"I suppose this dump will have to do for tonight." Keela eyed the rundown homestead, lip curling in noticeable disgust. "If you would, Cinnis?"

Brand studied the battered and chipped piece of wood serving as the door, focusing on the rusted iron hinges. He tried to delicately pull them apart, but the metal squealed and shattered apart the moment he touched it with his magick.

The door clonked onto the stones and fell inwards, kicking up motes of thick dust within.

Keela wrinkled her nose as she took a step closer. "Either the family who owned this place is long dead, or abandoned it a while ago." She eyed the forest they'd crawled through for the past two days, the trail of mud they'd trudged through for the last half hour. "I'm hoping for the latter. Aye, Cinnis?"

Brand swallowed, too tired to do more than nod his stiff head in agreement. In those two days he'd done nothing but walk, climb, and clamor his way through gods awful hillocks, treacherous valleys, and more than once he'd been forced off the road to hide behind a tree and avoid the countless patrolling horsemen. Whether rebels or loyalists didn't seem to matter. She was avoiding both of them.

"Well, let's not waste any time. Wouldn't want you keeling over any minute now," Keela said, looking put out over his lack of enthusiasm for her game. Not that there was anything fun weighing the odds between mold and a family of corpses. It was merely the prize at the end if he was wrong.

To Brand's benefit at least, the family who'd owned the place had seen fit to pack up and go elsewhere. The air inside was stale and musty, wood daubed walls peppered with various degrees of fungus and rot. The ground at least was dry, and the stone fireplace within had somehow survived the test of time.

"We should get a fire going. Clean it up while I hunt us some dinner. Feeling particular about anything?" Keela flashed him a side eyed grin. "Boar? Deer? Ooh, or maybe you'd prefer elk?"

Brand's stomach groaned out the answer before he could. He forgot he'd also forgone eating during their two day hike, surviving off of melted snow and sheer determination. In the past his mother had scolded him for missing meals, back when his sole focus had been on becoming the family scion.

He swallowed past a lump in his throat. She was the reason he was here in the first place, after all. Once he helped Keela with her task he'd finally find his mother again, and they could be a family once more. All he had to do was stay on the path. Nothing else mattered.

"Well?" Keela asked, her voice taking on a sing-song tone. "Don't keep me waiting, Cinnis."

"Deer will be fine," Brand said hastily. Although a Byzantian stuffed fruit tart with roasted raisins sounded just as delightful.

The witch shrugged and sauntered out of the abandoned house, the hem of her blue robe trailing over the doorframe. For a moment, Brand's eyes lingered on the curve of her thigh poking out from beneath, then she was gone.

"What in the Seven Hells have I done," Brand cursed beneath his breath, invoking a place of damnation he didn't even believe in. Damn the Vangen, but they loved their phrases. After a year of serving under them, he'd picked up the nasty habit as well.

He shook his head and tried to focus on the task at hand. The stone fireplace was, by all accounts, still reasonably intact. Leaves, sticks, and other debris lay scattered like a massive bird's nest within it, rusty bits of metal poking out like hedgehog needles.

With a quick snap of his fingers, Brand morphed his staff into a rake and started scraping it out. He tossed the rusty off to one side, scouring them clean for good measure. Even dead metal was still his to command, despite time's endless march.

Once the fireplace had been cleaned, he set his staff to snipping off the largest stalks of mushrooms, clearing out more space and making the air at least somewhat breathable. The bits of iron he'd found in the fireplace turned out to be a broken spit and with a little luck he assembled it back into place.

Off in the distance someone started singing, a woman's voice, Keela's he realized after some time. It rose and fell with a gentle cadence, the kind you'd sing to a baby to put it to sleep, or to ease the mind of a child scared by a nightmare. It reminded him of the songs his mother used to sing him for exactly the same reasons.

An inhuman scream tore through air as the singing stopped abruptly, followed by a spine tingling crack of broken bone. Brand's heart jumped to his throat as he ran outside, fearing the worst. Had King Erik's men found them? Had the rebels discovered them somehow? A more terrible thought came over him then. Had Libro and the others finally tracked him down?

Keela stood in the muddy yard of the house, one hand gripped tight round the throat of a large deer. Its head was bent the wrong way, a thin line of blood trickling from its mouth.

"I found dinner," the witch said, smiling from ear to ear.

Brand couldn't tear his eyes away from the deer, the way its black eyes continued to stare at him, as if accusing him somehow. Why couldn't you have requested a boar? It asked. Why me?

"Come now," Keela said. She threw the deer and it skidded to a misshapen pile at his feet. "Help me dress it. I haven't had good venison steak in quite a while."

It was hard to tell time without the sun. Brand sat with his back against the wall, picking absently at his meal, a healthy fire crackling over two sturdy logs. Keela was already finishing off her third leg, a neat little pile of bones set beside her.

"Growing boys need to eat their meat," the witch muttered between mouthfuls. She reached down and grabbed a piece of the antler, snapping it in two before sucking down the marrow. "We have a long road ahead of us tomorrow and we'll need all our strength to get there."

Brand paused and put his portion down, the slightest tickle of frustration growing in his chest. "Where are we even going?"

"The town of Torm, for starters. A bit of a walk, but it's best if we avoid the main roads for the time being. Less chance for the rebels to spot us. Or worse, the King's Chosen."

"And from there?"

"Rikkenland," Keela said before snapping off another piece of antler.

"And how far is that?"

She paused from her eating, studying him through narrowed eyes. "My my, you've become awfully curious lately. Why is that? Am I making you late for some important event? Do we need to hurry this along?"

Brand felt the tips of his ears start to burn. "No! I just...I just want to know when I'll get to see my mother again. That's all."

Keela heaved out a sigh, as if she were a teacher trying to explain the subject to a particularly dull pupil. "We've spoken about this already. I will tell you where she is after you help me save Danic."

The heat in Brand's ears slowly drained into his chest, igniting a long forgotten feeling he'd tried to smother for the past year.

"And how am I going to do that?" He demanded, surprised at the slight snarl in his voice. "Do you want me to turn the High King into a pile of meat? Wrap him up in an iron sarcophagus and toss him in the sea? Or shall I make the world's tallest pole so we can shove it up his ass and parade him around like a flag?"

In the past, his glib had earned him cuffing across the ear from Elba. Instead, Keela laughed, a soft tittering sound more mocking than congenial. It did little to abate the flames growing in his chest.

"I suppose I have been rather light on the details. No sense winding you up any further. I need you to be level headed if we're to succeed together." She slid closer to him, placing a hand on his leg.

Brand immediately pulled away on instinct. It wasn't the fact he despised her, far from it honestly. It was simply the fact her hand was too cold. Like winter made flesh. He could still feel the trace of it still burning his flesh.

Witchfire, he thought to himself.

Keela ignored it with quiet grace. "Let me tell you a story then. About Danic, and the rise of its first king, and how it pertains to our little quest. I take it you don't know much about our history, correct?"

"The land of Danic was never brought up in my education," Brand admitted. "My parents, even my uncle, were hesitant to talk much about it."

"Then allow me to be your tutor. Before King Erik, before kings even existed in a place like this, there was only darkness." The witch waved her hand in the air, pulling some smoke from the fire and turning it into a sphere in her outstretched palm. "The land was cold, and gray, and cruel back then. the people here were little more than warring clans of tribesmen fighting and killing for every scrap they could take."

"Like a bucket of crabs," Brand pointed out.

Keela paused, lips pursed as she glared at him.

"Sorry. Please continue."

"As I was saying. The land of Danic was a stagnant wasteland, stuck in a loop of cold winters and bloody summers, its people trapped in an endless cycle, until one fateful day a man named Galm was born. His birth was irrelevant, his childhood equally unremarkable, but upon his twentieth year when he was named the chief of his clan, everything changed.

Keela paused for dramatic effect, watching Brand to see if he would say anything. When he kept his mouth shut, she continued with a relieved smile. "It was the day my mother appeared before him. She did not give him gold, silver, or iron as proper tribute. Instead, she gave him a prophecy. That he was fated to rule all of Danic one day under the light of a falling star."

A log shifted in the fireplace then, embers scattering in all directions, flitting near Brand's eyes.

"He mocked her, of course, as all men do when faced with such truths, before a flash of light tore across the sky and crashed to the earth below." The smoke in Keela's hand morphed into the body of a soaring comet, colliding into her palm before dissipating away. "My mother took Galm to where the meteor landed and from its body a sword was forged, blessed by the light of the beyond. With it, they split the darkness in twain, bringing the sun back to Danic and uniting the clans under one single banner."

"Keela paused, the smoke in her palm transforming into the vague outline of a blade. "That blade was known as the Night Breaker."

"Is that what we're looking for then?" Brand asked, skepticism and intrigue tugging at him all at once. "This Night Breaker?

"The witch nodded her head. "When Galm, now known as Galm the Ancient, passed on from this world, my mother took the sword and hid herself from Danic. For you see, she had ulterior motives the entire time. The prophecy she told him was a lie."

Brand snorted. "Why am I not surprised? All prophecies are lies when you think about it."

"Are they?" Keela asked, a little venom hidden in her voice. "Even the one we find ourselves in now?"

That made him pause. "I suppose...there could be some merit to it. Magick is, after all, still very unpredictable."

"Much like people, in a way, but that is for a different story. My mother has always wanted to rule Danic, but she knew the tendencies of mankind. To see what others have and covet it yourself. Far better to hide behind a puppet and move the strings as she sees fit. But first, she needed the people of Danic to grow and spread across the land, forging a mighty kingdom for herself as one would grow a garden. It is only recently that she has emerged once more, with a new king and a new blade."

Keela held out her other hand, a second blade forming from the smoke. "Dawn Ruiner, the polar opposite of her first creation, brimming with the same darkness she'd banished decades before."

"But why?" Brand asked, his head reeling to keep up. "Why would she bring back what she'd worked so hard to drive away in the first place?"

The witch shook her head with disappointment. "Why do we reap in the fall and grow in the spring? Why do we raise our pigs before we slaughter them?" She leaned forward, snapping her sharp, white teeth in Brand's direction, startling him. "Because we are always hungry. My mother's appetite is just a bit more...insatiable."

A cold terror gripped Brand by the throat as the pieces slowly came together. "Your mother's been feeding off these people like cattle. She lied to them from the very start, just so she could do all this. She's worse than the Stelecasters. Worse than the Empress, even."

"And that is why she needs to be stopped, Cinnis. When she returned to Danic with King Erik and the Dawn Ruiner, she hid the Night Breaker to make sure its power could never be used again."

Keela snatched at both smoke illusions, tiny dust motes sinking between her fingers. "Unfortunately for her, I know where it is, and with your help we may yet save Danic."

***