Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

While two kings had their little pissing contest in the wreckage, the actual interesting conversation was happening forty feet away, where nobody royal was looking.

Lux Nash was crouched over a scorch ring in the dirt, poking a dead portal-seam. Dead things occasionally lied to you, and Lux Nash trusted nothing that had stopped moving without confirming it personally.

A Luminari man drifted up beside her, glowing the polite, low-wattage glow of a soldier who knew better than to blind a lady at work.

”That was fast,” he said. ”The closing. I’ve watched mages spend an hour on one rift and lose. You collapsed a dozen in a single pulse.”

”Yes.” Lux didn’t look up. ”I’m aware. I was there.”

He laughed, which meant he was either brave or too dim to read a room, and in Lux’s professional experience those were frequently the same man.

”I mean it as a compliment. Dark magic that clean is rare. Most who wield it end up wearing it.” He crouched across from her, uninvited, the way friendly people do right before they become a problem. ”You reversed the polarity of the anchor instead of severing it. Smart. Severing leaves a wound the fae can reopen. You closed the door and took the hinges.”

”How thrilling for you to notice.” Lux flicked a pebble into the dead seam and watched it fail to do anything. ”Do the Luminari hand out gold stars, or is verbal stroking the ceiling of your generosity tonight?”

He grinned. God help her, he had dimples.

”I’m saying your wards are good.”

”My wards are none of your business is what my wards are.” Lux finally lifted her head and gave him the full once-over, the one that started at the boots and ended at the soul and found both wanting. ”Here’s a fun fact about wards, sunshine. The second I tell a stranger how mine breathe, they stop being wards and start being a to-do list for the next asshole with a grudge. So no. You get the light show and zero blueprints.”

”Fair.” He raised both palms, still glowing, still infuriatingly pleasant. ”I won’t ask how yours are built. I’ll give you something instead. Consider it a professional courtesy from one door-locker to another.”

Lux narrowed her eyes. Free information was like a free drink from a stranger: you took it, but you watched his hands the whole time.

”Go on then. Dazzle me.”

He leaned in, and his voice dropped into the tone of a man handing over a secret he had permission to spend.

”White light counters dark warding through resonance, and there are dozens of ways in. Frequency matching, phase inversion, harmonic overload, a straight brute-force flood if you have the reserves and enjoy waste.” He ticked them off easy, generous, a rich man tipping in facts. ”But if it were me, and I wanted through a dark ward without the whole continent feeling me do it, I’d skip all of that.”

”Would you.” Lux kept her face carved from boredom, and her attention went sharp as a blade under it.

”I’d find the seam where the dark magic was anchored to something living. A blood tie, a bound soul, a mage’s own signature holding the lattice together.” His silver eyes stayed on hers. ”Dark wards are strong because they’re personal. That’s also the crack. White light doesn’t break the ward. It severs the tie holding the ward to its maker, and the whole thing unravels because the thing that was feeding it stopped answering the door.”

Lux said nothing.

She said nothing so loudly that the Luminari man’s grin widened, because he had aimed at a nerve in the dark and heard it twang.

”Just a guess,” he added, standing, brushing off nothing because his people apparently didn’t get dirty. ”One of many methods. But if I were betting which door the dark fae come through next, and I’ve been wrong about the dark fae exactly never, that’s the one. They’ll go for the tether, whatever it’s tied to. Or whoever.”

”Whoever,” Lux repeated, flat.

”Whoever.” He tipped his glowing chin toward the far end of the row, where a wolf princess sat cradled between a dragon and a god, white light still bleeding off her skin. ”You’ve got a ward in this camp that’s anchored to a living thing right now. Radiant. Loud. Impossible to miss.” His smile lost its dimples and picked up something colder. ”I’d move her behind three more before dawn, if I were the one locking your doors. Which, thank the light, I’m not.”

He gave Lux a small, courtly bow, glowing head to boot, and drifted back toward his portaling king like a man who had done nothing more consequential than compliment a stranger’s shoes.

Lux stayed crouched in the dirt a long moment, staring at the dead seam and running the math he’d handed her for free.

”Thank the light indeed,” she muttered. ”The last thing this camp needs is a second person who knows how the doors work. One’s already one too many, and she’s me.”

Free information had a price. It always had a price. The price was usually that the person who gave it to you wanted you looking at the shiny thing in the left hand while the right hand did the real work, and the trouble with this particular gift was that she couldn’t yet tell which hand was which.

She stood, dusted her palms, and went to find the one person who needed the update before the sun made a liar out of all of them.

Lux glanced one last time across the ruined row, past the drunks and the scattered gold and the orgy tent’s dazed survivors, to the glowing girl who had accidentally become the most valuable door in the kingdom.

”Well, sweetheart,” she said to no one, to Guinevere, to the night. ”Congratulations. You’re a keyhole now. We’re going to have a talk, you and I. After we’ve both had a drink that isn’t whiskey.”