An Unsatisfactory Necessity by M. K. Dreysen, introducing Pikka of the Shadows

This week's free story concerns the aftermath of a war, and the old bitter feelings swirling between the survivors.

Pikka's a wizard, with ambitions extending only so far as a good library, the occasional experiment. And a complete lack of anything resembling stories or notoriety. Pikka prefers the quiet life. Especially after the fall of Salinar.

Unfortunately, the past, and some of the folks Pikka would have preferred remain there, refuses to let go. So, Pikka finds herself saddled with a burden of...

An Unsatisfactory Necessity by M. K. Dreysen, a Story Introducing Pikka of the Shadows.

When the three soldiers enter the bar, the whole room silences, just for a moment.

They're all still getting used to the new regime. By the time the lieutenant leaves his squaddies at the door and begins making his way to the bartender, the low murmur of conversation resumes.

"Lieutenant," the bartender says.

"Quiet night," the lieutenant replies. "Hope it stays that way."

The bartender grunts his assent to that wish. The kid's just trying to do his job; the bartender doesn't begrudge him that. So long as the new soldiers don't get out of hand.

So far, he tells himself. The new soldiers have been professional, so far.

"Anyone new?" the lieutenant asks, before turning to scan the room for himself.

"Just the drunk in the corner," the bartender answers.

The drunk in the corner isn't. Drunk.

And she doesn't have any problem hearing the conversation. From her place next to the fire, she has the pleasant crackle of the red element, the bitter scent of the pine knot the bartender has thrown onto it, and the whispers of the patrons for company.

She had a beer, to cut the road dust and remind herself she was still human, still alive, when she'd come into the place. Since then, just the cooling pot of tea to wash down the dinner she'd enjoyed as much as the beer.

What impressed her most was that the bartender hadn't pulled the lieutenant a beer of his own, and the lieutenant hadn't asked. It spoke to the discipline of the new regime. She admired that. It might signal a possible future for the people.

She appreciated the way the lieutenant was making his way to her corner a lot less. "Help you?" she asked, when he stood in front of her.

"Where are you from, stranger?"

"On my way to Los Cruces, Captain." A little flattery might make this go easier, she told herself.

"Lieutenant," he corrected. "I asked where you came from, stranger, not where you're headed. If you don't want to answer, or if I don't like your answer, the only place you'll go from here is the jail."

She sighed. Maybe it had been too much to ask. Then she shrugged, and stood up to make ready for the next part of her trip. She ignored the nonsense the soldier immediately threatened her with.

She didn't ignore the hand he reached out to grab her. "Here now," she said. Then she caught him, slid herself under his arm and supported him when he began to collapse. "Let's walk you over to your men. Looks like you might need to get back to your barracks."

He stumbled along with her, mumbling, almost crying at the sudden pain in his guts; she was grateful that he was still young and skinny enough to carry this way. When the pair got to the bar, she propped the lieutenant up against a stool, waited to make sure he wouldn't fall, and held up a silver coin.

Where the bartender could see it, but none of his patrons could. The bartender raised an eyebrow, looked at the lieutenant, and the blood-stained drool starting to work its way from the young man's mouth. The bartender looked back to the woman, and spread the fingers of his right hand wide against his hip.

The woman placed a quarter crown next to the silver penny. Then she added a full crown, the gold and the two silver coins gleaming only for the bartender.

The man cocked his head to one side.

She answered the question by nodding vaguely toward the rest of the bar's patrons. "For the house."

The bartender nodded. Some measure of silence from the bar now assured, the woman left the coins on the back shelf of the bar and guided the lieutenant toward the door, and his men. "Must be the water," she said when she arrived.

The two soldiers would have had something to say. Probably just as inane as whatever it was their boss had been spouting when he'd objected to her getting her things. But they'd started fighting their own bout of the illness she'd communicated to the lieutenant. "The rest of your platoon are probably in about the same shape," she said to the three soldiers. "Your waters back home must be really clean. Why don't I get you three outside?"

The soldiers were barely able to walk on their own, yet they got it together well enough to sling the lieutenant between them.

She followed them out to their horses. "Climb on board, gents," she said. When they did that, she lead her impromptu escort around the corner to the stables. "Stay right here until I get back."

When she'd saddled her horse, filled the saddle bags with her gear and oats from the barrel, then rode out, the soldiers had reached the stage where she worried she'd have to tie them all to their saddles. "Here, let's go for a ride. Clear your heads."

Or, the saddles at least. The trees behind stable and inn sat silent, listening, as the riders moved into their darkness. Only the wind and a guttering lamp at the front of the inn gave testimony to whatever was happening. Even the moon hid her face; the clouds did the same for the stars.

Her business with the soldiers didn't take long. Soon enough, she returned to the stables, and then the street, with the army mounts trailing along behind her.

As it turned out, the stable owner was an old acquaintance. "Pikka," he said, once she'd rousted him out of his warm bed at the back of the building.

"How much for the horses, and their gear?" She had already claimed the little squad's coins. The swords and short lances slept the long sleep in the same shallow grave as their owners. A little coin from the horses, if the ostler would oblige, would go a long way over the rest of her journey.

"What happened... never mind," the ostler answered himself.

Pikka felt some pride that someone remembered. Followed by a hint of frustration. She didn't need stories following her heels. "The new queen will need horses for her soldiers," Pikka said. "When I came across these three wandering in the woods..."

"You brought them to someone you could trust to keep them safe," Robert Ostler finished. "Three crowns."

"Five," she countered.

He dug out four and a half. "We both know where we're headed. And that I'll put the name of Wendall Thatch on the bill of sale."

She nodded as she swung up on the back of her horse. Wend's mules attracted loose horses wherever the teamster went. Robert probably had half a dozen similar bills in his books. "Take care, Ostler."

"And you, wizard."

****

What had been the little union of states known as Salinar wasn't much. Pikka was only five days hard ride removed from the capital city, and she was now just a few hours away from the river she needed to cross for freedom and anonymity.

Not that she couldn't have joined up with the new queen's regime. That's what Lyka, Bernard, and Rynk had done.

Elthoma had perished in the siege. As he'd promised, the last time she'd seen him alive. "I'm too old and fat to run, too useless to the woman who will soon reign here, Pikka. Go while you can."

Pikka had wished the older wizard well, packed what she could, and vanished into the night.

Most of her former colleagues would have warned her that she'd stayed too late. A bare handful would have scorned her for not throwing her life into destroying the besieging army. For revenge, if nothing else.

Pikka had no quarrel, not really, with the soldiers. Nor, now that she'd had a few days away from the battle to let the results settle into her gut, did she have much remaining quarrel with Thessa L'morgan, now queen of Salinar and Duchesne. Three times the territory Thessa had started with.

And, from the evidence Pikka had rode through, without turning her soldiers loose to pillage the place. Pikka admitted that. She'd hunted for the signs, but found no burnt out villages, heard only scattered rumors of rape and theft. The rumors had turned out empty, when Pikka had taken the chance to hunt down their source.

L'morgan had told the family Salinar that she was coming to claim their territory for her own. She'd offered terms before a single sword had been unsheathed. A lifetime pension for each member of the Salinar family, paid through a third party bank in the Old State. The family members could even retain residency in the kingdom, inherited estates and all.

All they'd needed to do was relinquish their claim to rule.

Sitting her horse above the river's ford, Pikka snorted. She and Elthoma both had recommended, from the beginning, that the family consider the offer. The oldest Salinar, Pierre, had screamed and yelled in concert with them.

It had been the three sisters Salinar, the majority vote, who'd forced the no. And condemned themselves, their children, their brother, their husbands, to the gibbet.

Thessa L'morgan may have her good qualities, Pikka allowed. But those only went so far.

The family Salinar's fate was one of the reasons Pikka didn't regret the lieutenant and his soldiers now buried in the little glade. Or the rest of their platoon now suffering an extended bout of what looked and acted like severe food poisoning. The suffering of the curse she'd laid on them all, using their lieutenant's spirit as conduit, would be severe enough that the fact that their lieutenant and two fellow squaddies had disappeared would cause no real upset.

"Crawled off somewhere and died," the platoon sergeant would eventually tell the lieutenant's replacement. "Gods know we all felt like doing the same." This was the explanation Pikka's curse had whispered into the depths of his mind.

Elthoma's fate built the balance of how Pikka weighed the scales in her mind, the results leaving no guilt in Pikka's heart over the soldiers. She crossed the river and pursued a new life.

****

Three years later, and Pikka had built herself that new life.

Not a tower. That, perhaps never. She had coin enough, commissions enough, to pursue her own interests. Raising a tower and a name weren't among them.

Just now, she was most interested in the dragonette terrorizing the town of Ylthazia. Rumors of the little hatchling's predation, and a whiff of the stench it threw off as it grew into its magic potential, had found Pikka.

The town mayor had offered twenty crowns. Pikka had demanded fifty.

"Thirty-five, then," the mayor had offered. "Will you kill the beast? Please? It's hell on the cattle."

"One way or another, mayor, I'll remove the threat."

The dragonette was little bigger than a dog. Vicious enough, especially to folk who'd spent most of the past year arguing over whose job it was to go after it rather than gird up and go for it. Or just break down and hire a hunter.

Pikka tracked the wyrm-get to its lair, a burrow clawed out beneath the roots of a lightning blasted oak tree. Still earthbound, the wyrmling's magic wasn't yet mature enough to sustain it in flight.

For which Pikka was grateful. "Not much longer, kitten, and we'd be having a different conversation entirely." She crawled into the beast's hole, cursing the sand building up in her hair and clothing the whole way. "Actually, you aren't up to conversation yet, are you?"

The dragonette, red and gold scales flashing from its inner flame, hissed at her.

"It's not an insult, kitten, just an observation." Pikka made sure of her defenses, a weaving of wind, rain, and earth to absorb what the dragonette could throw at her, and then prepared her mind for the next step.

Only, as she sank to her center, a voice welled up to greet her from what should have been a silent deepness of strength. "Pikka!"

"Shit," Pikka muttered. Then, after a few more curses, she set aside the desperate call and returned to the dragonette. "Sorry for the delay. You, now sleep."

The dragonette fought her. Tooth and claw, wing and fire, it threw itself to meet the wizard's spells.

Pikka held the red and gold beast in the grip of her mind, whispering words of a forgotten language, until the dragonette finally slipped into sleep. And from sleep, she drew it little by little down in size, shrinking the wyrmling until it rested in the palm of her hand. "Good, kitten, sleep. Remain so until I, and I alone, release you." She whispered more of the dragon god's own language, continuing the song that the wyrmling would have listened to as its mother clutched her eggs, until the abstraction of dragonette was safely stowed within a glass-bound vacuum flask.

Much of her spare time between jobs over the last few months had been devoted to the construction of the vacuum flask. The balance of energies required to protect the dragonette and its stasis, bind it and keep it alive until Pikka could find it a suitable new home, had been delicate.

The wyrmling's capture assured, Pikka, sipping from a water bottle and ignoring the stench of the dragonette's nest, turned her attention to the distraction. "Bernard, I warned you to never again use the link."

Elthoma's creation. The two wizards had their own means of communication; Pierre Salinar had requested that Elthoma build a similar method for his other advisers. Elthoma had linked Bernard, Lyka, and Rynk together with strands of hair, concentration, and tiny brass medals decorated with the Salinar sigil.

"Pikka, thank the gods. I need your help."

Pikka heaved a sigh of frustration, before turning to her next task, the search of the dragonette's nest. The beast may not yet have a known human victim, but if one had come here unrecorded, the coins and other metals would have begun the wyrmling's hoard.

Which would be better used, at the moment, by Pikka. The beast would have its day, eventually. Until then, Pikka searched for any bits and pieces it had accumulated.

While Bernard explained why he was calling over a link that should have been destroyed. "Pikka, please," he begged at the end. "Please."

"The mayor was either lying, or ignorant." By Pikka's count, the dragonette had fed on humans enough to gather close to thirty crowns. And a handful of daggers and other hand weapons, all too bent and twisted by their passage through the dragonette's stomach to be of use. "No magic weapons yet. But then, you are still just a baby."

Satisfied she'd scavenged as much as she could from the new-start dragon's hoard, Pikka crawled from the den, shook the sand out, and made her way back to Ylthazia.

Without stopping to wash up until after the mayor handed over his promised coin. Pikka knew the dragonette's stench would help the mayor keep his end of the bargain. His watering eyes and nauseated stomach insured it.

Though she did wait until she'd spent an hour in the bathtub of the Ylthazian inn before Pikka relaxed the spell she'd used to distance herself from the smells.

****

Ylthazia lay some three weeks sea-travel north-northeast of the Old State; from there, thanks to a political environment Pikka had done everything in her power to stay blissfully ignorant of, she was force to horseback. And three months of it to return to the Salinar borders.

She spent the time whispering to the dragonette. Filling the flask with songs and tales of far gone ages and the rule of fire. Pikka had scavenged the dragon legends from a thousand sources; the Library and its keepers had collected them over the thousand years of the Old State's existence.

Pikka rode to Salinar as a ghost among shadows. Where mine foremen discussed the vanishing copper veins, and how Thessa queen had begun to refuse good pay and conditions to her miners, Pikka sat just beyond candle's glow and listened. Where children ran through the streets and chased "The dark bastard coin hoarders of the Old State," Pikka leaned around the corner of an alley and watched.

Despite her precautions, her passage echoed; generations later, mothers hushed their crying babies, singing "The shadow wizard will come, and she's hungry tonight."

Pikka took the time she needed, listening, watching, gauging how things had developed in Salinar. And each night, she sat beside a bare handful of dying embers.

Whispering legends in a dead god's language to an abstraction cased in glass and vacuum.

****

Bernard Legrange had risen high in Thessa L'Morgan's estimation. And his own. Commander of troops, he'd begun the Eight Week War with five platoons. None of them trapped in the siege of the city; Bernard's job had been to harry L'Morgan's troops from the rear.

Sufficient to show his bravery. Not so locked into the city as to be forced to sacrifice his men, or more importantly himself, in futile gestures. When the bells of the city had signaled L'Morgan's victory, Bernard Legrange threw his sword at the feet of the first of L'Morgan's field commanders he could find.

In theory, he'd meant the surrender to be a route to his old job as supervisor of mines. Someplace he could work at shipping and teamsters and lists of ports, while letting the groundhogs grub the works without his interference.

Thessa queen had circumvented Bernard's plan when she learned of him. "You acquitted yourself well, Legrange. You'd be wasted on the mines." And so she'd rendered him captain of the city guard.

Which, after six months or so, Bernard found suited him even better. The sergeants and their lieutenants did the work, and Bernard made sure to let them know he knew it. "I'm the one who tells Thessa queen how well you do your jobs. I get yelled at when something goes wrong. Don't get me screamed at, and I'll always make sure you don't get caught between the wheels."

He'd taken Pikka's old tower, three simple stories of wood and sandstone tucked between a fistful of ancient hickory trees. Outside of the city proper, close enough so that Bernard could ride easily to the guardhouse every morning.

And most of all, well away from the city districts frequented by members of the court. The occasional visitor Bernard did suffer were only those who'd estates outside the city walls, and the time for the twenty minute detour to Bernard's tower.

Tonight's visitor didn't belong to that category. "Your kingdom's rustling, Bernard. Has Thessa queen begun the squeeze?"

Bernard was leaning over maps, consulting notes and marking out locations. Not on the maps themselves, but on a hand-drawn scrawl of his own making. He jumped when the shadows in the corner coalesced. "Damnit all to hell, Pikka! Can't you warn me?"

The shadows chuckled, swirling, swelling, then condensing fully into human form. The wizard sat down on a stool next to the fire. "I'm here, Bernard. Shouldn't that be warning enough?"

He goggled at her until his eyes adjusted. "Are you here to help?"

Pikka's expression didn't change; instead, she turned away from Bernard in favor of the fire. "Do you remember? The reason I left?"

They both did.

The five advisers had begun the war scattered where they felt best suited. Bernard and Pikka with different sets of troops; Lyka and Elthoma in the city, in support of Rynk as commander of the main force of Salinar troops. The idea had been simple, and the only real strategy available.

Bernard and Pikka would do their best to slow L'Morgans army, and then harry them from the rear when the siege began. Rynk, with the old soldier and older wizard helping, would use the Salinar army, few as they were, to defend the city until the sisters admitted defeat.

And Elthoma's link should have let them coordinate across the distances. "It's the one advantage we have," Pikka had pointed out. "We need to use it."

Bernard, Lyka, and Rynk had not understood how Pikka knew that L'Morgan's commanders didn't have a similar communications link.

Bernard and Lyka had, however, accepted that she did know. Only Rynk had refused to believe it. Or take advantage of it. "We can't trust the link, Pikka. Not while L'Morgan, or her command, might be able to listen into our communications."

Pikka cursed the day she'd ever given in and brewed the alloy Elthoma had used to build the link metals. And the little bit of explanation Elthoma managed to get the other three to absorb about the way the links worked.

Rynk's pigheadedness would have been trouble enough. Yet eventually she had asserted her authority. "I'm ordering you to return to the city. Your magic will help us defend the walls. Bernard can handle the field troops."

"Does she believe I will exhaust my life destroying that army?" Pikka had asked Elthoma at the top of the guard tower, where the two wizards observed L'Morgan's army completing encirclement of the city.

"I think you give her more credit than she deserves," Elthoma had answered. "If Rynk has considered anything farther out than what benefits herself, she's never shown any sign of it."

Pikka had finally managed to let her rage at Rynk's order slip away when the final day of the siege arrived. And the final complete link the five advisers shared together. "We will stand down," Rynk had said. "The walls won't delay them any longer. Bernard, Lyka, you know what to do."

And the link had dissolved before Elthoma or Pikka could respond. Not that either of them could have changed things at that point. "Now we know why Rynk was suspicious of the link," Elthoma said, as Pikka was saddling her horse and making ready to leave. "She's been a traitor this whole time."

Obvious in retrospect. Whenever a decision had had to be made, Rynk had made the one that allowed L'Morgan's troops to advance with little or no real challenge. And when the point came where the main bulk of the army was threatened, rather than Pikka or Bernard's troops, Rynk had ordered the surrender.

On the hour of their final parting, Elthoma had made his stand at the gates of the Salinar ancestral home, a tiny enclave in the center of the city. "The sisters refuse even now to surrender," he reported.

Pikka didn't ask why the old wizard, and the ten soldiers standing with him, remained. Just as Elthoma and Lyka had offered Pikka a job and a home, the Salinar family had done the same for Elthoma generations ago. The family held his loyalty, and that of the troops he'd arraigned in their defense.

Elthoma stood at the family gates and held L'Morgan's army back. Until he exhausted himself.

While Pikka and her horse escaped through the shadows and smoke. Leaving Bernard, Lyka, and Rynk to find their place with the queen who displayed the Salinar family heads, and Elthoma's, on the walls of the Salinar family compound. All of them preserved by bronze, the alloy that had been the family's main source of revenue.

"And yet, for all that, you ask for my help, Bernard."

"Don't you care for the people at least?" Bernard returned. "The ones who are suffering because the mines are playing out? That's where your magic would help them survive, thrive even. Find new veins, Pikka, please."

The appeal would have worked. Except for the fact that, on entering the room, Pikka had felt an anti-magic trap close around her. Not a general one; no, this had been built especially for her.

From the thin tracings of her self embedded in the medals around Bernard and Rynk's necks. "Is that what Rynk will ask of me, when she comes?"

Bernard threw down the pen and paper, then strode to the door. "You'd have been better off saying yes to me. I could have persuaded Rynk to allow you freedoms under my watch that she'll never grant under her own." He left her there, slamming the door behind him.

Pikka flipped her middle finger at the door. "I don't know what's worse, Bernard. That you'd believe that, or that you'd have me believe it." Something stirred, shifted, in the pouch at her belt. Pikka ran her finger over the leather, but not the contents. "Shh..." she whispered. "Not yet."

As promised, Rynk arrived in the time it took for Bernard's messenger to ride to her quarters and back again. "I warned you Bernard," Rynk said as Pikka's two jailers returned to the office. "She was never going to accept your story at face value."

Pikka snorted. "You two never listened to me, did you? The tin and copper veins were near exhaustion when you turned them over to Thessa. Her greed has driven them far past the point of viability."

"Which is why you need to find new metal," Rynk replied.

Bernard had returned to his maps. Pikka rather thought that he'd prefer to map out the rumor networks Rynk used to stoke his paranoia than face the truth. "Pierre understood, Elthoma understood, even Lyka accepted it."

Pikka stood, stretching her back. "But then, none of the three of them promised Thessa queen she would have as much brass and bronze as she could sell, did they?" Pikka said. "When's your moment, Rynk? The one where your head joins Elthoma on Thessa's wall?"

"She'll have yours there first, bitch. After I've drained the last of your magic from your body and used your head as a chamber pot."

Pikka clucked her tongue. "Who did you find to construct it, then? This fine trap must have cost you all you've earned in the last three years."

Surprisingly, Rynk answered honestly. "Loen Bu Onigen. And he did it for free."

Pikka smiled. "Ah, Loen. Now there's a name I haven't needed to remember in a good long while." An old colleague from the University; one she had called friend. Until the day had come where she could no longer do so. "Did he happen to give you any warnings about the use of the trap?"

Bernard had, to that point, given the impression that he was doing his best to ignore the conversation. At Pikka's question, he jolted up from his maps to meet Rynk's eyes. "Don't worry," Rynk told him. "She's just attempting to scare you."

The idea of the trap was simple enough. Cut a wizard free from the energies flowing around them, and relieve them of the ability to work those energies. And because Onigen had used Pikka's own workings as a starting point, this trap was tied to her so strongly that she could barely smell and taste.

Pikka smiled as she reached for the pouch at her belt. At Rynk's bravura, her surety that she had bound Pikka at last; Rynk was so sure of herself that she smirked when Pikka opened the pouch.

"You'll find no help there. Even your alloys are useless in the trap."

"Indeed," Pikka replied. "So much so that the seals on this jar are failing." She brought the glass full of vacuum to her lips. "Fly, kitten," she whispered in the dragon god's language.

And then she opened the jar.

The dragonette had not grown physically. But it had grown. The crest on her neck and the budding horns showed that Pikka's idea had worked. Crooning the cradle legends of her nest, night after night, had awoken the dragon's magic.

The crest marked the dragon as she, a queen in waiting, a power to be.

Her wings finding strength to fly showed that her magic had matured enough to support her mass. Pikka smiled. Her prisoner was free. "I wouldn't run," Pikka told her jailers, frozen in shock and horror at the red-gold impossibility hovering in front of them. "She'll enjoy that far more than you will."

Bernard broke for the door first, Rynk scrambling to follow.

And then the dragon roared.

Pikka made her way from the room while the dragon finished her meal.

Carefully. Pikka didn't know for sure that the young dragon queen would allow her to escape. Her sojourn in Pikka's prison may have resulted in her gaining in power, but she'd still been imprisoned in a jar. Pikka didn't want to find out just how far the dragon could carry a grudge.

The anti-magic trap's power faded with each of Pikka's steps. Not because of distance, Pikka knew. Once sprung, the trap was centered on Pikka, not a physical location. No, the trap faded for one reason.

Because the medals that had triggered and anchored it were now traveling through the dragon's gullet. By the time she regurgitated them, the dragon's crop would have eliminated any possible traces of Pikka's connection with the medals. A happy side effect, Pikka told herself.

And one that gave her some comfort. By the time she exited the tower, she didn't know if she'd have the strength to overcome the dragon as easily as she had just a few short months before. But Pikka knew she had the strength needed to hide and run. And that would do nicely.

Pikka reclaimed her horse from Bernard's stable, then made her way to the city and Elthoma's grizzly memorial. She didn't linger here. Pikka simply let the horse walk by the gates to Thessa's palace, unoccupied now for at least a year. "She's exhausted the mines," Pikka told Elthoma's head as she passed by. "And abandoned Salinar to its fate. Just as we predicted."

Behind her, a faint screech from Bernard's tower carried over the city. The dragon was finding her voice. Still a juvenile voice, only strong enough to frighten the owls at this distance.

"She'll move on soon," Pikka promised Elthoma's spirit. "The mines will draw her like a moth to a flame." The bitter lemon of copper, the red wine vinegar of tin, the faintest whiff of cinnamon that Pikka's mind insisted was the taste of zinc, came on the wind.

These tastes would be ten, a hundred times stronger to the young dragon queen. "She will claim the mines as her own. What's left of the ore may not be enough to satisfy Thessa's greed, but the dragon will find the dregs a decades-long feast."

Time's threads became visible to her as Pikka saluted Elthoma's bronzed head and passed into the night. The miners would leave first; then, little by little the rest of the Salinar peoples would find somewhere beyond the dragon's reach. Thessa queen's dwindling cash flow would cease completely after tonight.

No army would face a dragon over played out mines. And definitely none of the few wizards capable of confronting the dragon. "Enjoy your spoils of war," Pikka told the flag of Thessa L'Morgan that flew above the city's gates. "You have earned them."

When she cleared the city, Pikka pointed her horse's nose toward the Old State, and the University that schemed there. Pikka rather fancied a visit with an old friend.

After all, she had a favor to return.