Frost, Flood, and Rain busied themselves by adding wood to the furnace and jabbing pokers into the coals. Occasionally, they stole looks over their shoulders. Roan sat on her stool at the worktable, watching. She wore a leather apron looped around her neck and extending below her knees. Her dark hair was tied up out of the way, a lone lock dangling over her forehead.
Malcolm waited. He stood very nearly in the middle of the smithy between the assembly table and a stack of wooden buckets. Once Raithe moved away from Arion, Malcolm folded his hands before him in a deliberate manner that announced sincerity. “What I have to say to you now is incredibly important. More important than anything I’ve told anyone in a very long time. I might stumble here and there because it’s not an easy thing to talk about, so please, bear with me.”
Raithe had never heard him speak so gravely before, and for a moment he didn’t sound like Malcolm. Not the man he met on a fork between two rivers, the one who had followed him blindly for a year, the one who didn’t know which animals could be petted and which would attack. This was someone else.
“Want us to leave?” Roan asked. She was so convinced of the expected answer that she got to her feet.
“No,” Malcolm replied. “What I have to say is for everyone here.”
Roan stopped here, confusion swimming in her eyes. She eased back onto her stool. At the same time, the dwarfs put down the pokers and paused to listen.
“We have a problem,” Malcolm began. “A very serious one. The Fhrey outnumber us three to one. Our rune-etched walls are broken, the only things protecting us are gone, and most of our best soldiers are dead.” He gestured at Raithe. “Or wounded.”
“What do we need walls for?” Raithe said. “The bridge is gone.”
Malcolm shook his head. “Lack of a bridge won’t stop them. They still have Miralyith. They will use the Art to extend the stone of the cliff walls. I told Suri to destroy the bridge only to give us this time to prepare.”
“That was you?” Suri asked.
Malcolm nodded, then turned to Suri and offered her a sympathetic smile. “You can’t stop them, can you?”
Suri shook her head. “I’m not strong enough.” Suri touched Arion’s hand. “She might have been, but not me.”
“Arion couldn’t have stopped them, either,” Malcolm said. “And tonight the fane’s Miralyith will create new bridges, and his army will cross over the Bern River with orders to kill everyone. You might disrupt one or two of the bridges, Suri, but you won’t be able to take down all seven.”
“Seven? Wait…” Frost said, rubbing his beard the way he did when he was pondering. “How do you know there will be seven? How do you know any of this?”
Malcolm shook his head. “That’s not important at the moment. Just consider it a good guess. How we stop them is what we must discuss.”
Suri looked back at Arion and shook her head. “We can’t.”
“You sure?” Malcolm asked.
“Pretty—” She didn’t finish and the tears flowed again.
“Isn’t this Nyphron’s and Persephone’s problem to solve?” His voice had an odd sound, more gravelly than usual. Raithe didn’t understand the change. He sounded upset, and his anger grew each time he looked at Arion’s face. It didn’t make sense; the dwarfs had hated Arion. Everyone knew that.
“They can’t solve this,” Malcolm said. “But the people in this room can.”
This conjured a round of puzzled faces as they looked to one another for hints of understanding. They found none.
“What can we do against an army of Fhrey that Nyphron and Keenig Persephone can’t?” Frost asked.
“He means me,” Suri said, shaking her head. “But I can’t—”
“Actually, I mean everyone,” Malcolm said. “Every single person in this room must do their part.”
This brought a look of absurd disbelief from Tressa, who remained uncharacteristically silent.
“There’s nothing I can do!” Suri was shaking her head. “If they hit me with the same power as before, I can’t—”
“They will hit you, and with more than last time,” Malcolm assured her. “Only one Miralyith fought you today. But after the bridges are made and the troops are across, all seven will focus on you. Once you are gone, we won’t stand a chance. The Fhrey army will butcher every living soul while the Miralyith obliterates what remains of the city.”
“If what you say is true, we don’t actually have a problem,” Raithe said. “We have a lack of hope.”
“Gifford might return,” Roan said, causing everyone to look her way. The sudden attention caused her to shrink back, drawing up her knees and hugging them. Still, she managed to add in an unusually proud tone, “He rode a horse to fetch the Gula.”
Tressa was shaking her head, but Malcolm smiled at Roan, a warm, encouraging look accompanied by a confident nod. “Yes, I honestly think he will, but it won’t be enough, and it won’t be in time. And the Gula don’t have armor—they lack the protection of the Orinfar. Were they here now, they would be obliterated by the fane’s Miralyith.”
Roan looked guilty.
“It’s not your fault. You and your army of smiths did an amazing job. No one could have done more. There simply wasn’t time.”
“Then it really is over,” Raithe said. “There’s nothing we can do.”