She reminded herself silently: To kill is to steal truth.

What might she learn from that man? What of his secrets might she conceal, were she to force him to take the knowledge to his grave?

She reminded herself silently: To act is to have a goal.

There, by the gathering-hall. Hilda and Kamila stood in the doorway, and the Invictan captain approached them. Hilda, without her weapons, couldn’t hope to fight back. Kamila might try, but without so much as an aspirant’s power…?

She reminded herself silently of the last of the Final Theses: To preserve knowledge is to preserve life beyond life. Stepan’s place – to guard that knowledge. Few thought of it this way, but to Marga that library was the center of the village, its most unique feature, its reason to be. At least, it was the reason she was here.

Now, that was something worth defending, as well.

The captain grabbed Hilda by the arm and something broke in Marga. She took a running pace, picking up speed by the second – it felt as though time slowed. She noticed a tingling of her hare tattoo, and continued to speed up, heedless of how quickly she was draining its power.

She shoved the Invictan captain to the ground. “Run!” she shouted, and turned away. She saw Hilda and Kamila make a break for the edge of the village green, in the direction of the Zelenko house. There, Hilda’s equipment waited.

As Marga turned to run she heard somebody moving behind her in military-issue boots. “Hold your fire!” a shrill voice shouted, and moments later a hand brushed against Marga’s hair and shoulder from behind. She struggled to pick up her pace. The hare tattoo burned, but she could not make herself move quicker.

Then a shudder ran through her, and a searing pain from her feet to her fingertips. It radiated from one spot: a fresh bullet wound in her lower back. She noticed the pain before she heard the sound. Marga continued moving without thought, her mind blank from the pain. The bear tattoo activated, immediately beginning its healing work, but she staggered, and slowed. The pain surged and subsided, A hand from behind gripped Marga’s upper arm.

She shook herself and slipped free, and ran for the nearest fence. An obstacle to clear – to put between herself and her pursuer.

As she crossed over the fence and entered the field of grain, Marga felt a twinge of instinctive guilt, even through the haze of adrenaline and blood, at stomping through a field that served to feed her and the rest of the village. She pushed that aside, running as soon as she hit the ground. Far behind her, one of her daughters shouted something. She started to turn, but the soldier was too close behind her. The soldier’s fingers brushed against her arm. She couldn’t see Hilda or Kamila. She ran as hard as she could, even as a voice screamed for her to turn and fight. As she ran, Marga reached out with her mind, sailing along the edge of the Veil. Behind her, the echoes of movement.

Hilda stumbled, but quickly regained her pace and dashed behind cover, Kamila ushering her along. They were escaping.

Thank goodness. But Marga’s own pursuer was right behind her.

She had to make for the orchard, because there she might find a place to hide.

When Marga climbed over the second fence, she looked to the ground and watched. Her strides became longer, her steps lighter. Keeping her speed up while moving like this was difficult, though with each passing second she felt more and more that her body knew how to move on its own, that her mind was elsewhere, otherwise occupied, as though she were watching the scene from a bird’s eyes.

Glancing back over her shoulder, Marga saw that the soldier was moving hesitantly through the field, taking shorter steps than Marga and moving more slowly. She didn’t suppress the victorious smile. Marga’s cheeks ached with the effort of not gritting her teeth against the pain of her gunshot wound, but the injury was already starting to get better. With each step, every pressing motion up and down, the waves of pain from the bullet lodged in her grew closer to the skin.

She started to turn her head back toward the orchard. And then…

The soldier began to sprint through the field.

Marga jolted – she couldn’t be serious, trying to catch Marga like this! Marga had won!

She felt the bullet leave the wound, splash into a shallow pool of stagnant marsh water.

Marga began to backpedal, then turned to try to run, to increase the gap between herself and the soldier, but she was starting to get tired. The hare tattoo still wouldn’t activate, just tingled painfully. Marga checked over her shoulder. The Invictan soldier was getting closer. She was going to catch up. Marga closed her eyes for a moment even as she ran and started to mutter Words under her breath, to focus, to prepare for the fight, to make her magic stronger.

And then the Invictan soldier stumbled.

Mud and still water splashed around her as the soldier fell into the marsh, dirtying her face and sinking her boots inches into the earth. She recovered quickly from her shock and looked up toward Marga. The soldier raised a weapon, hands shaking visibly, jerking her body as she tried to free herself.

Marga turned toward the soldier. Sweat plastered unbound strands of her hair to her face, and her soldiers rose and fell rapidly, her stance barely steady. She felt like she would fall over if pushed even lightly. She took a step toward the soldier.

“Listen to me…” the soldier croaked. “Marga.” Marga flinched at the sound of her own name, but didn’t stop moving forward. That’s… that’s the stranger I saw earlier. Right, of course. Marga cast a split-second glance over her shoulder – no one approaching to ambush her. The soldier continued to speak. “If you don’t want this to turn into a massacre, you’re going to have to come with me.” The voice became dull and monotone.

Marga snorted and grit her teeth. “Come with you?” She took another step forward, putting her perhaps three meters from the soldier. She could feel the tremor in her hands increasing, could feel the blood dripping down her back. “I ought to kill you. You shot me. Your friends shot Eksha. Killed him like nothing.”

“He should have stood down,” the soldier replied, in that same monotone, detached voice. She said it so casually, so coldly, like Eksha’s death was just an inevitable result of his own actions. Not a murder! “We weren’t after him. We were after Mirshal.”

Of course. Of course they were. “You don’t care about Mirshal.” Marga mustered up the force of will to laugh, and hoped that she seemed intimidating to the soldier. Maybe her humor in the face of death would faze the soldier. Then again… perhaps not. “If you wanted to find Mirshal you wouldn’t be murdering your way through every village in the south of the Vale, would you? You care about power.” She bowed her head and reached out to her side with her left arm, mouthing the Words to bring her Reaper’s weapon from the Aether into the World.

It was a simple task, really – reaching through the Veil between the Aether and the World, and retrieving something that, in the end, belonged to Marga. The pathways were there, in the residue within Marga’s soul. But of course, the Veil did not make such a thing simple. Words allowed Marga access, Words allowed her to weaken a part of the Veil while she spoke them, to make the Veil porous, where it might normally be iron.

The soldier spoke again: “You’re misunderstanding the situation. We just want the Mirshalites. We know how you hide in the population, how you use these people as your cover.”

Marga struggled to keep her cool, and forced herself to laugh again, though she wanted to scream in frustration. She wanted to kill this soldier, rip her to pieces while telling her the truth behind every lie she’d believed when she left imperial territory. Instead, she said:

“And you kill them!” And laughed. “You bitch, I’m not using these people as cover! I live here!” Back to the Words. Have to just reach across… the tips of her fingers felt as though they were reaching through a thick jelly, and a charge rose in the air.

Said that idiot soldier: “Don’t you want to stop this from becoming a slaughter? If you just cooperate with us, I can help you. Get the Captain to stop any violence, end searches. I can even get you amnesty.”

Lies, of course. Why wouldn’t she lie? It was her duty to lie. Marga knew it as well as the soldier did, for it was her lies which had informed the other soldiers of their targets.

Marga raised her head and, in the distance, saw two figures. Even through the disorientation and the adrenaline, she recognized them immediately. Hilda and Kamila. They were alive! And it didn’t look like anybody was pursuing them, although… Hilda was walking with a slight limp, one hand resting over her stomach. A surge of anger went through Marga as she glanced back down at the prone Invictan soldier, accompanied by a renewed fear. If I stay here…

Hilda and Kamila were approaching on foot, quickly, and it looked as though they’d retrieved mundane equipment: power gauntlets on their wrists and repeating crossbows slung to their belts. Marga reminded herself to review with Hilda how to summon her Reaper weapon when this was all done with.

She looked back at the soldier, the liar, the one who had entrapped her kids in the first place and nearly drawn them to their dooms. The charge in the air grew intense, and Marga felt her whole hand immersed in the jelly-like sensation. The feeling subsided, followed by the soft touch of rolling mist over her hand. She grasped through the other world, and her hand closed around the edge of a great chakram, and with a great yank, with a final shouted Word, she drew it forth from the other side of the Veil. The threads tightened at her departure and wove themselves tight, locking all but the barest wisps of mist on the other side.

“You tried to kill my children!” Marga screamed, swinging the weapon at the same moment that the soldier twisted her feet out from the ground, surged forward, and fell to the side, avoiding Marga’s swipe. The ground around where Marga stood grew dry with Desertficiation leaking through the Veil, and a shower of glassy sand scattered to the dirt, infused it. Resuming her chant, Marga swung her chakram, ready to throw it, and pictured the pores in the Veil reaching to meet her touch, rejecting all else, even the Desert itself. In the slowing time within Marga’s mind, the residue mists around the soldier grew clearer.

Marga felt the shot coming before the weapon fired, but she was already overextended.

Marga stumbled back, hand clutching a fresh wound to her torso. Blood blossomed over her wrists and palms and fingers. She spoke Words still, carrying on the chant despite the feeling of breathlessness. And then in her hands there was a great pole-axe, and she swung it down at the soldier’s body, closing her mind to the suffering of a fellow soul, to the truth she was about to steal from the world.

More than counterbalanced by the lies.

She struck true. The Invictus soldier screamed in pain, dropped her weapons, and dug her fingers into the dry, dry dirt. As the soldier spasmed, her hands came up trailing grains of sand among the black earth.

“You should have left when you had the chance!” Marga shouted. The soldier coughed – blood along with the phlegm. She tried to push herself up, but couldn’t. Marga turned, sparing a glance over her shoulder for Hilda and Kamila. The two sisters slowed to a walk, while the soldier on the ground struggled to retrieve something from her bandolier.

Waving a hand over her shoulder in a follow-me gesture, Marga walked into the orchard.

Many minutes later, when Hilda and Kamila finally arrived, Hilda was leaning against Kamila, groaning with every step. Blood poured from an open wound in her back, and she clutched at her stomach. Kamila laid Hilda down, grumbling angrily about the inconvenience, about how they’d almost had that soldier. As she guided them to a hiding place out of the eyes of anybody who might pass by, Marga questioned Kamila.

“The soldier got away?”

“Yeah.” Kamila spat. Her eyes were ablaze. “We were just about to get her, when Hilda’s wound opened back up. If she hadn’t argued and just helped me kill that soldier, we wouldn’t have this problem now.

“She’s going to go back and tell the others where we are, no doubt. Soldiers will come to search this orchard.” Marga placed her hands on Hilda’s shoulders, muttering Words and willing some of her own energy to go to Hilda’s aid.

And it worked. Little by little, over long, agonizing minutes, she coaxed the bullet from Hilda’s wound, spoke the hole closed, and wiped away as much of the blood as she could with a sleeve. “Hilda…” Marga sighed. Hilda was conscious, but barely lucid, recovering from the pain of the injury and the healing process. Marga reached out and touched the bear tattoo on Hilda’s neck, the golden ink smearing with Hilda’s and Marga’s own blood.

“Kamila, stay here with Hilda.” Marga sighed, closed her eyes, and placed her hand on her forehead. “Stay out of sight. And make sure your father is okay and doesn’t get himself into trouble. If the soldiers see me leave, they won’t need to search here.” Marga stood up. “So… I’m going to let myself be seen and then get out of here. I’ll head to Kivv, to the monastery, and they’ll bring back reinforcements. We’ll be okay. We’re not going to let the Invictus hurt any more of our friends.”

Kamila, crouching protectively next to Hilda with her crossbow now in hand, grinned up at her mother grimly. With the Words still on her mind, Marga could feel plainly through the Aether residue on Kamila that her eldest daughter was merely putting on a brave face.

Marga stood up and made for the entrance of the orchard, murmuring the Words to herself, letting the impression of sand swirl around her, the winds of another world. She walked into the marsh beyond the orchard, eyes half-lidded, listening for footsteps, looking to the pass that would take her from this village and toward the northeast, toward Kivv.

She didn’t see the bear trap, still warm and wet with sweat and oil from the hands of the one who’d laid it, until its teeth closed around her ankle and bit through to the bone.