When resting unused for long periods of time, an internal pressure begins to accrue within one’s heartstone. This can be seen in children by the sudden onset of obvious discomfort around their third to fifth year, and it is at this time that their abilities tend to begin manifesting themselves.

-On Heartstones, vol 2

The first time I demonstrated my beautiful new shield to Pelys, he considered it for three seconds, then shook his head.

“The barbs are too far apart,” he said. “They need to be packed tight enough that nothing can slip through. The way you have them now, I could reach my hand in safely, let alone a disruption attack.”

He demonstrated, effortlessly spiking it into nothingness.

I deflated, my grand triumph of the morning feeling long ago and far away. I’d flown slowly on the way over, trying to practice as much as possible, but I still couldn’t bring it into shape in less than half an hour. Pel’s took about five minutes when he did it seriously, though he could put together a demonstration version more quickly that wouldn’t be stable enough to use in an actual fight.

I began the laborious time-consuming process of reforming the shield.

“Don’t look so discouraged, this is still great progress.” Pel sounded obligatory, though, and I knew he was only trying to cheer me up.

He’d grown increasingly tense throughout the past weeks, as the reirns refused to come to an agreement regarding the renegades. But this felt different. In recent days, Pel’s attitude had been slipping faster than usual. Rather than impatience, a sort of resigned apathy seemed to be taking over. I’d been focused on my own lack of progress, assuming my slowness caused his discouragement, but now that I’d actually made a breakthrough it seemed to have no impact on his mood.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, as I slowly built up my shield again. “Raysh still refusing to help?”

“Reirn Anadeen refuses to permit anyone across her borders ‘with intent to harass my citizens, regardless of alleged misdeeds.’”

Reirns Mennan Metako and Ushan Varon had eventually committed to join Ovnon Sarosa with enough trained fighters to overpower Retti and Desten with ease. But since Retti and Desten had legally purchased their hideout within Raysh jurisdiction, if Reirn Ovnon attacked without authorization from Reirn Anadeen it would shatter the Alliance and open the door to Raysh aggression anywhere in the world.

Not that it stopped various ‘independent individuals’ from trying, but no attempt at assassinating or extracting Retti and Desten had succeeded. I tried to hope ours would be different, but so far no one had returned who’d done more than observe at a safe distance.

Pel continued, “Since the last few strike attempts, she’s assigned several Aylin to watch the area around the village for foreign interference.”

“Aylin, that’s roughly equivalent to Sarosa’s fourth ranking?”

“A little higher, yeah. It’s what I would be ranked if I were Raysh.”

“Shouldn’t Reirn Anadeen be more concerned about sheltering two Varon murderers who’ve killed multiple close-line Sarosa nobles?”

Pelys growled. “That’s the problem. They’re too valuable.”

In the past we’d discussed the theory that Raysh liked the idea of keeping such powerful individuals for themselves, but mostly as a bonus to the fact that they were causing trouble for the other houses. But he’d never seemed this obviously bothered by the idea before.

“What happened?”

“If our intelligence isn’t mistaken, Utrenad and Wightok have both made offers on them.”

I blinked uncertainly. “Offers?”

“Bribes. Offering payment in addition to protection if they’ll agree to come integrate. Desten is young and unattached, with the kind of power that makes reirns take note. If they keep playing their tiles right, they’ll end up as very influential people.”

I shivered, imagining Desten 5 as an heirna, Retti in the shadows to guide him where she wanted. She was dangerous enough on her own. I did not want to see what she could do with an entire house’s resources at her command.

Distracted, my control slipped and the shield relaxed back into its default smooth sphere, setting me back several minutes. I sighed and refocused on shaping the power.

“That’s not the worst of it.”

I froze, shield quivering in place.

“People have been disappearing. Not killed flashily, no remains left to attract attention, just gone. Which would ordinarily be of no concern; people decide to leave or go on trips without warning all the time. But the longer they don’t come back, the longer there’s no word… the more likely something untoward has happened.”

“Kidnapping?”

“That’s what I suspect. Multiple individuals last known to be visiting Raysh have disappeared without leaving word.”

“Children?”

“Adults.”

I frowned. “Couldn’t they fight back?”

Pel nodded. “Which is what makes this all the more concerning. Without overwhelming power, it shouldn’t be possible to thoroughly subdue someone who knows what they’re doing. And even then, there’s no way to keep them under control forever. There’s no way to restrain power like you can restrain someone physically. Even disruption can be disrupted, as I just proved.”

“But it might not be Retti? It might be innocent travel or personal reasons for disappearing?”

Pel met my eyes without looking away. “Do you believe that?”

“No.” My stomach felt all twisted up on itself. We’d waited too long. Whatever her plans, she’d been free to pursue them unobstructed - worse, in collusion with Raysh authorities. "What can we do?"

"Train you, prepare Vess and Lan, and go after them ourselves." He smiled tightly. “I’ve been in contact with a few other independent groups, and I think we can coordinate a joint attack of our own. It won’t be official, won’t have any reirn’s support, and it’ll destroy our credibility, but I refuse to sit by again.”

"That seems dangerous."

"It is dangerous. But if Raysh doesn't care that she's kidnapping people right under their noses? Do we wait until her project is finished? Let her carry on with impunity?"

“Well, what about the conversant? She was terrified of them finding out, have you talked to them? If anyone can ignore the dictates of individual houses…” I trailed off as Pel gave a weak laugh.

“The conversant? Me? I wouldn’t even know how to find them, even if I did have the authority to approach them. Lost god, Astesh! Half the time they don’t even show up when the reirns ask them to. Do you really think they’d deign to answer to someone like me?”

“Well, what do they actually do normal days? Ratifying a new reirn happens, what, once every forty years or so? That alone certainly can’t be enough to occupy their lives.”

“Perhaps when they’re not acting in official capacity they go about their business as ordinary nobles. Or perhaps they have a secret mountain somewhere. Or they live in the sea. It’s impossible to guess, and pointless to try.”

My mind skipped over something, snagging on a fragment of memory I’d mostly forgotten.

“None of the houses wears black, do they?” I asked slowly.

“Not as more than decoration. Only the conversant.”

“So that was one of them,” I murmured. Suddenly, Retti’s fears made a lot more sense, having witnessed the unbelievable strength of a conversant firsthand. “I know how to get their attention.”

“Right now I’ll take any help I can get. But if they smite us for interfering, don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.”

“Really Pel? I thought you weren’t worried about anything.”

He sighed, looking away. “Then you don’t know me as well as I thought.”

“I— no, that’s not what I meant. I know you worry about— I was thinking about dangerous circumstances, not—” I forced myself to stop, and an awkward silence hovered between us.

“So, what’s your plan?” he finally asked.

“We need to transgress into the study of useless histories with no application to our present lives. Last time I spent a week studying scraps of ancient history, an insanely powerful woman in black robes showed up to order me to drop it.”

“Is that what the conversant do with their free time? Harass scholars?”

“As long as they actually show up, I won’t complain. We just need to tell them what Retti’s up to, and they should swoop in and put a stop to it.”

"Do you think they would?"

I shrugged. "She seemed afraid that they would. I don't know what they concern themselves with apart from safeguarding historical documents. It's at least worth a try."

Pel nodded. "Good. Let's go. And keep practicing. You need to be able to hold that shield no matter how distracted you are."

Oh, right, I’d forgotten to reshape the shield, leaving it at its base smoothness this whole time. I sighed. “I’ll work on it on the flight over.”

Pel and I visited the Vaerport archive every day for the next two weeks. I asked after the same documents Desten 3 and I had been studying, and he pretended to peruse the shelves while I stood at a safe distance and practiced my shield.

No one tried to stop us. No mysterious black-robed figure appeared, not even a threatening note or sly whisper.

In desperation, I wrote out everything we knew about Retti’s scheme that might be relevant to the conversant - where she was, what she’d done, what we suspected she was continuing to do - and slipped a copy into every book Desten 3 and I had used while researching Desten 4’s condition. Even the useless ones with nothing but tall tales about prismatics. If the conversant were monitoring the usage of any of them, they’d find the note and could act if they saw fit.

But it did make me wonder. Why was Retti so set on secrecy? What specific piece of her madness did she imagine the conversant would care about, when they interfered so little in anyone’s lives?

I didn’t have time to ponder the question too long, as my biggest focus remained on strengthening and sustaining the dispersal shield. Pelys seemed pleased with my progress, but I couldn't help feeling that I was progressing too slowly. I'd dropped two minutes off the creation time and increased the number of spines threefold, but still they were too spread out and too weak to survive more than a single dispersion attack.

It frustrated us both, how much time we were forced to waste. Leetan was in negotiation with Metako to add their influence to the attempt to persuade Raysh to stop being stubborn, but Pel was pessimistic about that going anywhere.

"Even if Leetan did join us, Raysh would dig in their heels deeper. They've never forgiven the Alliance for refusing their claim on cities they believe are rightfully theirs. The more houses unite against them, the more stubborn they'll get. Besides, I bet you anything Leetan is trying to think of a convincing offer to get hold of Desten themselves."

This wasn't an encouraging sort of thing to hear.

I couldn't keep worrying about everything, but I couldn't stop.

The days passed with more and more reports of missing people, almost predictable. Roughly every three days, two or three more people would be missing. Even people with legitimate business in Raysh had begun avoiding the place as its reputation for safety diminished.

And yet Raysh continued to ignore it. Almost stubbornly so. Why would they do this? I didn’t care how powerful or valuable Desten 5 might be, no attempt to recruit one individual was worth burning this much of a house’s reputation on.

I could sort of understand the desire to protect Retti and her family simply to spite Sarosa and Varon, but this had gone way beyond mere protection. As far as I was concerned, Reirn Anadeen and her court were complicit in the loss of dozens of visiting nobles and Raysh citizens alike.

My mind kept circling back to that question. Why?

If I knew, I couldn't bring it to mind.

But ultimately their reasons didn’t matter.

"We can't keep waiting," I heard myself say, as I arrived at the conclusion.

Pel looked at me, surprised.

"I mean it. We're sitting around and delaying on me. But why? Is this shield really going to be the breaking point between success and failure?"

"Yes."

"I don't see how! It's been months and we're still letting them go on. Whatever horrible things they're doing, we can't just let them."

"I agree, but you're not ready. If we go now, we won't be guaranteed to take them down."

"And if we wait, we are guaranteed to lose more innocents to this madness!"

Pel sighed. "Show me your shield."

Pull it together, push it out into its angry pink spikes. I managed it in twenty-seven minutes. Once created, I could hold it for up to four hours if I didn't get completely distracted.

I kept my focus on maintaining its strength, so when Pelys snapped out his disruption attack it didn’t fade away. He struck again, breaking a hole the size of my head through the shield before I pulled the power back together. That left a smooth defenceless patch, which he attacked with a power-assisted punch. His fist glowed blue as his power flared out one final time and my shield collapsed into nothing.

He shook his head. “You’re not ready.”

“I’ll never be ready! I’m not made for this kind of thing, Pel. I belong at a desk, or on a horse, not in a fight. But this is important. We have to act before it’s too late. If there are three houses already hoping to recruit them, then there’s every probability that they’ll end up out of our reach.”

It would be bad enough to assassinate or capture them from Raysh territory now, but if they were more explicitly allied with any house then even if the Alliance remained intact it might initiate a shadow war the likes of which hadn’t been seen in generations.

“Trust me,” I insisted. “I’ve tried waiting and over-preparing. It doesn’t work. If we don’t act, someone else will.”

“You’re right. I’ll see what can be arranged. Keep practicing. You need to get those barbs closer together, and more of them.”

We practiced long into the night, longer than usual, until dawn began to appear. I didn’t even try to fly home to Varonhold, falling wearily to sleep in Pelys’s sitting room nearly the moment I relaxed. I had been hovering at the edge of stonedrain for hours as I pushed myself and my power to the limits, and his chairs were plenty comfortable enough to sleep in.

Three days later, we had our plans settled.

Of the four unofficial groups Pelys contacted, three agreed to a joint assault on Retti’s cottage. One would strike at dawn, drawing away the Raysh guards, then the rest of us would converge and take over the place.

If Retti and Desten were present, we’d fight them on the spot. If not, we’d take Desten 4 and Tali hostage and confront them when they returned. It seemed a bit extreme to me, but if anything would convince Retti to stand down, it would be knowing she risked the rest of her family.

It would take our allies a further week to covertly relocate into Raysh in order to be in position when we needed them, so that was our target date.

The reckoning would be delayed no further.