's good to see you."
"And you! A drink for the Professor wolf!" she cries out, and hugs Pepperidge tight.
"Ah!" The Professor catches sight of a new pin at the throat of Longeye's tunic. "Captain Longeye, now?"
Longeye makes a pleased noise, blushes, covers the shiny metal emblem with selfconscious fingers. "Well, the old man's wearing another hat now, so — "
"A drink for Captain Longeye!" Pepperidge sings out, clapping her on the back.
Longeye grins. "If we're to take turns doing that," she says, "you'll at least let me toast your honour, I hope; for I had the singular experience of waking in the mud, blind in one eye, with a dozen weeping Fürstens' soldiers waiting to surrender their swords to me."
"How so?" Pepperidge says. "And what has that to do with me?"
"Because you killed the sorcerer," Longeye says, and drains her cup in a single long pull, just before someone brings them fresh wine each.
"Oh...but I didn't — she sought to strike me, and I carried the Heart — "
"No, little Professor," Longeye says softly. "There was no Stormcrow, you see? And never was. What died on that hilltop was a ghul, only a ghul, and that's the only way anyone will ever remember it. And they knelt in the mud and wept and surrendered for the shame of ever following it. And call me blackened of heart, but that brings me a joy that simply stabbing the sow could never have. Our elder's avenged to the very fullest, and you, Amaranth Pepperidge, are my sister as none other."
The Professor regards her cup of wine, on the table before her, for long moments, then raises it in salute. "To the death of nameless monsters," she says quietly; Longeye clinks her own to it, and they drink in silence.
