"This is ridiculous," Everna griped.

Winter had arrived and stayed with a vengeance. Snow drifted from the heavens for the fifth day in a row, burying the town ever deeper beneath its icy coat. Icicles dangled precariously above the heads of oblivious townsfolk as they worked to clear the snow from in front of their doors. Guards armed with shovels and horses equipped with field plows worked tirelessly to free the streets while trade wagons and carts crept further into the town proper.

"You'd think we were in the mountains with how much snow's fallen," Lyra agreed. She tugged her scarf — a scrap of a thing made from a strip of a blanket rather than knitting — further up her face and burrowed into it, her cheeks red from the cold. "I couldn't even open my door this morning. I had to climb out the window."

As the town lay in the southernmost corner of both the kingdom and the region, where the weather remained mild throughout the year, Pendel rarely saw a true winter. It wasn't until Everna spent her first winter in Inversa that she experienced the spectacle of waking up to the sight of snow covering every rooftop. Yet, even Inversa saw only a few inches, just enough to cover the city in a thin sheeting.

When she pulled her curtains open that morning, she'd found the most bizarre sight before her. A storm had blown through that evening, but she hadn't paid it any mind. Pendel frequently saw storms, which brought with them an abundance of rain and thunder, well into the early months of winter. This one had come with considerable wind and several feet of snow.

"I did too," Everna shoved her hands deep into her coat pockets, the fur lining soft and warm against her numbed fingers. "Mom had me outside at the crack of dawn dumping hot water on the street because she's 'too old to be climbing through windows.’"

Afterwards, she found herself on the roof with a shovel, buried to her knees, as she tried to clear the icicles from the eaves. It had been a mistake, as not five minutes later, she wound up in the street, floundering beneath half a foot of powdery snow while her mother laughed herself to tears in the doorway. Her father, who pulled her free, was not as amused.

Her parents were still arguing when she left.

Embarrassing as it was, she took solace in knowing that she was not alone. The baker's son fell from his roof not long after. The Guards pulled a pair of boys from a snowbank after their makeshift sled shot off another roof and into the street. A few blocks over, someone had fallen through theirs.

She didn't doubt that, come noon, the Guard would have notices advising against such endeavors posted across the town. Whether people listened remained to be seen.

"The boys are happy, if nothing else," Lyra said. "My mother, not so much. Holt and Egan made a snowman and used her good apron to dress it."

Lyra's brothers weren't the only ones. Shoddy snow sculptures dotted the alleyways between the buildings — hats, gloves, and dresses used to decorate them. Snow faeries covered the parts of the streets not yet cleared. The older children had claimed the snow banks, obscene messages and images carved into the snow. There was even a large phallic sculpture in the middle of the street, at which a group of young boys pointed and laughed as they ran past.

Lyra made a noise of vague disgust at the back of her throat. "I cannot believe the guards haven't taken that down yet."

"They'd just make another one," Everna said with a shrug. "You know how boys are. Personally, I think it's hilarious."

"It's anything but."

"What? You don't think a snow cock is funny?"

"Unlike you, I don't have the maturity of a schoolboy," Lyra clipped. "It shouldn't be there. It's just wrong."

"You're right," Everna said, a cheeky grin splitting her lips. "In this cold, it should be much smaller."

"Your sense of humor is atrocious."

"I'm making one in front of your house tonight."

"Don't you dare."

Nearer to the center of the town, the streets were busier than ever. On the south side of the main square, preparations for the Harvest Festival had begun. The skeleton frame of a stage stood in the designated area, a swarm of carpenters and woodworkers laboring to put the floor in place. On either side, a smaller group focused on constructing the massive tables that would hold the feast. Unlike previous years, however, the atmosphere was much more subdued; rather than bristling anticipation, a heavy sort of reluctance clung to the air.

"I'm surprised there's a festival this year," Everna said. "I don't think the townspeople are in the mood for celebrating."

Lyra gave the stage a sideways glance, her lips pressed into a firm line. "I heard there was talk of canceling it, but Pala insisted they hold it. She thinks the town could use the distraction more than ever, and rumor has it there are plans to use the festival to honor the mayor. They buried him three days after you left."

It would be the best way to send him off, Everna thought. Mayor Ashburn loved the Harvest Festival more than any other seasonal celebration. For Pendel, which thrived on agriculture, it was the most important day of the year. The hunters and farmers presented offerings to the nature deities; if those offerings were suitable enough, the appeased gods imparted their wisdom onto them.

Nothing would make Mayor Ashburn happier than to see his hometown thrive.

"She's not wrong," Everna said a few moments later. "The world doesn't stop on account of one person. There would come a day when Mayor Ashburn left us. It's just unfortunate it came so soon, and in such a horrible way."

"I suppose you're right. I just... Sometimes I can't believe something like that would happen," Lyra muttered. She paused, then swallowed as it if were the most difficult thing she'd ever done. "I still see the blood sometimes."

Everna had always thought she had a strong stomach. Her brother was reckless to a fault, and she spent much of her childhood fetching their parents whenever his dauntless stupidity resulted in one gruesome injury or another. She'd seen him impale his own foot with a pitchfork. He once fell out of a tree and broke his leg so horribly that the bones stuck out in three different places. He'd even fallen into a bonfire and charred the skin of his leg.

Their parents kept healing potions on hand because of him.

None of that, however, prepared her for seeing a man's skull split like a walnut and the contents spilled across the floor, or witnessing what happened to a body when it fell from a great height. The first time she'd seen a decapitation, she'd nearly screamed. She didn't dare think of the mutilation case she once handled under the tutelage of an Inquisitor. It had been worse than they expected, and even the Inquisitor had to excuse themselves for a few moments.

Mayor Ashburn's death was exceptionally tame by comparison, but to Lyra, who'd never witnessed violence of that nature, it was probably a horrifying experience. Everna would be more concerned if she hadn't reacted. Still, she was handling it much better than some of her classmates had. Three of them dropped the course after their first encounter with death.

"I don't know how you do it. How did you... You didn't even react."

"I did," Everna admitted. "I just didn't let it show."

Dealing with death required both nerves and a creative mind. It was a mental game, one of distraction and redirection. Her instructors introduced them to such scenes as quickly as possible, as desensitization came with exposure. They encouraged them to find other explanations for what they saw: to see blood as paint or the bodies as the mannequins used in the earliest days of their studies.

Repress the body's natural response, adopt a neutral stance, and focus on nothing but the evidence; it was second nature to her now.

"Maybe that's why Windmore seemed so convinced it was you," Lyra proposed. "You were so calm. It was almost... creepy."

Everna scoffed. She could've been the one vomiting out the window and Windmore would twist it into an admission of guilt. He'd wanted to arrest her that night and nothing but a confession from the culprit would've stopped him. That may not have been enough, either. He'd have arrested her as an accessory to murder or assumed they were covering for her.

You're jumping to biased conclusions, she reminded herself.

She drew in a deep breath, feeling the cold air flood into her lungs, and released it in a cloud of white. Her emotions and personal views were interfering with her rationale, and that would get her nowhere with this case. She might not like Captain Windmore, but without evidence to support her claims, suspicions, they were nothing more than slanted speculation. He may have been all too happy to slap her in chains, but given the circumstances, he wasn't wrong to do so.

He had, if even in the barest sense, done his job and she couldn't fault him for that.

"It was the sword," she said at length. "Which reminds me, I need to pick it up from Banor. Care to join me?"

"Another excuse to avoid my insignificant other? I will gladly go with you."

"Why are you still with him if you don't like him?"

Lyra sighed. "I don't have the heart to tell my mother things have changed. She was so happy when she found out we were together and was absolutely beside herself when he proposed."

"Don't tell me you intend to marry Gyles for your mother's sake."

"Not everyone—"

A loud crack from above stopped her short.

Without thinking, Everna seized Lyra by the arm and hauled her towards the middle of the street as a massive sheet of snow and ice on the roof beside them broke loose. It spilled over the eaves, dragging a large chunk of wood and several loosened shingles. The onslaught missed them by mere inches, and for the third time that morning, Everna found herself buried to her shins in snow.

"Gods be, this is insane," Lyra huffed as she smoothed her dress, glaring at the roof.

"Come on," Everna said, ushering her down the street. "The sooner we're off the streets, the better. The snow's tried to crush me to death twice, and it's not even noon."

Banor's forge was one of the stranger buildings in town. Circular and half buried in the ground, it sat nestled between two much taller apartment buildings in the middle of the northwestern quadrant. A set of worn steps led down to a pair of thick steel doors set into the earth. They were open; the sounds of hissing steam and a hammer striking metal rose from within.

As a dwarf, Banor insisted he worked best beneath the ground. His people inhabited the Scintillating Peaks due south of the town. Beyond them lay the mysterious Indarian Region, where the dwarves once dwelt before the people drove them deeper beneath the mountains and further into Trellan. The elves that inhabited the woods west of town hadn't been far behind them.

Few knew anything of the region that bordered Trellan to the east and south. The Scintillating Peaks were nearly impassable, the peaks too high to climb and the caves beneath too treacherous to pass. Only the dwarves knew the way through the mountains, and they kept the knowledge to themselves.

What Everna knew of Indaria, she'd learned from Banor. It was a predominately human region, he claimed, and one that had widely forsaken both the gods and magic. They worshiped only a single deity, a goddess as temperamental as the sea she commanded, and disparaged anything dissimilar to them. Many of Banor's kin met their end simply for stepping into their realm.

It was an odd concept Everna couldn't wrap her mind around. Inverness was largely populated by humans (as was much of the region, so she heard), but there were many other races to be found. Beyond a few specific instances, the racial differences weren't of much concern. When racial mixing began, especially between humans and elves, that acceptance became a matter of debate.

The elves were arrogant, infuriatingly so. She'd met several in her life, and Andryll was an oddity among them. Most elves viewed humans with contempt — as vermin encroaching on what they believed were lands that belonged only to them. Humans, it seemed, couldn't care less what they thought so long as the elves let them be. And they did, for the most part. Inverness had the odd border dispute with the elven kingdom deep within the Nivfell Woods, but nothing more than a few petty arguments came of it.

Perhaps that intolerance wasn't so odd, now that she thought of it.

"Gods, this place is unbearable," Lyra bemoaned. She pulled her scarf from her neck and used the end to wipe the sweat from her brow.

Even the sweltering heat of Highsun couldn't compare to the absolute misery inside the forge. Molten metal boiled in the vats carved into the far wall. A massive furnace dominated the western wall, flames the color of starlight burning behind the protective grate. Weapons hung from the walls: swords, axes, and spears sharpened and polished until they shone beneath the torches that kept the eastern side of the building illuminated.

It was a welcome change from the frigid cold, but with her coat, it quickly became too much. Everna shed her outerwear and tossed it onto the hook near the door. Lyra followed suit, happily discarding her cloak and scarf.

In the far corner of the forge, Banor labored over a small anvil nestled beside a thick water pump. His skin gleamed with sweat. Soot and coal stained his pale beard black. Singe marks littered his clothes, and a nasty bruise encircled his left eye.

"Hit yourself with the hammer again?" Everna asked.

"Ha, ha. I see your sense of humor's still intact," Banor scoffed. He slammed his hammer down onto the unfinished sword perched precariously atop the anvil, then added, "And you look as pale as snow. You need to get out more, lass."

"I don't want to hear that from a man who lives in half a hole in the ground."

"You say that like you weren't in one a few days ago." Banor set the hammer aside and wiped the sweat from his brow with his beard. "You can thank me later."

Everna threw him a quizzical look. "For what?"

"Sir Swiftbrook asked me to look at your sword." He stepped away from the anvil and beckoned the girls to the table in the center of the room. "Wanted me to check for signs of use, pointless as it was."

"I don't see how verifying that is pointless," Everna argued.

"Because I didn't need to do the whole bloody process to prove it, but he insisted.

He reached for a folded bundle perched in the middle of the table. The cloth was thick and stained with polishing oil and grease. He pulled on a piece protruding from a subtle twist in the fabric, and it fell away, revealing Everna’s sword. It looked the same as the day she got it; gleaming steel that shone blue beneath the light.

"It's pretty," Lyra said, eying the sword with awe. “I don't think I've ever seen it outside of the sheath before."

"Because I never use it," Everna said.

"A damn shame, too," Banor lamented. "You think it's pretty now? It'd be downright gorgeous if she'd used it. Pains me to see my best work collecting dust, but, that may have saved your life."

Lyra frowned. "I don't understand how you could tell she's never used it."

"Dwarven steel's a marvel of a thing," Banor said. He pointed a stocky finger at the edge of the sword, where the light was strongest. "See how blue it is? When Dwarven steel comes into contact with blood, the iron reacts with the metal and turns it iridescent. If the metal's been tempered properly, that is."

Lyra wrinkled her nose. "Well, that's a gruesome thought."

"Swords don't belong in a display case, girl.”. He muttered something under his breath, then continued, "Whoever planted this beauty at the scene didn't know what they were dealing with. If the mayor died from this sword, it wouldn't be blue as the day I forged it. The only thing it's seen is the inside of a scabbard and the occasional polish."

She was certain had it not been a request from her father, Banor never would've given her that sword. Dwarves took great pride in their work and placed greater significance on their metals. She'd taken it to a dwarven smithy in the captial to have it cleaned, and the smith nearly fainted when she removed it from the sheath. He could not believe a dwarf had given her such a blade.

She'd nearly gotten her head lopped off as he'd thought she'd stolen it.

"It saw a floorboard, once," Everna corrected. "That's why I never touched it. Damned thing cut through it like warmed butter."

Banor laughed, loud and boisterous. "Dwarven weapons are sharp, surely, but that one's special. Quite a few nifty enchantments on it. Took a forever to make. Blame your father. You're not the best with the sword, I hear, and he feared you'd need a bit of help."

"I'm not that bad. He's just overly critical," she defended. "Not that it matters. I've never had to use it, thank the gods."

Banor raised a bushy brow. "Even in the capital?"

"No, just having it on me seemed enough of a deterrent."

Banor motioned for her to take the sword. As Everna curled her fingers around the hilt, Lyra asked, "If you knew the sword wasn't the... murder weapon, why didn't you say anything?"

"I did. Didn't do a damned bit of good," Banor spat. "Windmore didn't care, and even now, he's trying to get my assessment written off. Says I'm too close to Ronan to take my word for it."

"And by his own logic, we shouldn't take anything he says as truth for the opposite reasons," Everna clipped. She retrieved the scabbard from the table and slid the sword inside, more than relieved to have it in her possession once more.

It would now stay on her person at all times. The last thing she needed was for it to turn up at the scene of another murder.

"True, but that may have spared you the mob," he said. "I'll tell you, Andryll's right. Had anyone else arrested you that night, you'd never be able to show your face in this town again."

"I'm still surprised someone hasn't tried to lynch me," she said as he tucked the sword into her waistband. "And I feel like I'm the only one concerned about the fact that no one seems to care."

Banor waved her off. "It's not that no one cares; it's that no one believes Windmore. This isn't the first time he's done this. He tried to ruin Arden when he first ran. He's tried it with your father several times."

Everna raised a brow. "He tried to ruin Mayor Ashburn? Why?"

"I don't know the details, but there's a bit of a history between those three. Lots of bad blood." He paused then, his brows drawn and his lips pressed into a firm line. "Between the three of us, I think Windmore did it. There's talk that his son is planning to run, and everyone in Pendel knows that as long as Ashburn's running, no one else has a chance in hell."

That was news to her. She knew there were several running against him, but she hadn't heard the word of Windmore's son. He rarely graced the town with his presence, preferring to keep to his family's lavish countryside villa. She'd met him once or twice before, and from what she'd gathered, he wasn't on good terms with his father.

"Half the time I forget he has a son," Lyra said. "I still can't believe there's a woman in the kingdom who'd want to marry a man like him."

"Money," Everna pointed out. "People quickly cast aside their morals and decency when money's involved."

"If not Windmore, then his son, and Windmore framed you to cover for him." Banor slapped his hand on the table, then shrugged. "Just a thought."

Everna worried at the inside of her cheek. If Windmore's son truly intended to run, he wouldn't have a chance. Mayor Ashburn served thirty years in office. The townspeople were content with his leadership, and he wasn't quite old enough for concerns of aging to sway their opinion. Windmore's son would still lose, even with Mayor Ashburn no longer a consideration. No one in Pendel wanted to see Windmore have any more power; he already had too much as it was.

It was vital information, but she hadn't a clue to do with it. Confronting Windmore wasn't an option; she had neither the patience nor the authority to interrogate him, nor a member of the clergy to ensure he spoke the truth. Sir Swiftbrook likely already questioned him and found nothing. He was likely already aware of the rumors.

"Sometimes passing thoughts are more helpful than you realize," she muttered.

At least now she had a legitimate reason to suspect Windmore.

Sword

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