Silvermane had never liked canal roads. She tolerated them in the way seasoned horses tolerated most things: with a long memory and no illusions. Each step onto the damp stone would come with a fractional pause, just enough to test for treachery, before she committed her weight. The road was narrow, the water too close, the echoes wrong. She preferred earth that answered honestly when stepped upon.

  She had learned that preference years ago, on a river road where a slick stone sent a younger gelding into the water and never gave him back. Horses remembered these things, even when people pretended not to.

  “She likes you,” Anabeth said mildly, nodding at Silvermane’s ears. “Or at least, she’s decided you aren’t worth arguing with. That’s the highest praise a sensible horse gives.”

  “I do not believe she understands the concept of ‘liking’,” I said.

  Anabeth chuckled. “Neither do I. I tend to skip straight past like. I’m far too serious a creature for it.”

  She really called herself ‘serious’...

  Silvermane snorted. I knocked on her head once and mouthed ‘behave’.

  In fact, Silvermane had never taken much interest in anything at all. She moved when guided, stopped when told, and conserved her attention for the few things that mattered: hay and her knees. Everything else passed her by.

  Anabeth noticed her anyway.

  “A practical temperament,” she observed from behind me. “You see it often in draft-bred mares. They aren’t curious animals. They’ve learned curiosity is usually more work than it’s worth.”

  Yet, even the most indifferent animal couldn’t remain untouched when the world itself changed its rules.

  Tonight, the canal had dressed itself differently. It no longer read as a single stretch of water, but had been broken into sections by glow and shadow, an effect that made distance difficult to judge. The lumenlilies emerged directly from the water’s surface, their stems so invisible it made them look anchored somewhere beneath the canal rather than grown within it. Each bloom formed as a shallow, multi-petaled disc, yered thin as a cut crystal of diluted opalescence: milk-blue at the center, fading into pearled silver and veins of violet as they spread.

  “What have I told you, Sir Henry?” Her arms rested lightly around my waist, not gripping so much as existing there. “That beauty is rarely loud. It prefers to announce itself by altering the assumptions you make about a pce. Look at the light that doesn’t scatter. It’s exquisite.”

  Silvermane disagreed.

  She shortened her stride to the point of obstinacy. Her hooves pced themselves farther from the canal’s edge as her ears pinned back in judgment.

  Anabeth ughed. “Some things prefer to be approached on foot. Shall we walk?” She slid from the saddle without waiting for my response, turned and held a hand up to me.

  I sighed, took her hand, and dismounted. When I released her, she didn’t step away at once. We stood close, shoulders nearly brushing, the glow threading itself through the narrow space between us.

  Anabeth was quiet for a few steps. Then she said, almost conversationally, “I suppose I should admit something.”

  I waited.

  “The st few times I asked you about your Order, your Saints, your vows.” Her tone was light, but deliberate. “Those weren’t real questions. They were the sort you ask when you’re trying to pce someone, not understand them.” She gnced at me sidelong. “It’s a habit. An uncharitable one.”

  I still waited. I knew she’d fill the silence for me eventually.

  Then she said, “So, tell me something that doesn’t come with an oath attached. Did you choose this path… or did the armor choose you?”

  I waited for a more sensible question.

  She ughed. “Ah. Right. I’ve done it again. No knight questions anymore… Ahem. What sort of mortal food do you eat besides slime juice?”

  I opened my mouth.

  She hurried on, warming to it. “And don’t spare me. I once watched a man from the eastern marshes consume fermented eel fat with crushed beetles and cim it improved his digestion. Another swore by sugared locusts dipped in goat milk. I myself—”

  “Bacon,” I said.

  “Bacon!” she echoed, fingers patting at the pce her satchel would have been. Then she looked down, and her hand fell, a little sheepish. “I seem to have forgotten my notebook. You’ll have to limit yourself to no more than three culinary revetions until I can find something suitable to write on.”

  I did not give her another answer, and fortunately I was spared the need to. The canal widened ahead, and the stone gave way to a shallow riverbank where the glow gathered thickly enough to draw the eye whether one wished it or not.

  Up close, the lumenlilies were less like flowers and more like a condition imposed on the water. The cores bled even more distinctly up close. The longer I stared, the less the pattern felt decorative and the more it felt like a diagram rendered in living color.

  There was no way something like this wasn’t saturated with aether. I wondered which task it’d give me once I harvested it.

  Anabeth leaned forward as if considering the reflection rather than the flowers themselves. Then she murmured something and simply... lifted herself into the air. She drifted out over the canal with the same unhurried composure she brought to crossing a room. The water never once rippled.

  Ah yes, of course. She knew flight too.

  She extended two fingers and pinched the rim of a lumenlily between them. Then she came back and held the lily between us. The glow spilled around her eyes turning the pale blue of her irises almost translucent. “Did you know that these are quite sought after in the colder North? They don’t bloom there, of course, but when fsh-frozen at harvest, they become remarkably cooperative. In the right conditions, they can be used as anchors! Bone matrices take to them particurly well. It’s peculiar how a phenomenon which only manifests in the humid South should prove so compatible with cold-bound rites. ”

  Why did she know about bone summoning rituals specifically of the far North...

  “But where I come from...” She held it out to me, not quite pressing it into my hand, just offering the possibility. “We give them as keepsakes. To mark the appreciation of someone’s presence.”

  A gift, then.

  That narrowed things.

  Of all the towns I’d traversed, only the rger southern cities bothered with lumenlilies as social tokens. They were too fragile to transport casually, too temperamental to cultivate, and too associated with canal districts to be fashionable anywhere without a proper nocturne circuit. Aurelienth, certainly. Maybe Valcera. Possibly one or two river-crown towns that still maintained old water charters. The only town I knew of which wasn’t well-off that saw these blooming flowers was Branfield.

  Which meant noble-adjacent at the very least.

  Not many houses, then. And fewer still that trained their daughters in cold-bound rites and flight magic and the etiquette of giving symbolic flora without making it sound like a transaction.

  Valcera was only twenty miles away. Maybe if we could head there... I could learn who she really was.

  Or I could simply ask her.

  [Intimidation Aura — Escation Threshold Breached]“A COMPANIONSHIP WILL NOT BE BUILT UPON FABRICATIONS,” my voice thundered. “I WILL NOT ACCEPT TOKENS, SYMBOLS, OR SENTIMENTS FORGED ON A WEB OF HALF-TRUTHS.”

  Anabeth stared at me, wide-eyed.

  I continued, “You will tell me why you walk at my side. By whom you were sent. What interest you serve. And if you do not, this association will end here. I will remove myself from your life so completely that even this moment will cease to have existed.”

  This had worked before. It should work again.

  She stared at me for three seconds longer. Then she ughed.

  My ultimate intimidation move... made her ugh.

  “Oh, Sir Henry. You can’t use the same threat twice and expect it to nd with the same weight.” She grinned, unabashed and daring as her eyes twinkled.

  Then her fingers slid into pce before I fully realized what she was doing. One hand rested lightly over my gauntlet, thumb brushing the ridge where steel met leather; the other came beneath, steadying, as if my arm was a fragile hourgss. With gentle insistence, she lifted my hand between us.

  The lumenlily’s glow washed up over her face, catching in her eyes.

  Then she bowed her head and… pressed a kiss to the back of my hand.

  What kind of power move is this?