The boats from Alcer and Talkro had seemed much faster when they first started arriving. From Talkro, once Aurie rallied Morin to her side, she was able to fill three boats in the first day. Six the next. Six more the day after that. And more after that. The fish poured in.

  Somehow, at the same time that fish seemed to fill the lake, so did families being baptized by Father Hagen’s monks. Aurie found the friars to be fascinating, in that they weren’t so different from the monks or Father Hagen except that they didn’t answer to the Cardinals. They seemed to do a few baptisms of their own. Aurie never spoke to them. She wanted to, mostly out of curiosity. Maud said that they were preferred by Paladins because they didn’t answer to the Church, only scripture. But she had other things to handle at the time.

  It was Balian, with his wrapped hand tucked into his side, who approached her on the fourth day.

  “How can I help?” He asked from the doorway of the fishery office while she was shuffling through her tick marks of shipments. It was the only way she could keep track.

  It took her a moment to stop staring at him in disbelief, to stop herself from leaping at him in a fury. Instead, she answered with a simple, “Can you help me organize a caravan to Berone? We got word that they’re expecting a battle. It would have been last night. They’re going to need our help.”

  “What kind of help? I can get the boys together. But that’s our fishers, too, so…”

  “No, not fishers. We need them to keep doing what they’re doing. We need…people who can help with…what happens after.” She could see his confusion. “Find as many volunteers from the migrants as you can. Strong hands willing to work. When they ask for a price, tell them they’ll be provided what they prove they’re worth when the time comes. Anyone who knows anything about patching wounds. Veteran soldiers, healers, the like, especially. And any skilled workers we can spare from the houses.”

  “Coraline knows salves,” Balian perked at her. “And I can…I…” He looked down at his wrapped hand and sunk his shoulders.

  “You can manage laborers like the best of them,” Aurie nodded. “So, you’re in charge of them when we get there. And, I’m willing to bet they don’t have enough cooks or pots or much of anything. So, we’ll be needing those packed, too.”

  Balian nodded. He turned to leave, but stopped himself short. “Aurie…”

  Aurie hummed, counting her ticks from yesterday. He didn’t say anything, so she looked up at him. “What?”

  “Whatever you need, ask me first. Even if it’s to jump on a spear.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Aurie went back to counting the line of ticks. “There are plenty better men for that.” She grinned, “Go on, I want us on our way as soon as we can. Maud and I are leaving with our things on the next boat before noon.” As he opened the door to leave, she called after him, “Balian.”

  He stopped.

  “I will never forget what you did. But I do forgive you. Now, have those workers on their way before dawn tomorrow if you can. No later than noon. Pick someone you trust to get whoever’s left behind. I’ll be ready for you when you arrive.”

  “Yes, Madame,” he nodded a bow and stepped out.

  They were on their way when the sun was highest with Senna, Eleanna, Alexandra, and Leta. Surprisingly, Balthazar’s wife, Annabelle, and her daughter, Emma, had rushed to gather everything they could to make it at the very last second. Balthazar was in the boat behind theirs, with his eldest son, Raphael. He waved sheepishly when Aurie eyed him. He brought with him some of the Talkro men who were never farmers and didn’t fish, like Tuck with his guitar strapped to his back and Dalfur, Egan the Blacksmith’s son. Aurie wondered how Maud felt about that. When she looked, Maud didn’t seem to care. She was pining over Karl, who was sitting on one of the crates of supplies, saying something that was making her cackle. Funniest man alive, that one, Aurie thought with a sigh.

  Aurie was awestruck when she saw Berone’s canal gates when they arrived. It was the fourth day of shipments and it took nearly the entire day before they reached the gate itself. When they did, Aurie was quick to find the closest shiny armored man with a cross on his chest and give him a what’s what about moving things along. At first, he looked at her with the same humored expression any two-meter-tall man looking down at barely a meter and a half tall woman almost double his age shouting at him would. Rolling eyes, chuckles, and dismissive glances to the men around him.

  That was when Aurie, while Maud put a hand up to hide her embarrassment from the boat overstuffed with their supplies and barrels, stomped his foot and grabbed his ear. When the others reached for their weapons, all she had to do was hold up a finger at them and give them the look. They froze. By his ear, she led the man to look down the canal at the jammed line of boats and lectured him about moving things when they should be moved. He pointed for her to find someone by the name of ‘Chamberlain.’ Not a name, a rank—or title—for a priest. And when she met him, it took all her strength, standing in the warehouse where he was going over ledger after ledger to catalogue the stacks of barrels before they were wheeled by twos out of there, not to thump him and drag him by his ear.

  Instead, she crossed her arms and blocked him from continuing his little inventory. The haughty priest glowered at her and waved his pen at her only to gape in silence as Balthazar and the Talkro men hurriedly offloaded the boats ahead of theirs, adding to his ‘inventory’ until the way out of the warehouse was completely blocked. The boats, however, were moving. The next ones of barrels, they made quick work of, keeping the priest in shock.

  Finally, the priest asked, “Who are you?”

  “Inform Prince Dra—Dietrich that Aurelie Clevlan has arrived with supplies and help. We’ll finish here. Thank you.”

  “The Prince is incapacitated from the battle.”

  “Then you will consider me in charge until he wakes up. Now, we need to get these to where they can be given out to families…” She looked up at the stacks and across the dumbfounded faces of the many hands that had stacked them.

  “I don’t know who you think you are, Paladin Enya is in charge and this is under the jurisdiction of the Divine Universal Church!”

  Aurie let out a long breath. “Dalfur,” she called around the Priest. “Check the seals. Make sure they’re tight enough to roll. The rest of you, once they’re checked, get them lined up. You! Up there! Get ropes, lots of them. Balthazar, you’re good with ropes, you and Samma can rig the barrels to roll ten at a time.”

  “Excuse me,” the Priest looked like he was steaming at the ears.

  She tapped his chest, half paying attention to him, “I’ll get to you in a moment.” To Maud and the women, who were still standing in the boat with Karl and the supplies for cooking lines, “Karl, you know your way around Berone, yeah?”

  Karl called from the boat, “Yes, Madame.”

  “Once they get you through, get them to whoever is in charge of the healers and wounded.”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  “I beg your pardon!” The Priest insisted, this time nearly bumping his chest into her. “But you are not in charge here!”

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  “No?” Aurie looked around. “This Paladin—what did you say his name was?”

  “Her name is Paladin Enya, and she is in command until the Paladin Grande Pri—”

  “Yes, her,” Aurie shrugged, pulling her cloak off and tossing it to a nearby bench so she could roll up her sleeves. “She’s a Paladin, so she answers to God. You answer to her. So, I’m willing to bet that eventually, the same questions are going to be asked. Why are these barrels of fish here and not in the city being handed out to families with empty bellies already? Why are the boats moving so slowly when they could be on their way back for more already? Why is there only wagons when barrels are quite literally made to roll?”

  “Because I must inventory them first so that I can ensure we know how many are in each, how big they are, and how many total there are before we hand them out so we can make sure that everyone gets their fair share.”

  Aurie nodded, as if she were agreeing. “Right,” She put her hands on her hips. “The fish in these barrels weigh between one and three kilograms, two can feed a family of four for a day, and there are thirty per barrel. As of,” she leaned to see that Karl was helping offload the last barrel from his boat, “that one, you have eighty-four barrels of fish. That’s two thousand, five hundred and twenty fish, which will feed how many families of four today, Chamberlain?”

  The Priest blinked at her. “Twelve hundred and sixty.”

  Aurie grinned, “Now, fetch this Paladin Enya and whoever else is Drak—the Prince’s council so we can set things straight. Or, better yet, once I am certain things are going in the right direction here, you take me.”

  It was almost nightfall before the Chamberlain convinced her to leave the warehouse. It was still half full of those stacks, but they had gotten barrels rolled to most of the western districts where knights and monks began handing them out. Like Aurie had told them, they gave two fish per family, promising the same number the next day, probably at about the same time.

  ‘Two a day, so make it into soup,’ they told them. No one protested when they saw that the fish were long enough that young children had to hold their tails over their heads to keep them from scraping the ground.

  Aurie didn’t go straight into the Cathedral like the Chamberlain expected. She first went to see how Maud and the others were doing, helping the healers—who turned out to be nuns and warriors she learned were like Draka and her, but lower ranking and less authority under the Holy Spirit, called Clerics. They were helping with mixing salves and rolling cloths through them.

  Maud was helping with stitching wounds, which surprised her. Apparently, she had come across someone that they didn’t have enough help to tend and took it upon herself to begin stitching his wound. After that, the head nun—Abbess or Mother Superior, depending on who you ask—started following her and was guiding her on how to work on all sorts of wounds and stitching. By the next afternoon, Maud was stitching the aftermaths of surgeries and amputations. There were a few whispers that she helped with a surgery, too. ‘Steadiest hands I’ve ever seen,’ the Infirmarian, they called their surgeon, said when he caught Aurie watching her at some point. Of all the things for someone to say about her Windleaf.

  Aurie couldn’t help noticing that Maud also had an audience. Specifically, a white furred, pale blue-eyed, dish faced, little shit of a horse by the name of Vigora. The horse would follow her from patient to patient, except when she was in the surgical tents—she heard later that the nuns had to chase her out with saws and brooms the first time because she did, in fact, follow Maud in—and go to the tent that Draka was in to check him, then back to following Maud. Sometimes—she caught it enough in her eventual trips to and from the Cathedral that she knew it was the norm—Maud had Vigora hold her bag of tools and thread for her while she worked.

  Her first time there, though, Aurie went to see Draka. What she found made her heart stop. She expected the others within the tent. Her father had told her enough about his experiences as a soldier for her imagination to paint vivid nightmares as a child, but not him. They were still waiting to do surgery on his shoulder at the time. Tubes that would normally be filled with sausage were stuck in his arms by needles, pumping blood from bottles hanging upside down from hooks on the rack above him. They had clamps on his skin to hold it closed, but blood was still seeping through the creases. Burns covered him in scaley webbed patches, even across the right side of his head, from the ridge of his cheek, over his ear and across the back. His hair was strands of singed blotches in those areas.

  She stopped one of the nuns changing out the bottles of blood. “What about healing? Can’t he be healed of these?”

  “He was,” the nun put a hand on her arm with a comforting squeeze.

  “God said no,” Aurie whispered.

  “From what I was told,” the nun began replacing the oiled cloths on the burns on his head. “It isn’t a matter of no. It is a matter of not fully yet.”

  “I’ve healed him twice, now,” Enya found her. Aurie’s mouth gaped. Balor would be a child beside this woman. And she was so different looking from anyone she had ever met, as well. Lips doubly thicker. Hooded, slanted eyes. Wide cheekbones like a bull. A pointed chin, but so defined that she looked like a crane. She was…beautiful and odd. Foreign. Best not come to Talkro, poor woman.

  Foreign or not, her expression was as familiar and spoke as many volumes as when Draka gave her the same look. One raised brow and blinking eyes. “Something wrong?” The woman asked. Her voice was deep…but feminine, too. Commanding. Aurie wondered if she could make her voice do that.

  Aurie stopped staring at Enya and looked back at Draka, “What happened here?”

  “He took on the Baron with armor that needed repairs. The Baron was a good swordsman, he got his blade right through one of those spots and about gutted him.”

  “Why, though?” She turned back to Enya. “Why did all this happen? I thought the Baron and Draka—I really need to stop calling him that around you people—the Prince were on the same side. Aren’t we at war with across the Rhine?”

  Enya narrowed her eyes. “Draka? You know him as Draka?”

  Aurie thinned her lips. He looked so pitiful there. Defeated. Burned. Mutilated. “He’s my neighbor and protector. My daughter is his ward. I’m…Regent of the kingdom until he wakes up. And,” she turned to face the behemoth who towered high enough over her that she felt like a toddler trying to give a tree commands, “that means you are to…follow…my command.” She lifted her chin.

  “Or else…?”

  “You answer to who I answer to.”

  Enya raised that brow at her again, this time over crossed arms. “If not him, then who is that?”

  “I’m a Paladin. New. But, I am. So, I was told you’re in charge,” Aurie stood as straight as she could. “Now, I am in charge of you. Now, why did the Baron nearly kill the Prince?”

  “The Baron was starving the city to create insurgency and using an innocent he had imprisoned as a pawn to turn them against the Prince by lying to them and saying that it was him who wanted her executed. So, we fed the people, tried to turn it around, but we had to attack the Baron in order to free the woman. She’s a symbol of the people. She needs to be seen around the Prince when he wakes up, even if it’s just sitting next to him when he’s in public. There’s more to it, but long story short, we had to lay siege to Palais Rohan,” Enya pointed from her crossed arms, “and your Draka faced off against him in the middle of it burning down on top of him. I’ve healed him twice and missed about as many days of helping around here for it. God’s not saying no. He’s saying that the Prince needs to take time to heal. His wounds aren’t just the ones we can see.”

  “No,” Aurie regarded him with a heartfelt grin and fingers along the edges of his graying auburn hair on the side that wasn’t seared.

  Enya furrowed her brow at her. “What is it with you small ones? The poor man. I feel for him, I do. But you all got to start playing cards or something before he completely loses his mind before his vow of silence runs out.”

  “What?” Aurie looked up.

  “I mean, you,” Enya flicked her brows. Turned her eyes. Grinned. “Him.”

  “What?”

  “You two…” Enya wagged a finger between them.

  “Are Regent and her Prince who considers her daughter as his ward. What are you trying to say?”

  Enya blinked at her, still wagging her finger between them.

  “I’m a widow. Recent. We’re just close friends. We’re family. And he is the closest thing my daughter has left to call a father.”

  “Okay,” Enya nodded approval. “Just making sure, that’s all.”

  “Good. Now let’s meet the rest of his council and figure out how to fix this mess.”