“If you want a fight, have it with us,” Briar called to Isha. “Leave these soldiers out of it. They’ll get hurt.”

He felt something like a shiver in his bones. It was a swell of power on the far side of the stone gate. With it rose plants, stones, even trees, all things that had been growing in the track where the spell anchors for the magical barrier had been set centuries before.

Sandry rode up to the gate and tried to go through. She met a force there like a solid, invisible wall. Her mount shied when it struck it, spooked by a barrier that it could not see. Sandry fought her mare to a stand, then dismounted. She walked up and found the barrier was every bit as solid as stone, for all that is was completely invisible. It was as if the air had gone hard.

She turned to look up at the people on the platform. “How does my cousin intend to keep me, Viymese Ladyhammer?” she demanded. “In a cage like this?” She struck the barrier with her fists. “Married off and locked up in some country estate, my name signed in blood and magic to a promise to be a good little sheep? Can you people afford to keep me long? All magic has limits. There is no way you can force me never to use my power again. You know power must be used, or it goes wrong. And when I have the chance to use my power…You all wear clothes. You all stitch things together.” She tried to pinch some of the wall, to twirl it. If she could make thread of it, she could unravel the wall.

She could not even scratch it.

“You might well spend your life in a cage, if you will not sign a vow of obedience to the imperial throne,” Ishabal said calmly. “You cannot be so foolish as to think the powers of the world might allow you to pursue your own selfish desires all your days. Wake up, children. It is time to learn to live in the real world. What the empire wants, the empire keeps.”

Briar walked up next to Sandry, carrying his shakkan on one hip. “She doesn’t know anything about us,” he murmured in Sandry’s ear. “Me and Daja wrapped up Quen like he was fish from the market. Her ‘real world’ is just more dead fish.” He held out his hand.

Sandry hesitated, then put her hand in his. Daja dismounted and took her staff from its sling. With it in her grasp, she came over to join hands with Sandry.

They let their combined magics pull and tug at the barrier. Daja dragged more heat up from lava flowing far underground. Sandry borrowed part of it and a length of magicalvine from Briar. Fixing the image of a drop spindle—like a top with a long stem and flat disk—in her mind’s eye, she wrapped the heat-soaked magical vine around the spindle and twirled it back and forth like a handmade auger, trying to bore an opening through the wall. It made not a dent.

For an hour or more they struggled. They sought the top of the barrier and its roots, unable to crack it. Daja hammered. Briar spread himself as a vine, seeking even hair-thin cracks into which he could insert a tendril, as he had in Quen’s glove spells. Sandry hunted for loose threads, with no luck.

“Are you quite finished?” called Ishabal from her platform. “I am impressed—most collapse long before this—but it changes nothing. Better mages than you have pitted themselves against our barriers and lost. You will not be permitted to leave the empire.”

Briar glared up at Ishabal. “You think I’m scared of empires?” he yelled. “Here’s what I think of empires!”

He drew on his shakkan, flinging that power at the wooden platform on which Isha and her companions stood. The mages who stood with Isha were there to guard against attacks on her. They were prepared for a mage to turn fire or wind against the platform. They were not prepared for the wooden boards to shift, and groan, and sprout branches. Whole new trees suddenly exploded from dead wood. The mages dropped to the ground, bruising themselves on knobby roots that dug into the earth around them. Sandry and Daja as well as Briar felt the shakkan’s glee at creating so many new lives.

“Maul us all you like,” cried Isha, staggering to her feet. “You will get not one whit closer to home! This is your home, and you will bend the knee to your new mistress!”

Why not name her? Daja wanted to know, exasperated. Everyone knows who has commanded her to do this—why be so festering delicate with Berenene’s name? The rude jokes told in the forges of the empire aren’t so polite about keeping her name out of the conversation!

Sandry wiped sweat from her cheeks with a handkerchief. Normally I’d say it’s because she wants to keep Berenene’s name out of it if this fails, but it’s not like we’re succeeding. She nibbled a lip in thought. Unless it might still fail? What else can we do?

Daja grabbed Sandry. “The thread! Our circle!”

Sandry reached into her neck pouch and produced the thread circle once more. “I don’t know if it will work without Tris,” she protested. “It’s got some of our strength, but this is a nasty barrier.”

I suppose it is, Tris said through their magic. But while I may be a day’s ride from you, I still can hold my part.

Silver fire bloomed in the vague shape of a hand in the air. It wrapped itself around Tris’s lump in the thread circle. Sandry grabbed hers. Daja did the same and smacked Briar on the back of the head. He whirled, then saw what they held.

“Keep growing,” he muttered under his breath to the trees. Then he grabbed the knot that stood for him.

Sandry anchored herself in the thread with a feeling of stepping into her own skin. This was also her first leader thread, in part, the one on which she first spun wool. Over the years, she’d placed a great deal of strength in this symbol of the union between them. Now it was also a symbol of what had happened on this trip. At last they were one again. She still had them, and they still had her.