Page 42 of The Sundered Realms

“No. I did know there’s something different than the usual demon portal business going on, which means Vhannor needs a new partner, and he needs one now.”

Liris wasn’t stupid enough to not understand where she was going with this, but it didn’t make sense. “Why doesn’t he have a partner?”

Lady Inealuwor sighed. “Because he keeps burning them out. He hasn’t had a real partner in years—he takes interns to test and train them for future partners and field work, but his last moved on two months ago.”

“So why doesn’t he take a new one?”

“Because there aren’t that many qualified candidates for field spellcasting, Liris, and someone untested typically does more harm than good,” Lady Inealuwor said. “I don’t think you appreciate how remarkable it is that you were able to step into your first demon fight and spell without any pertinent training and successfully manage both. Teams usually train together before they can do that.”

Liris wouldn’t say she was untested. “So even though I don’t have any spellcasting training, you think I’m qualified to be Vhannor’s partner?”

Dangerous. As if she wasn’t already attached to him?

“For now at least, yes,” Lady Inealuwor said. “I am making special arrangements so your formal relationship won’t be hierarchical in the usual way, and your future won’t be solely left to Vhannor’s judgment. If you change your mind in the future, I won’t hold you to this, and I will move your room. But for now, having your room not just not in the dorm, but in the same house as Vhannor’s sister, helps prevent him from being able to distance himself from you the way he’d otherwise try to, even if he knows he shouldn’t. It forces him to think of you not just as any other new student he’s rescued, but as a potential equal.”

“A partner,” Liris said, testing the words out loud, unsurprised at the excited skip in her heart. “Are you sure that’s what he wants from me? He shouldn’t be forced into a partnership either.”

“I have known that boy a long time,” Lady Inealuwor said again, very dryly. “I am quite sure. So?”

So? What was the question—oh.

“I already told you what I chose,” Liris said with some exasperation. “That hasn’t changed.”

She would be involved.

All the way.

“Good,” Lady Inealuwor said briskly, reaching for the door. “Then let’s get you to your meeting.”

Liris blinked. “Shouldn’t I wash up first?”

Lady Inealuwor considered her. “No, I don’t think so. She’ll take to you better if it looks like you know how to work.”

In dirt?

“Who, exactly, are we meeting with?”

“The Speaker of the Assembly for the Sundered Realms,” Lady Inealuwor said. “Princess Nysia.”

Vhannor was silent again, clearly frustrated with Lady Inealuwor successfully undercutting his plans. After spending every waking hour seeing excitement brighten his lavender eyes, to find them now a stormy, flat gray and expression tight made Liris want to apologize for being complicit in it.

She would have apologized to the elders, even though it wasn’t her fault, and that alone was enough for her to keep her mouth shut.

But she also remembered asking him if he ever had time for anything, this man who was at the top of his hierarchy and whom no one could make stop. And she didn’t want to stop him, either, but one conversation with Lady Inealuwor was enough to make Liris confident that woman knew what she was about.

Put out as he was, Vhannor nevertheless brought Liris with him to Special Operations’ headquarters without argument.

And that headquarters was the spire.

Clearly visible, but also easy to mark off limits: Vhannor claimed they had more spell protections than most paranoid governments, and they couldn’t easily hide a place so many people worked at anyway.

They took a spiral staircase up, passing floors dedicated to fiber arts specialists, advanced mathematics, and of course rare languages—the kinds of pattern experts they would want easily accessible for unraveling demon summonings. Another floor with people bringing messages in and out, collating them into different reports; another floor full of maps and charts and plans and assignment statuses, where professionals turned analysis into action.

This was something she could do, if she had to stay. Learn how everything fit together. Liris focused on absorbing it all to process later as workers startled at the stranger in their midst, subsiding from outward alarm only at the sight of Vhannor accompanying her.

They passed through this floor to a meeting room more like what Liris had expected from Special Operations. A large round table surrounded by chairs with pads of paper and pens at each, one wall covered in paper for writing and the opposite wall made of cork for pinning pages, and on the far side a window—blackout drapes in front of it, but a hint of silvery spell glare peeking through—with a table in front bearing a water dispenser, glasses, napkins, and a small array of snacks.

Aside from a toilet, it had everything the people who made decisions might need to sustain them while they set courses for the Sundered Realms. Liris’ heart started pounding just from standing in the room where such happened.

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