“Sorry! Sorry!” chirped the voice. “I didn’t mean to startle you!”

  My eyes landed on the person who had managed to sneak up on me. For a moment, I just stood there, staring in shock.

  She was short. Considerably shorter than me. Her fluffy, floppy ears didn’t even reach my chin. She was dressed in some kind of supple leather outfit, fit for a hunter, and covered in a thick cloak which she was holding closed at her front with both hands.

  None of that was what startled me.

  What startled me was the kind of ears she had.

  They were very obviously canine in nature. But rather than the ears of a wolf or a fox, which I would have expected to see out on the frontier, this was very much a dog I was staring at. Beagle, unless I missed my mark considerably. There was a family of them serving the Royal Court of Autumn, so I was rather familiar with this particular type of beastkin.

  Which was also why I was so surprised to see one out in the middle of the wilderness. Most ‘domesticated’ canines didn’t do particularly well on the frontier, unless they were huskies or something similar.

  “Uh, h-hi?”

  She tried again, her grin faltering a little in the face of my apparent unwillingness to engage.

  “Hello!” I replied quickly, feeling my cheeks turn a shade rosier than their usual pale red, practically white-ish color. “Don’t worry about the, ah… my reaction. I was just distracted, so I didn’t see you. My name is Thorn.”

  Strictly speaking, this wasn’t even a lie. Lianthorn could certainly be shortened to just ‘Thorn.’ (Not that anyone had ever done it before.) Besides, I thought it best to keep my ‘new’ name somewhat similar to my old one. I would hopefully get used to it faster, which would lessen the danger of failing to respond to it by mistake.

  “Oh! Sorry!” She laughed sheepishly. I could see the back of her coat starting to shift, presumably from her tail swishing around. “My name’s Nasha! So… whatcha doing here? Visiting someone?”

  She narrowed her eyes at me a little, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t blatant suspicion shining in her chocolate brown orbs. Now that I was looking at her a little more closely, it was hard not to notice how cute she was…

  She blinked, still waiting for a response.

  “Ah, no, not visiting anyone,” I replied, fighting not to slip into the more formal speech patterns of the Court. “I actually want to talk to the town elders. Or do you have an official mayor elected already? I’d like to… join up, if that’s alright. You are still accepting people, I hope?”

  If it was at all possible, Nasha beamed at me even more happily. “Of course! Come with me!”

  And then my hand was, somehow, in hers as she dashed towards the ramshackle bridge, tugging me along. I genuinely couldn’t explain to you how that happened. And I was a (mostly) trained assassin of the Belladonna family!

  “It’s been rough,” she was saying. “We can barely get all the resources required to get the town off the ground! And then there are the professions. I mean, I understand why a cobbler wouldn’t want to come out here, for example, but…”

  She continued to prattle on. And while I was mostly listening, because she was handing me some of the information I needed on a silver platter, I couldn’t stop my lips from twitching into a smile. It was, I decided, her complete and utter lack of hostility that kept my instincts from reacting to her badly.

  Though that didn’t stop me from tugging her to a halt just as we reached the death trap they called a bridge.

  “Are you sure this… thing… is safe to use?” I asked dubiously.

  The size of the river was considerable, sure, but the forest around us was positively ancient. I refused to believe they couldn’t have found trees tall enough to form a halfway decent bridge. Instead, two logs were driven into the ground on each side of the river, and a net stretched between them over the water. Along the net were some rather scarce wooden ‘steps’, which appeared to be tied in place.

  Nasha just nodded happily.

  “Oh, definitely! Alys wanted to make a proper bridge, but then Elder Hyel stopped her and insisted on setting it up like this so we can… er…” She trailed off, blinked at me, and then whipped her head forward as a flush crept up her cheeks. “I mean, er…”

  Frowning, I glanced from her to the bridge and back before gazing at the collection of houses in the distance. Looking closely, I now noticed the settlement had only a single long stretch of wooden palisades, in the one direction that wasn’t already boxed in by the rivers.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “It’s so you can easily collapse the bridge if you need to, isn’t it?”

  She whined softly and refused to look at me, but she nodded again.

  “And you weren’t supposed to blurt that out to just anyone, were you? Especially to potentially suspicious strangers who could be scouting out a frontier town?”

  Her head snapped back. This time, it was definitely suspicion in her eyes. Even her grin was gone.

  “But you’re not doing that, right?”

  “I’m not,” I confirmed, making no effort to conceal my amusement. “Also, if it makes you feel any better, it’s rather easy to figure out why the bridge is so bad. I just had to think about it for a moment.”

  She perked up instantly. “Right! You figured it out! I didn’t say something I wasn’t supposed to again!” Her tail definitely wagging at speed now, from what I could see of her coat’s movement, Nasha once more tugged on my hand and stepped onto the death-trap bridge.

  I paled a little, but this time, I complied with her tugging and followed. Not even three steps in, I was immensely thankful, both for my training and for the heightened sense of balance that came with being a fae. Without these assets, it would have been all too easy to end up in the river.

  “See?” Nasha chirped. “Not that bad! Though, Alys just outright refuses to use the bridge and says it’s an insult to all she believes in… anyway, the elders should be at the meeting hall, which is this way!”

  She led me quickly through the burgeoning ‘streets’, talking all the while and occasionally greeting one of the settlers we passed. I’d arrived quite early in the day, but the folk of the frontier town were already up and about. Everyone I saw was too focused on their tasks to spare me more than a glance. Some seemed suspicious, though most looked simply curious. Overall, the atmosphere wasn’t particularly stifling or unfriendly.

  Which was surprising, to be honest. After all, there was no true bustle of civilization, no laughter of children, and no animal sounds beyond the one horse and few chickens I’d spotted. Hardly the concentrated chaos of noise, smells, and life I’d seen in the villages on my way to Swiftband.

  The town itself was a tiny bit bigger than I’d expected it to be, though it did seem strange to call it a ‘town’ at all. That was the official title, true, but it was smaller than most of the villages I’d passed through.

  The only reason it was considered a town was tradition.

  Any settlement that sprang up on the frontier was automatically granted a ‘town’ charter by the kingdom sponsoring it. In fact, if Swiftband continued to prosper, they could easily apply for a city charter once they hit a certain population size. This would grant them many genuine perks, such as lower taxes and the right to organize a militia. Frontier settlements were exempt from taxes for the first twenty years anyway, so Swiftband didn’t need to worry about any of this immediately. It was something to keep in mind for the future, though.

  I continued making observations as Nasha tugged me along, sorting and analyzing them almost unconsciously. Every structure had been built with high-quality wood, on a base of some kind of black, shiny stone that looked vaguely familiar to me. The construction itself also looked solid and of high quality, with no gaps or other obvious issues.

  Yet the wood didn’t have the particular shine that would hint at some kind of weather-proof treatment. This wouldn’t necessarily be a detriment for quite a while, but it was a flaw, with potential long-term repercussions.

  I filed it away in the back of my mind.

  Regarding the townsfolk, I observed that most were young. Around my age, as far as I could tell. The only notable exception was a dwarf who glared at us from under his bushy white eyebrows as he cut directly across our path.

  And, again, no children. Which made sense, of course. The frontier wasn’t a safe place to be. None but the most desperate of families with children would sign up to move here.

  “...that one! We’re almost there! You can already see the elders!”

  Nasha’s cheerful voice broke into my thoughts. Refocusing my attention on the stream of words coming out of her mouth nonstop, I looked at the building she was pointing to.

  It was one of the more impressive pieces of architecture around, a three-story structure built from some kind of bone-white wood. The roof had been laid with cheerful red shingles which looked a little rough in spots, but were otherwise well made.

  The double doors leading into the building were wide open. Stepping inside, I found myself in a large, open space dotted by wooden supports. There was a kitchen setup along one wall, a myriad of tables made from the same bone-white wood, and a staircase leading upwards.

  Several groups of people were eating and chatting softly at the tables, but pride of place belonged to four elderly individuals at a table all their own. The elders, I presumed. This table was positioned against the far wall, allowing them to survey the entire space easily. The table even looked to be of a slightly higher quality than the rest, with an actual polish that made its reddish wood pop splendidly.

  The four elders were an interesting bunch.

  An elf with actual wrinkles sat on my far left, hands closed around a steaming cup, watching the room with a regal air.

  A wendigo filled another seat. Their skull-like face and stick-thin body betrayed nothing, not even their gender. I tried to keep from staring. It was a rarity to see a wendigo actually capable of functioning in polite society.

  The third of the elders turned in our direction the instant we crossed the threshold, her eyes zeroing in on us with unnerving intensity. Granted, she was a hawk beastkin, so that might have been a look of pure affection and I would never know. I hadn’t spent enough time around the more exotic beastkin species to understand them properly.

  The final member of the group was almost disappointing by comparison. An elderly human, hunched over with age. Still, the way he was methodically demolishing the meal in front of him revealed both a certain stiff discipline and a level of vigor that a human of his years simply shouldn’t have possessed.

  I took a deep breath as we approached the table, relishing the warmth of the space while simultaneously preparing myself. The coming negotiation might well be intense.

  But I would get through it. I would get them to accept me. I had come so far already, and I wasn’t going to fail at the last step.

  My future depended on it.