Frankie’s commanding brusqueness took Riordan back to his old military days. He responded clearly and concisely, answering as quickly as she barked out her questions. They sped up their pace, each responding to the methods of the other, until they were practically talking over each other. Whenever Riordan got something wrong or left something out, Frankie snapped out the correct answer, and made him repeat it a few times before moving on to the next question.

The interchange got Riordan’s blood pumping. He felt challenged and sharp in a way he hadn’t in ages. Someone was pushing him. It made him want to push back. To exceed all expectations and win. It was moments like these that reminded Riordan why he was weak despite being a fighter and a survivor. When he didn’t have something to fight or to survive, he got a little aimless. He was a person who needed pressure to grow. Or at least, that was the way he knew how to grow.

Frankie challenged him. She made it clear that she thought he was a hopeless mess. Instead of wallowing in his own patheticness and unworthiness, Riordan wanted to change that low opinion of his skills and potential. Yeah, maybe he’d never win compared to some genius like Quinn, but he would show that he was the most determined to improve, damn it. Given enough time, hard work could take him to some crazy heights.

Her questions proved Riordan right. She began quizzing him on things besides the stones in the box, tossing out descriptions and then fetching a handful of unpolished stones for him to identify. She even grabbed some of the labeled herb bottles off a shelf to quiz him on, even though plants hadn’t been in the book she’d left him with last night at all. Frankie took short breaks periodically to check on her apprentices, but kept up the intense questioning and teaching for an hour. Riordan’s brain felt hot and strained from maintaining focus and recall for so long.

Finally, she cut him some slack, leaning back in the overly stuffed armchair that dwarfed her thin body. Frankie tapped her fingers against her chin, studying Riordan. Riordan let her, sitting in silence and waiting for her to break the silence. He was fairly certain she could out patience him if she wanted, but he was also pretty sure she wouldn’t bother. Not when there were things to get done today.

“Why do you think you are an idiot?” Frankie asked finally.

What a Frankie question. Riordan snorted, leaning back with equal ease in his own comfortable chair. “Are you asking what might have caused me to be an idiot or why I view myself in a certain way? I’m assuming the first, since the second only makes sense if I thought I was an idiot. Which I don’t.”

The look Frankie gave him was pure disbelief. “Boy, you are your own worst critic in everything personal. Other people judge your actions. You judge yourself. Who convinced you that you would never amount to more than a soldier?”

Something about that phrasing made Riordan frown deeply and get defensive. “Soldiers aren’t idiots. They are some of the bravest, smartest, strongest people you’ll ever meet.”

“Anyone who lets themselves kill at the orders of another is some flavor of fool in my book,” Frankie snapped right back, “Anyone who kills because they think it’s right and just, like they have the qualifications to know that, is worse. Violence can be the answer. Some people listen to nothing less. Turning to violence first and glorifying it is a quick descent into reductionist thinking and dehumanization. Lack of empathy is the heart of sin.”

That last part hit hard. Riordan had arrived at that conclusion himself, not long ago, when thinking about the lengths the death mages were willing to go to for power. He warred with the combination of that condemnation with his own concept of a soldier. Soldiers were people willing to risk everything for the greater good. They did hard jobs, putting their lives on the line to protect people and ideals from danger. They went into dark places and did what was necessary, so that no one else had to.

And yet, who did soldiers fight? Who decided wars? What was the justice in violence? He’d grown up with stories of the Holocaust all around him, writ large in the large swathes of family trees wiped out from his own family and that of his friends. Soldiers had killed them. Soldiers had saved them. They had also saved themselves. And then there was the news he’d heard out of Israel since he left, of worsening atrocities committed against the Palestinians in the name of never letting the Holocaust happen to the Jewish people again. It was easy to excuse horror when it wasn’t his own people suffering. When it was far away. When it was hidden or spun or justified. When he was just following orders.

Riordan hated the knot of discomfort left in his chest at those thoughts. No one liked uncomfortable truths. He tried to sit with the feeling and process it. He wasn’t sure Frankie knew the whole of it. She’d never been a soldier. It was easy for her to pass judgment from her safe rural corner of the world. Yet, that didn’t mean there wasn’t at least some truth in her judgment. Still…

“Soldiers aren’t idiots,” Riordan reiterated, unwilling to back down on that point, whatever the other quibbles Frankie had.

She dismissed that with a wave of her bony hand. “Fine, fine. You’re missing the point. You have a habit of belittling your own skills. Why?”

That was a challenging question in a whole different way. Riordan sat back, startled. He wasn’t sure he saw what Frankie did in himself, but even if he did, what sort of person could just look at a character trait and go “ah, that was caused by this”? Riordan couldn’t say why he was a certain way. Hell, he hardly knew what traits he truly called his own as it was.

This was the most backhanded compliment Riordan had ever received. Frankie was saying that his skills and possibly intelligence were higher than he gave himself credit for, despite the way she also considered him an absolute mess of a person. What did she want from him?

When Riordan couldn’t come up with an answer, his inner struggles furrowing his brow in sharp lines, Frankie relented slightly and rephrased her question into a statement. “Somewhere in your life, you internalized negative beliefs about yourself. They are undermining your potential. Normally, if you were an apprentice candidate, untrained and barely into adulthood, I would consider you an excellent shaman candidate, just based on the intelligence, drive, and magical instincts you have demonstrated. However, you are not a typical apprentice candidate. You are a fully formed adult with ingrained habits that hold you back. It would take a hell of a lot of work to turn you into a pack shaman at this point.”

Riordan’s head whipped up, words slipping out before he even registered what he was saying, “I don’t want to be--”

He cut off as Frankie nodded, as if that was exactly what she expected. She gave him another thoughtful look and another baffling question. “Are you a spiritual man, Riordan?”

That question took on whole new levels of potential meaning between two users of spirit magic, but Riordan thought it wasn’t magic she was asking about. She meant faith, as tied to a religion or not. Riordan had considered himself an atheist, denying gods as only interpretations of other phenomena. Yet, in the last few days, he’d bonded with ghosts, wallowed in death, spoken to a spirit in its own language, and peeked past the mirrors of perceived reality in the spirit realm.

Riordan shook his head, paused, and then shrugged. “I would have said ‘no’ without a thought until just recently. Now, I don’t know.”

Frankie pondered Riordan and his answer before nodding. “There is wisdom in growth. Never stop questioning things. There is always more than one way to look at anything. A spiritual person might think that your feet have been placed on a new path for a reason. A skeptical person will think that the new path can become a reason. Is it the path that makes the walker or the walker who makes the path? Think about it.”

Gods, Riordan didn’t even know where to start with that nugget of old shaman wisdom. Still, the concept that there are different valid perspectives stuck with him. He nodded slowly. He could at least spend some time thinking about it. Riordan had no idea what conclusions he would reach, or even if he knew enough to reach a meaningful conclusion, but Frankie was right about him having bad habits of thought. Specifically, Riordan often didn’t think. He shoved things away, buried them, wallowed in them, but didn’t process and own them. His regrets haunted him and his anxieties tormented him, but had Riordan ever tried to make them part of himself, their master and not their puppet?

“Ngh,” Riordan groaned, rubbing at his eyes, “You make my head hurt, woman.”

“Ha! It’s good for you,” Frankie laughed. “Builds character!”

“Character, my ass,” Riordan muttered, but he found himself smiling anyway. Frankie had given him a lot to think about and it had helped ground him and remind him that there was still more to the world than his own immediate problems, no matter how large or important. “What next?” he asked.

Frankie started to answer and then her head whipped up to stare off into space, reacting to something unseen. Riordan knew that motion, though he doubted she was turning to listen to a ghost. A moment later, Frankie spoke some words in a language Riordan didn’t recognize at all, each one dripping with power, and a streak of color flew through the air.

It resolved itself into one of the Spirit Guardians Riordan had seen the night he’d crossed the territory border. Wings spread, the bird spirit with its long legs, long neck, and glowing blue symbols highlighting its skin and feathers cried out, the sound silent but resonating.

Images and sensations rippled out from that call, directed at Frankie but catching Riordan in its nimbus. Blue skies, wind, the curve of ancient magic that was the border. Flowing along those twisting paths of thought and magic. An oily scent on the wind. A chill air. It faded, retreated, vanished away before touching and was forgotten. Then the black frost burst forth, splattering upon the egg shell of the pack’s protections, oozing down and smearing foulness. A terrible taste. A rotten stench.

Riordan knew that taste. It was death magic, thick with stagnant corruption, as experienced by a spirit.

The border was under attack.