Strike.

Thrust. Duck. Parry. Strike.

Felix panted with the effort, breath coming out in little frozen clouds as he swung his battered sword against the air and stepped carefully across the muddy courtyard. Prox never really thawed out, but sometimes it almost came close. Fighting kept him warm enough.

Someday, he thought. Someday he'd get them out of here. He just had to make himself stronger first.

He'd worked his way across the yard, avoiding pools of slush, and now he turned around to work across the other way. Pattern drills like this were basic, but it was all he had, and he meant to make it count. He'd just stepped out with his left foot when something hooked around his ankle, yanking him to the ground.

He fell hard, landing flat on his back in the cold wet dirt, the sword falling out of his hand and into the mud.

"So you're the Venus Adept," said a voice from somewhere above him. "Felix, wasn't it."

It wasn't a question. He couldn't have answered it even if it was. The fall had knocked the wind out of his lungs and he lay panting, trying to get it back.

"They told me you understood the gravity of your situation," the voice continued slowly, calmly. "I wonder if that's true."

Felix managed to roll himself over halfway, and get a look at whoever was speaking to him—a blue-haired man, standing in the slush on the other side of the fence, outside of the yard. Not Proxian.

The stranger stared at him without expression, and after a bit Felix noticed the fingers of his right hand twitching, almost casually. It might have been some absentminded tic—if not for the tendril of muddy water twitching in answer on Felix's side of the fence.

Mercury Adept.

That's right, they said they had one…Alex. The healer who'd left them stranded. He watched him, and thought about reaching for his sword. Or—

A couple rocks rattled together before he locked that thought down, and Alex's eyes narrowed.

"I think," Alex said at last, "that you would be wise to think about what you're doing, Felix."

Felix pushed himself up on an elbow, finally getting control—and another wave of mud rose up and slammed him back into the earth.

Without another word, Alex turned on his heel and left him there coughing on the ground.

Bastard.


Piers's ship was somewhere near Madra, which left them all with another days-long trek ahead of them as they headed back to the village for a third and hopefully final time.

Jenna said almost nothing the first day of the trip down out of the mountains, and even Sheba was unusually subdued. Felix caught her glancing back and forth between him and his sister with a pointed look on her face, and did his best to silence his thoughts. What else was there to do? Isaac wouldn't listen, and running was a hell of a lot safer than trying to fight it out. They couldn't afford to lose.

Piers, too, showed no inclination to talk, though Felix supposed that was reasonable—he'd gotten a lot more than he'd bargained for, though at least he'd still agreed to give them passage. Felix was loath to say anything lest it upset the delicate balance, and he hoped there wouldn't be any more unpleasant surprises in store. That hope was likely futile.

They made their camp at the base of a sprawling tree, and after a silent dinner Felix took first watch and the others turned to sleep, except for Jenna. She took a seat across from him stiffly, her back unnaturally straight, her shoulders rigid. He knew what she was going to ask him and he knew she wasn't going to like the answer, and he wished he didn't have to do this.

Wasn't that just the theme of his life.

"Felix-" she began, almost hesitantly—and that wasn't like her, was it, but then again maybe it was. Who knew how much she'd changed while he was gone?

A lot, apparently.

She went quiet when he looked up at her, and he hesitated too, wondering how to say it. It came out wrong. "You and Isaac—"

"What, Felix?" she burst out, and that was more familiar. The vise around his heart eased up a little. "He's not my enemy! He's not your enemy!"

Felix didn't bother denying it, though he didn't know if he agreed. It didn't matter, enemy or no. He reached for a stick and stirred the fire. The burning branches popped and sparked, deafening in the silence. After a bit, he said, softly, "He'll do something stupid if he thinks he's saving you from me."

She looked at him a long time without saying anything, and when he looked up from the fire he saw her chin trembling, and he didn't know what to do. Why, gods, Felix thought, why did it have to be him? Of all the people, of anyone in the village, it had to be him. It wasn't her fault, either, though it would have been nice to be able to blame something other than fate for once. He wanted to reach out, to step across their little camp and give her a hug, to make it better just like he had when she was little and he could fix everything—but that would only have made things worse. She wasn't little, anymore, and this wasn't meant to involve him, and now it had. Finally she said, tight-voiced, "We run, then."

He nodded, slowly. "We run."


A night's sleep, however fitful, helped a bit, and the next morning Jenna seemed to be doing better—grim, maybe, but she no longer looked like she was about to burst into tears any second. Felix was glad for that. He had no idea what else he would have done. By afternoon she'd taken to bouncing a little ball of flame between her hands, tossing it up and catching it, although she still didn't say much.

As they drew closer to the cliffs the trip grew less peaceful, with more creatures popping out of the wilderness—by now, nothing remarkable, and none of it very big. Some oversized rats, a couple giant worms, and a handful of obnoxious little flying things that Kraden called pixies, for lack of a better word. The pixies were the most annoying, because they were smart enough to work together.

They camped for the night on a plain near the cliffs and Piers had just finished dousing the remains of their cooking fire—Felix's group had rice, and Piers had dried fish, and together it made a kind of sludge that was mostly edible if you didn't think too much about it—when they heard the telltale whine. Pixie wings.

There were five pixies in this group, enough to be a nuisance, but they'd had enough practice to split them up and pick them off one-by-one. In no time at all they'd been downed, and all the Adepts were left standing—except Sheba, who lay sprawled on the sandy ground, eyes closed.

Felix rushed over to her, but Piers was already there, one hand at her forehead. "She's not hurt," he said, and frowned. "It's as if she's asleep."

Except that people didn't fall asleep in the middle of a fight. Felix stared, wondering what to make of it.

Jenna reached out to shake her by the shoulder, and to his surprise, it actually worked. Groggily, Sheba blinked her eyes open.

"Are you all right?" he asked, but she only grinned.

"I just had the best idea!"

"What?" asked Jenna, giving her a hand up.

"Wait and see." And that was all she said on the matter. They waited and finally saw what she meant that afternoon, when another pack of pixies attacked them. They'd dispatched the first two with relative ease when a yell from Sheba stopped them. "Wait!"

She held out a hand and from her palm shot out a purple bolt that struck the pixie—

—and it dropped like a stone, snoring peacefully.

Sheba punched the air. "Ha!"

A low rumble from behind her cut the victory celebration short. Another group of monsters, chasing after the first. Four of them, and big. Lizards, or lizardlike enough.

Working together, he and Jenna teamed up on one of them, and Piers and Sheba went for another. A couple fireballs and some well-placed ice took them out without a problem, but the second two were wilier.

Felix dodged the spiked tail that swung out to trip him—he'd gotten in a few glancing blows to this one's head, and it was disoriented, though still dangerous—and turned to Jenna. Her fingers twitched, starting to build a fireball. Sheba yelped in the distance, and he heard Piers shout as the monster burst out of the ice he tried to trap it in. "Go help them!" he told Jenna. "I've got this one."

She sprinted away and he got his chance, then, as it turned to swipe at him again. Too slow. Felix lunged.

Shooting pain lanced through his arm, and he stifled a yell. His fingers involuntarily lost their grip on the sword, and the only reason it didn't drop was because it was now stuck to the hilt in the monster's side. He called up Earth—and it answered with a roar, sending up a torrent of stones to half-bury the thing and finishing it off for good.

With the monster finally dispatched, he pulled the sword free with his right hand and tentatively flexed his left arm—and stopped short with a grimace as the pain shot through it again. He'd torn something, he realized, something inside. He tried to summon the power to heal it, and was left with nothing. He'd used it up already.

This was bad.


The others fared better than he did, with only a couple minor scrapes. Felix said nothing about his arm, though every time he bent his elbow it jabbed at him. He'd fix it himself once he could. A misstep on the rocky ground jarred the injury again and he stifled a wince, glad that they'd be getting off the road tonight if all went as planned.

He still hadn't managed to heal his arm by the time they got to town, and things only went downhill from there. They staggered into the inn after sunset and found it packed.

"I don't suppose there's space for five," Kraden asked, once they'd elbowed their way through to the innkeeper's desk.

"Only two beds left. It's these creatures on the road, right? They got everyone all jumpy. Wouldn't wanna meet one of those flying things at night, nosir. "

Great, Felix thought. "What about the floor?"

The innkeeper considered. "You're that desperate, I got some room in the attic…"

The attic it was, then. After dinner he and Piers found themselves up there with a couple straw mats tossed down between the dusty crates. Better than the road. The girls and Kraden had taken the beds. Felix still wasn't able to use his arm.

Naturally left-handed, he'd eaten dinner clumsily with his right—it was stew, at least, with a spoon, and he'd thanked Iris he hadn't needed to use chopsticks—and prayed that no one noticed. Tomorrow, hopefully, he'd be able to fix it.

As it was, Felix sat down on a crate of blankets and set to carefully removing his gear. When it came time to pull the glove off his left hand he couldn't quite hide the flinch. He paused, a moment. Maybe it hadn't been noticeable.

Piers looked up from where he'd been tending to his own equipment. "What happened to your arm?"

No such luck. "It's nothing."

"You're hurt."

He stared him down. "It's fine."

Faster than Felix could react, Piers reached out and grabbed him by the wrist. Felix tensed, about to punch him, but stopped when the movement sent a new spike of pain shooting toward his elbow.

Piers only met him stare for stare. "Ply."

Blue light glowed.

Mercury's healing was cold, unlike Venus's warmth. He'd felt it before, but that didn't make it comforting.

When the last of the light had faded, Piers let go, and Felix drew his arm back slowly—the healing left a pins-and-needles sensation that he longed to rub away, but not with Piers watching. He'd shown him too much already.

Piers, meanwhile, turned back to the sword-belt he'd been oiling. "Keep your wrists tucked and that won't happen."

Without a word Felix pulled a blanket from the crate and wrapped himself up in it, lying down to face the wall.

Behind him, Piers kept at his work. "Good night."


As it so happened, the mayor wouldn't let them leave Madra until he'd rewarded them for their role in apprehending the pirate, though the reward was yet another mysterious object—a stone chip, this time. They gave it to Sheba for safekeeping, because she said it seemed windy. Felix supposed a windy rock might come in handy eventually, somehow.

They'd just gotten onto the road, preparing to bid Madra goodbye for good, when a voice called out from behind them. "You!"

A woman—and he'd have known the scales, the fangs anywhere. Proxian. She held a scythe in her hands. "I recognize you. Felix!"

His heart began to pound. What was another one of them doing out here? He glanced around, hand drifting toward his sword-hilt, but she didn't seem to have any companions with her. Though she wouldn't need to, if she were strong enough…

She advanced on them, pink-skinned and scowling. "Menardi was with you! Where is she? Where is my sister?"

"She's not here," he said slowly. She didn't know. Oh, gods help them, she didn't know.

The woman's brow furrowed, drawn close over gleaming red eyes. "When will she return?"

"She won't!" Sheba spat from somewhere around his elbow, voice made of venom and fire.

Her grip tightened on the haft of her scythe, knuckles going pale. "What did you say?"

"She won't be coming back, because she's dead!" Sheba stepped forward as she said it, stretching out her hands, and Felix stuck out an arm to hold her back. Not now, he thought. Not here. They didn't need another fight, they didn't need another enemy. And this woman hadn't needed to know any of that. Fleetingly, he thought of his and Jenna's parents, of Isaac's father…

Sheba caught herself and stopped struggling against him, but none the fire left her voice. "Saturos and Menardi are at the bottom of the ocean by now! Isaac killed them!"

"Sssh!" Jenna hissed.

Not helping, Felix thought, keeping his face carefully blank and his eyes focused straight ahead. You're not helping.

Proxian faces were hard to read, but shock and sorrow were universal. "Is this true? Is my sister dead?"

He supposed they couldn't lie…but the truth could kill more people. Before he'd made up his mind what to do she spoke again.

"She was no fool. She wouldn't have left you alone. She is not here, and you—you wouldn't have stood a chance against her. And you wouldn't have been stupid enough to fight her, anyway. So it must have been this Isaac." She snarled. "I've heard of him. They say he passed this way recently. Where is he?"

He swallowed, and felt his palms go sweaty. "We don't know."

"You lie!" She leaned in toward him, until she was mere inches from his face. Her pupils were slits, like a lizard's. "You will tell me!"

"We don't know."

She drew back and hefted the scythe. "I should kill you where you stand—no."

A joyless smile spread across her face. "No. I will let you live to light the lighthouse. You will light it, because you know what will happen if you do not. And I will find Isaac and kill him. The last thing he sees will be Karst avenging the death of her dear sister!"

She turned on her heel, and headed up the north road.

"Can't we—" Jenna said, as soon as Karst was out of earshot.

"Leave it be," said Felix. "I was there when Isaac defeated Saturos and Menardi. She's no threat to him."

He hoped it was the truth.

They watched her go.

"I think," Piers said, "That you had better tell me exactly what's going on."

"Not here," said Felix, glancing over the town's buildings, golden-yellow in the lingering dawn, the open road. His hand rested on his sword hilt, not lightly, and stayed there until they'd put more distance between themselves and Karst. They finally stopped in a scrubby clearing, and silence hung heavy in the air for too long.

"It's our parents," Jenna said at last, haltingly. "We need to free our parents."

"They were kidnapped," Felix said. "By the Fire Clan of the North. Saturos and Menardi. Proxians, like her."

"I thought you said Saturos and Menardi died."

"They did. Our parents are in Prox."

He'd never heard of it. It wasn't on his long-outdated maps.

"In the far northern reaches. The home of the Fire Clan. They're…collateral. We're from a village called Vale, at the foot of Mount Aleph." When that got no recognition, Felix went on, "In Angara. It's a village of Adepts."

Kraden cleared his throat.

"And Kraden. We had a treasure, there. The elemental stars, one for each of the elements. They were held deep within Sol Sanctum, in the heart of the mountain. As Adepts of Vale it was our duty to keep them safe, to keep them hidden away from the outside world."

"The Stars are stones of pure elemental power," Kraden explained. "And they're the key to lighting the elemental Lighthouses, and breaking Alchemy's seal."

Were they? His king would want to know this…his king would want to see them. Maybe those all those weeks of imprisonment had been a blessing. Piers chose his words carefully. "I thought that was only a legend."

Kraden chuckled, half-humorlessly. "So did we."

When Piers looked to him for an explanation, he gestured to Felix, who continued.

"Four years ago a Proxian raiding party came to Vale, and tried to steal the stars. They failed, but when they breached Sol Sanctum they triggered a trap that set off a massive eruption. I was caught in it." He glanced over at Jenna, who was staring intently at the ground, stone-faced. "So were our parents. The Proxians found us first. They made us go with them to Prox. A year ago they tried to steal the stars again, and brought me with them. This time they succeeded."

He broke off, then, and went looking through his pack, before pulling out something small, about the size of his palm. He held it out, and Piers saw a purple gem, shot through with veins of blue and silver and glimmering dazzlingly in the sunlight—no. He looked more closely, and it wasn't the sun's reflection. Motes of lighting, brilliant sparks, danced inside it, following a rhythm all their own.

Elemental power. One of the stars.

Gooseflesh rose on his arms.

"Mercury and Venus are already lit," Felix said, slipping the star back into its bag. "Jupiter is next. That's where we're going."

"To light the lighthouse," Piers said.

"To light the lighthouse. If we don't, our parents die." Felix looked at him then, and the look in those eyes dared him to try to do something against it. It was belied by the tense set of his shoulders, by the way that Jenna's face went white.

That explained it, Piers thought. Their families' lives were at stake. No wonder they'd been so jumpy. He'd have liked to tell Felix that there was nothing to worry about…but it was up to the king how much to reveal. Piers would have to take them to him. He hoped they'd acquiesce.

Mercury and Venus are already lit…half the king's final plan, already come to fruition. And Lemuria hadn't even known. There was no way for the Senate to stop it now. Piers could have kissed him. He cleared his throat instead, hiding the grin. "Well, then, far be it for me to stop you."

"Wait, what?" Jenna frowned at him. Behind her, her brother had frozen with his pack halfway to his back.

Better to not give them the chance to think about it. Piers turned to Sheba. "And you're also from Vale?"

"No. I fell out of the sky." Her eyes narrowed. "Where are you from, Piers?"

"The heart of the Eastern Sea." He hesitated. She didn't look away. Could it hurt, he wondered. They would surely see the maps—and King Hydros would need to see them, sooner or later. Half the lighthouses already lit. Remarkable. "Lemuria."

Kraden peered at him with renewed interest. "Some say that that's only a legend."

"My people rarely venture beyond their island."

"And you left it to make a map?" Felix asked, but with more puzzlement than steel.

"By order of my king." He looked hard at Felix as he said it. Don't ask about the rest of it, he pleaded silently. Don't ask about the rest of it and I won't ask about the rest of you.

Felix seemed to catch on. He nodded. "All right. You said your ship is to the east?"

Piers tried not to let the relief show on his face. "A few hours' walk."

"Lead the way."

He did as much. The girls followed along behind, with Felix as the rearguard—though the road between the town and the shore was well-traveled enough that he didn't think there'd by any trouble with monsters.

They continued in silence for some time, until Kraden fell into step beside him.

"It's interesting," Kraden said to him.

"What's that?"

"Many Adepts would not be so cavalier about lighting the beacons. It's why we've had to be so secretive about it."

"Is that so?"

"I've also heard that the Lemurians' understanding of Alchemy runs far deeper than our own."

He smiled, a little thinly. "I couldn't say."

Kraden looked as though he were about to say something more, but Piers was saved from any further suspicion when they crested a hill to reach of the beach. Below them stretched a tan strip of sand, and then the ocean, brilliant blue. And on it…

"There she is," Piers said, voice swelling with pride. "My ship."