After that, I could at least scratch “spend the night in a haunted house” off my bucket list.

Caer Gwylhaithe didn’t have actual ghosts, but it definitely had that vibe. I was shown to a guest room by a giant undead spider, which returned several minutes later to offer me a complimentary bowl of mashed-up maggots and worms. I politely declined. Come to think of it, this seemed to be the overall theme of my stupid isekai adventure. The goddesses were clearly trying to enforce all the standard tropes, but tropes don’t tend to withstand prolonged contact with reality.

I had decided to stay the night because managing Khariss was obviously going to require constant attention. Hopefully just at first; hopefully it was a task I’d be able to delegate soon. She was trying to be positive about all the people suddenly tromping through and around her home, but her periods of hiding in her room tended to be interrupted by sudden outbursts if we didn’t keep somebody near her to contain the situation.

At least she seemed somewhat more emotionally stable after getting her fill to drink for probably only the second or third time ever. Nazralind was fine, too, having received multiple Heals during the process. It had altogether been one of the more socially uncomfortable experiences of my life, standing by and casting healing magic on my lieutenant every few seconds while our new vampire friend slurped directly from her arm. Yet another trope ruined. Vampires and in particular the act of drinking blood tends to be heavily sexualized in all the fiction, but man this was just awkward. I’d never have imagined the spectacle of two attractive women exchanging bodily fluids would be so…clinical and uncomfortable.

After sending most of the team back to North Watch with orders, I kept Zui and Zhylvren with me to continue with Khariss duty, at which they’d already proven successful, and also Aster because there was no way she’d agree to leave me in that place without her supervision. The next day began a heavy traffic between Caer Gwylhaithe and North Watch, via Kzidnak. Sneppit and Kasser arrived at my summons to survey the place, begin drawing up repair plans, and give me no end of shit about the sheer scale of the project I was dumping on them. Since Rads and his crew were fully occupied and I wanted them to stay on task, I authorized Sneppit to form a second excavation team to begin boring new tunnels to Caer Gwylhaithe and all three tribal villages that now answered to me.

Meanwhile, Djast and Naarosh were brought to visit, both to have a say in those arrangements and then to meet with Aster for the purposes of setting up an entire organization of hunters from all three tribes, the North Watch contingent, and Nazralind’s girls because gwynneks were devastatingly effective hunting companions. Having this centrally organized, with an actual duty roster and everything, was very much counter to how the beastfolk were accustomed to doing it, but it was the only way we were going to be able to effectively leverage all our new gleanable territory, not to mention being a good start at getting the various ethnic groups accustomed to working together.

Watching these plans unfold and paying attention to the interactions of those we brought in to consult, I was able to form a mental map of the tensions that existed—as was Zui, who I kept nearby for these discussions because that was her strong suit. Matters between the cat and wolf tribes were tense, but not overtly aggressive; everybody knew that the wolves had been on the verge of attacking the cats, but the cats were sympathetic to their reasons and I had intervened before any blood was actually shed. Wolves and lowborn were careful around each other, simply due to a long cultural history of regarding one another as dangerous by reputation, but there was no evidence of specific anger there. Open hostility existed between the cat tribe and the humans of North Watch, which Sneppit quietly reported that she and Minifrit were staying on top of, but only barely and with a lot of effort. It was understandable; that conflict had been brief, but people on both sides had lost friends to it. Nobody liked the squirrels, but whereas most of the other factions were just wary, regarding them as deep forest boogeymen, the wolf tribe were actively angry. Fairly or not, there seemed to be a general consensus among them that the squirrels shared some blame for allowing the zombies to spread through their territory and become a big problem for the wolves. I have to say our representatives weren’t helping; nothing in squirrel culture seemed to emphasize diplomacy, and neither Naarosh’s stern demeanor nor Zhylvren’s mocking aloofness were making them any friends.

What a mess—and the exact kind of mess I was least equipped to deal with. This would have led to a disaster I’d have no way of fixing a very short while ago, but thankfully I now had subordinates with a decent variety of specialties, including social skills. I learned that both Nazralind’s highborn friends and a contingent of the most outgoing goblins had been actively working to circulate through the organization, soothing ruffled feelings and encouraging people to get to know each other. Zui and Minifrit were taking an active role in organizing this as they could.

More than one person told me things were a bit less tense in North Watch when Velaven wasn’t there. I knew she wasn’t doing anything to worsen the situation and would be actively trying to improve her standing in everyone’s eyes, but…I also couldn’t blame the cats and humans for actively detesting her. The other beastfolk were wary of Shylver nobility among us, too.

I was not looking forward to introducing everybody to Khariss.

So, yeah. A mess. And I had no choice but to trust my top people to keep it contained.

I ended up staying the next day at the zombie village, too, what with all the activity we brought. My day was filled, and divided between meeting with my various subordinates to lay all the plans we needed to, and checking in on Khariss. To my surprise, that became a bit easier once Youda arrived to meet her and examine her alchemy setup. Though no Zui, Youda did not lack social adroitness and I had the impression she was not the first emotionally unstable genius he’d worked with. They hit it off amazingly well, and talking shop with another professional brought out a whole new side of her. I was happy to leave them to it while I dealt with the hundred other arrangements that needed to be made to get this village repaired and re-fortified, and the surrounding territory effectively managed.

No doubt we could’ve made it back by nightfall, but I decided to stay another night, just to be sure. Well, as sure as was feasible. Khariss was slowly coming around, my people were slowly getting used to the giant undead spiders, and necessary arrangements had been made… Things were starting to come together.

Which made me nervous.

And sure enough, as soon as we returned to North Watch the morning after our two-day sojourn in zombie town, Gizmit was there with a report on Caludon’s asinine winter games, and also a particularly surprising bit of news.

“Me?” Aster exclaimed in shock.

“Yeah, her?” I agreed. “Fuckin’ really? What’s a Dark Lord gotta do to get some attention around here?!”

“Have you ever considered the possibility that everything is not about you?” Zui asked me very calmly.

“Not even for one second in my entire life. Fuck, speaking of that, this probably is my fault. I knew that performance at Caer Ardyllen was gonna come back to bite us. Caludon figured out he can get me through Aster and now, here he is, doing that.”

“A reasonable conclusion,” Gizmit said with an amused little smile, “but in fact, it’s not him this time. He hasn’t made a single move toward any of your known interests or associates, Lord Seiji. On the contrary, I haven’t managed to confirm this yet but my people have picked up a credible rumor he’s leaned on his family members to shut down their efforts to find and retrieve Nazralind and Twigs. No, this is something entirely different. The arrest warrant for Delavada Aster comes from Fflyrdylle, entirely bypassing and superseding the Archlord’s authority. It’s been posted in the King’s Guild and every Convocation temple, and sent to each Clan on Dount. The crimes listed on the warrant are treason, sedition, and various other haughty-sounding synonyms for fucking with the power structure.”

Aster was staring vacantly at the fortress wall over Gizmit’s head, her eyebrows drawn together. I stepped over and placed a hand on her upper back, just beside her sword, speaking quietly.

“You okay?”

She shrugged with one shoulder, her expression not changing.

“Well,” Nazralind said slowly, “she did tell off Aunt Naz in front of an entire audience of highborn. A lowborn can’t just do that in this country, not without steep consequences. But it’s…really weird that the central government would get involved in something like this. And even weirder that there’s nothing about Lord Seiji. If they think it’s that important, well, it’s fairly obvious who the ringleader is.”

“As for Lord Seiji,” said Gizmit, “the issue is his outsider status. Him feuding with Caludon Aelthwyn or Lhadron Ardyllen is just tension between nobles, one of whom has no position in the Fflyr hierarchy and thus no stakes for the system itself. Also, Fflyrdylle doesn’t know where he’s from and the King is very hesitant to start beef with any foreign power. But even that isn’t the point. In fact, Aster herself is only kind of tangental to the issue. This is about symbols, and about power. The warrant is a reaction to the other piece of news I came to tell you.”

“You have our attention,” I said.

“She didn’t just tell off Highlady Nazfryn in front of an audience of highborn,” Gizmit explained, “but also a lot of lowborn servants whom those highborn tend to forget exist when they aren’t being used. And they began spreading the story. In fact, it spread remarkably far, amazingly fast, until the name Delavada Aster was being whispered everywhere on Dount the highborn aren’t visibly listening in. Apparently beyond Dount, now, given the reaction from the capital. It’s even made its way back into our organization via our Gwyllthean gangs and contacts in the villages. Everyone is surreptitiously cheering for the Wolf of Dount. Congratulations, Aster: you’re officially an outlaw hero.”

Aster blinked twice, still looking gobsmacked. “Wait… Wolf? What?”

“It’s the eyes,” I said, regarding her pensively.

She narrowed them at me. “Lots of people have yellow eyes.”

“Yeah, but nobody else who called the Archlord’s wife a bitch in public and then walked away from her.”

“And that’s why it’s not about Lord Seiji,” Gizmit added, nodding. “He is an outsider. We all know how good a show he puts on in person, but in the abstract? For the same reason the highborn don’t find him inherently threatening, the lowborn aren’t inclined to find him particularly inspiring. But Aster is one of their own—one who got to say and do what they’ve all desperately wanted to their entire lives, and then walked away without consequence.”

Nazralind let out a low whistle. “Oh, yeah. That’d do it.”

“It gets better!” Gizmit was openly grinning now. “They’re going about it in classic lowborn fashion. The lower classes mocking their betters right to their faces, subtly enough they can’t be called down for it, is an institution in Dlemathlys. In the last two days there’s been an explosion in the popularity of wolf fhullyr totems. The things have become impossible to buy; people are carving their own out of scraps of akorshil and akorthist. Suddenly everybody’s walking around wearing them.”

“Okay, back up,” I interjected. “Filler totems? I know I’ve heard that term but I can’t place the meaning.”

“Fhullyr,” Nazralind corrected. “Okay, so you know how the Radiant Convocation is literally just the Radiant Temple but with some extra doctrine? All of that extra is either justifications for the racial hierarchy or some pre-Convocation Fflyr folklore to give it cultural identity. Fhullyr are part of that.”

“You’ve seen the totems,” Aster said quietly. She still looked shellshocked and was staring into space, but at least she was participating in the conversation. “Some are used in funerary rites.”

Oh… Yeah. I did remember those, the little carved figures they placed around the bodies during a vigil, and which held down the ends of the cloth strips that covered the eyes of the dead.

“Fhullyr are characters from a series of parables that teach moral lessons,” Naz explained. “They’re a mix of real and imaginary creatures that each embody some virtue or vice or personality trait. Some of the stories are actually really funny—basically the only part of religion I actually liked growing up.” She paused, glancing surreptitiously at Aster. “The, ah, the wolf fhullyr is a kind of morally neutral figure, depicted both positively and negatively in different stories. It symbolizes loyalty, both in how faithful and protective the wolf is of its pack, and how savagely destructive it can be toward those outside it.”

“Which is why carrying wolf totems is a brilliant piece of defiance,” Gizmit continued. “These are officially recognized religious symbols of the Radiant Convocation; no secular authority from the King on down would dare prohibit them. In fact, it is Convocation doctrine that the open carrying of fhullyr totems is a praiseworthy sign of piety and an activity for which Clans should reward their lowborn. Even though the Clans know damn well what this sudden popularity of wolf totems actually symbolizes, it’s easy for the lowborn to play dumb about it and the Clans can’t retaliate without attacking the source of their own authority. The Convocation itself does have the power to decanonize the wolf fhullyr and any such totems, of course, but they’re smarter than that. Which is probably going to come to be a problem for us, Lord Seiji, once we start butting heads with the Convocation in earnest, but in this case it helps us. The priesthood is typically more subtle and better at wielding soft power; they know better than to acknowledge Aster’s power as a symbol by taking action against it, or to set the precedent that a popular movement can force them to strip out pieces of their own doctrine.”

She glanced at Aster, her lips curling up in a knowing smile.

“And so the Wolf of Dount lives on in the hearts of the people, and also dangling from a lot of lapels and belts. The Clans are seething, but they are doing so…quietly.”

“Hey.” I patted Aster’s shoulder again. “You all right? Anything I can do?”

She blinked once, then shook herself slightly as if pulling out of some kind of trance. “I…huh. It is the weirdest damn thing. I have hated the institutions of the country my entire life, I’ve been actively working to overthrow them since the Goddesses tossed you in my lap. It’s not like I didn’t know I’d wind up openly at odds with the powers that be. So why the hell is this upsetting?”

Aster turned to scowl at me.

“This hurts my feelings, Seiji. That makes no sense, and in fact it pisses me off, but it does.”

Zui stepped over to pat her back, reaching up so she managed almost the middle of Aster’s spine.

“Cos you’re bein’ treated like a criminal for doing the objectively right thing, hon. There’s no context that’ll ever make that anything but shitty. Yeah, I know we all gotta get used to shit like this, but I say you cling to that resentment. It’s yours and you earned it.”

“Anger is great for motivation,” I agreed. “Well…shit. I guess this means no more casual visits to Gwyllthean for us. Sorry, Aster, I know the King’s Guild was important to you.”

“You can still go to the city, Lord Seiji,” said Gizmit. “There has been a notable lack of any legal action taken toward you. It’s important to keep up your relationship with Norovena—he’ll probably have to ask you some pointed questions about Aster’s whereabouts, but playing dumb about that and also greasing his palms a bit will help keep this from becoming a legitimate problem for us. Anyway, there’s one other thing about all this that I wanted to bring up with you before we move on.”

“Oh? What now?”

“The timing,” she said, her expression more serious now. “Populist movements like this move fast, but this was exceptionally so. I’d have expected something like this to unfold and spread as far as it has over a couple of weeks, not a couple of days. It’s not impossible that this just happened organically, there’s some precedent for things like that, especially in perpetually tense and fractious societies like Fflyr Dlemathlys. But in my professional opinion, this has the smell of having been helped along.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Hm. How? And by whom?”

“Those are the questions I wanna answer,” she said. “The how is probably the easier one. If any well-connected network on the island wanted to do something like this, they could almost without effort, but I don’t know of any established players on Dount whose agendas would be anything but undercut by this. It doesn’t have to be a big player, though. A few agents, or even just one, could pull this off overnight in a territory the size of the Fflyr-controlled parts of Dount by traveling from village to village, spending an hour in each stirring up trouble in the tavern or town square. Any spy would have the necessary skills—but then, so would any bard. Something like this could be anything from a top government agent to some unemployed lowborn who had a spark of inspiration and the desire to cause trouble. Point being, whenever it looks like somebody might be stirring shit up and I don’t know why or who, I want to investigate. Just because this advances our cause is no reason to get complacent. There are a lot of potential reasons somebody with an agenda might want to cause political instability on Dount, and not even most of them include a friendly disposition toward us.”

“I see your point. Okay, approved: figure out who did this, if anyone, and what they’re after. What’s your plan?”

“The trail shouldn’t be hard to follow, I just need to check with the aforementioned village watering holes and notorious trouble spots in Gwyllthean. The latter I have easy access to already and I’ve got my people very carefully asking questions. The countryside is trickier. Naz, all right if I borrow one of your girls for a tour of the villages? Your old gang still has connections out there, some of whom don’t wanna talk to anyone else.”

“Absolutely,” she said, nodding emphatically. “In fact, I’ll come along myself. If that’s okay, Lord Seiji?”

“Sounds good. I like the idea of you watching each other’s backs. Okay, Giz, thanks for bringing us up to speed on all that. You said you had news about Caludon’s horseshit, too?”

“Nothing that required a spymaster’s skills, but I’m here so I’ll update you. He’s made the public announcement of the timetable for the first…game. It starts in two days.”

I drew in a breath of the cold air, letting it out slowly in a long huff of steam. Maybe we should’ve taken this conversation indoors, but Gizmit had intercepted us on the way from the courtyard tunnel to the front doors, and I’d been too distracted by her briefing to suggest a change of venue.

“Then we have our timetable. How’re we set up?”

“I know Clan Olumnach and Clan Yviredh are going to defy Caludon and refuse to hold the games,” Gizmit said grimly. “The rest of the news isn’t great, Lord Seiji. I have no other confirmations of Clans holding out. Some at least are floating the idea, what with Olumnach actively pushing it and the games themselves being a diabolically stupid pet project of an Archlord everybody already hates. The Clans are waiting and watching, though; nobody wants to risk being the first. I’m sure more resistance will grow after the first game is held and there are some holdouts, but… That first one is going to be ugly, Lord Seiji. I don’t see any way around it. There are going to be losses, and there is just not much we can do to prevent it.”

“I have our people in position across the island as best they can be,” Aster added, just as dour. “Having to hide in wilderness areas puts us at a disadvantage in the east; there just aren’t safe locations for us to establish base camps. We’ll have to use the goblin tunnels, and using them in the necessary numbers will raise a serious risk of giving away their position. Not to mention the fact that we are using the tunnels.”

“Even if we did,” Zui said quietly, “what can our forces do, other than attack the Clans and kick off a full-on military engagement we’re not ready for?”

A short, grim silence fell, all of us staring at the ominous truth laughing in our faces: in two days, Caludon Aelthwyn was going to get away with torturing dozens of lowborn to death in public, because we were going to let him. Because strategically, we could not afford to intervene in force.

Not yet.

“We will do what we’ve always done,” I stated. “Whatever we can. What we can get away with. Whoever we can’t protect, we will avenge. Just because it’s not fucking good enough doesn’t mean we can do better…yet.”

Nazralind scrubbed a sleeve across her eyes, saying nothing.

Aster inhaled deeply, rolling her shoulders as if rousing from a long stillness. “Well. If they insist on making me a symbol, we can’t afford not to use it. Wolves howl to find their families. After the kind of cruelty they’re about to inflict, there will be a lot more people sympathetic to the idea of fighting back. We’ll have to be ready to do what you do best, Lord Seiji.”

Meeting her golden eyes, I nodded once.

“Let’s make some fucking noise.”