It wasn’t going to be as simple as breaking in and reading a library book, it turned out.

  "Why," he had asked an alternate-future Effluvia, "would they store them in the manors instead of the vaults? It seems really insecure."

  She had giggled and said that the vaults weren’t really any more secure than anywhere else. "Without wards, a locked room made of stone looks exactly the same as a field to a teleporter. And anyone who wants to steal from someone as serious as one of the Noble houses is going to want a teleporter to escape alive. No, wards are everything. That way, you can’t teleport. That way, if you did teleport, you wouldn’t be able to read what was there, etc."

  Wards. Of course, most of his follow-up questions about wards would have potentially led to an Effluvia who angrily asked if he was trying to pump her for information about her family's vaults. But if he didn’t bring up vaults at all, and instead went back to the topic of her "clap on" enchantment in museums, she turned out to be much more amenable to telling him what she knew.

  "Wards are the magic of edges," she said. "Liminality. What doesn’t apply outside or inside, but only in between."

  Dalliance nodded. "That’s not very . . . is it a picture?" he said.

  "No. Wards don't actually take up any space." She made a shimmering motion with her hand. "And that’s not obvious at all. Most magics, like a fireball, we can think of as throwing a ball. A ward, you have to think of it differently, like a command spoken to the place you’re warding, because there’s nothing to look at."

  "Of course, those are real wards. Good wards are held in place with sigils and stuff."

  Dalliance said he knew that.

  "Well, yeah. And if I wanted to put my 'clap on' enchantment somewhere," he said, "then what?"

  "Then you’d have to enchant something," she concluded. "Usually bone. The bone of monsters is best, but anything that was once alive and part of something that could channel mana. The rarest types of beasts drop living metal, which can be used in this way. So, what would you want your enchantment to do?" she asked.

  "Warn me if spiders are nearby," he said promptly, and it wasn’t even entirely a joke.

  "And maybe my sister," he tried joking after everything else failed.

  The noble girl left. "I can see the appeal," she said. "For that, though, I think it’ll need a little bit of you in it. Hair. Blood." She thought about saying most houses use blood, since it’s the commonality that ties them together, but you couldn’t use that because it ties you and your sister together, too. But you don’t share hair. But then she decided not to say it, which was too bad because she thought about it, and now he knew too.

  He began to feel like a monster. He was, in fact, pumping her for information about her family's magic, but that was okay. He could just not target her family. He would target a house at random, slow down, prick them with a needle and break into their vault, and once he had their blood, that would allow him to read their books and leave. Ideally: it had the advantage of simplicity to recommend it.

  And he wouldn’t have to feel bad about breaking Effluvia's trust either.

  It couldn't be this late, though. He already had burglary plans.

  Perhaps he'd do both?

  His musings were interrupted by a volley of earthen darts through the narrow windows, forcing them both to the floor, and then completely sidelined by the arrival of the Captain, who told him there were other uses he would be better put to than sitting in a be-fogged tower, and more fitting of his skills.

  It wasn't what he'd expected.

  "A gofer," his uncle repeated. "That means, I say 'gofer a quiver of arrows,' you bring me a quiver of arrows. 'Gofer a potion,' you bring me the potion. 'We need more arrows for this tower.' You get them."

  "I can do more than that," Dalliance finally got to say later, after interminable waiting to tell his uncle till afterward, when he wouldn’t be countermanding him. They strode along the narrows: apparently, there was a bar his uncle wanted him to know the location of. For off-duty requests and suchlike, a Legion hangout, he needed to know.

  His uncle humored him with an appraising stare.

  "Can you, at that? Maybe. But what happens when you overestimate your abilities out here, with hundreds of hostile eyes watching your every move, waiting for you to slip up and put an arrow in your gob? What happens when you don’t know that the goblins' parting ways means an armored troll rush is underway? You don’t recognize the roar of a drake bearing down on the wall, and you don’t duck for cover?"

  "What I need you to do is get blooded the right way. Where you learn the territory, not just the weapons you’re using. You need to learn the enemy and their tactics and take them seriously because you’ve seen how serious they are."

  "I want you to see your first corpse, your first fallen comrade, but I want you to see that when you’re not responsible for protecting the life of the person next to you. I want to give you time to get over the shakes. The enemy isn’t going anywhere. This isn’t a race. Tower shift, then gofer shift, understand?"

  “Yes, sir!”

  His uncle sighed. They'd reached their destination by the looks of it: a brightly painted, if faded, watering hole with a busty barmaid sign swinging crookedly over the double doors.

  The Tumbling Trollop.

  “While you’re here, let’s get some bread into you,” his uncle said. “I'll let you tell me about that sister of yours. My treat.”

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  A platter-sized hand, so like his father’s, ushered him forward into the swirling smells of beer, the murmur of conversation punctuated by the occasional boisterous laugh, and the lilting voice of a minstrel.

  Dalliance heard only a handful of words before they stopped him dead in his tracks.

  —chained him up n'eath tyrant's tower

  and broke his will with breaker's power

  A mutt unleashed is still a hound

  He'll bite unmuzzled - leave him bound

  Four Rathers held the Wall as one,

  Dominion proud! with three strong sons.

  With halberd, chain, grit of stone,

  As titans! held the wall alone.

  Four rathers held the Wall, they say,

  Four rathers lost a different way.

  The father first, the eldest most,

  The third's gone sour, fourth's a ghost.

  The eldest, Solidarity,

  Kept strife aimed at the enemy.

  But wine became his one and only,

  His wife and child were feeling lonely—

  This mama, try and understand,

  She fled and took another's hand.

  Now Rather walks the streets at night,

  But something's missing, man ain't right.

  But Cadence, stone-cold Cadence stayed,

  The Wall's last keeper, underpaid.

  They passed him by for younger blood,

  And left him standing in the mud.

  He took his fury, nursed his pride,

  And bought a farmstead, hid inside.

  Unknowning neighbors till nearby—

  Still bloody, bloody, is his eye!

  Impetuous, the reckless one,

  Still does as he'd already done.

  A tinker, with a ready smile,

  He'll charm your wife, and stay a while!

  The smallest of the four of them

  Still fights as good as others ten.

  (Of all the brothers, strange to say,

  The commons like him best, today).

  Drink ye th' Rathers, drink ye well,

  Though it's a brutal truth to tell

  The proud, the mighty, lost it all:

  the taller man, the harder fall.

  Solidarity stood still behind Dalliance, one hand on his shoulder. “Let it be,” he said simply, and waited. The bar was silent when the song finished, and the unfortunate bard glanced around in puzzlement, dazzled by the stage lights. His face paled visibly when he finally followed the stares of his silent audience to their object.

  “Well sung,” said Solidarity. “Now get out.”

  The bard fled obediently, four-legged stool clattering off the edge of the stage in his haste. “I am soooo. . . .”

  “Out.”

  He went.

  The crowd cleared before his uncle, who took off his plumed helm and clanked it loudly onto the bartop. “Sausages and oatmeal, for the lad,” he said mildly. “And cheer up, you’re not dead yet.”

  This met a roar of approval, and the noise quickly returned, a new musician with a panpipe taking the stage.

  “Sorry you had to hear that,” his uncle said ruefully. “But it’s still making the bloody rounds, you’d have done.”

  “It’d made its way back to Talbotton, too,” Dalliance admitted.

  “Impetuous.”

  Got it in one.

  “Some brother he is.”

  Dalliance smirked once he saw his uncle’s mood remained unchanged.

  “In any case, that’s the main reason I wanted to pull you aside—your father asked after you."

  "Da's asking after me? Why?"

  His uncle shook his head. "There are reasons he might be, but I can’t tell you them."

  The barman stopped by with a tankard, and his uncle began the night's work that'd earned him his place in the song. Dalliance realized he'd rather be somewhere else. Might as well cut to the chase.

  "He wants me to become a knight," Dalliance said. "Elevate the family."

  Solidarity looked at him askance, considering him for a long moment. "Well, I nearly forgot you'd gone and made yourself a wizard. Stands to reason you’d be smart. Sure, that’s what your dad would like."

  "He disowned me."

  "It’d still work."

  The plate of sausages landed in front of Dalliance, adrift in a sea of molten fat. The oatmeal was a solid sphere of grainy grey.

  "He won’t let me benefit from the proceeds of his work, but he can still benefit from the proceeds of mine."

  Dalliance poked the oatmeal with a spoon, and the ball rolled into the middle of the plate, unchanged. He took up the knife and went to work slicing it into chunks.

  "Yes," said Solidarity frankly. "Because the world isn’t made for the young. The world is made by the young, and by the time they amass any power, they are no longer young."

  Dalliance clarified. "So young men work so old people can have easy lives?"

  "I passed my retirement age a decade ago," said Solidarity.

  "I’m sorry," said Dalliance immediately. Some of the veterans nearby were looking at him with disfavor.

  "Best keep a respectful tongue," said Solidarity. "But sure, you’ll be peeved. I would be, too, I'm sure. And wasn’t your dad aggrieved to hear I was making you a gofer?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I’m going to be straight with you: not much glory from the towers, and none at all to be had as a gofer. I meant it: it’s best for you long term. But no one throws a Triumph for a runner, do they?"

  Dalliance pictured the elaborate parade passing, and the shouted explanation of the exalted’s deeds: ‘Fetched and carried.’

  "No, probably not."

  He tried the sausages. Not bad.

  His uncle was on his second beer.

  "Is getting a Triumph the only way?"

  "Of course not. But it is a way that sometimes works. Put it out of your head until you’re a bit older, son."

  Topaz’s words came back to him: this first week, these first few weeks . . . Ah. Solidarity prefers a living nephew to a dead, heroic Rather.

  "Thank you."

  "Don’t worry about it."