“And that is how I ended up in your splendid company, your ladyship. I thank you for listening to my long tale of woe, challenge, and finally, triumph,” I finished. It had been cathartic to speak at length about my history. Up until that point, I alone had known it. My secrets were only ever doled out in parts to people I’d never see again or to those forever silenced in death.

  There came a burst of applause. The Lady had been as attentive an audience as one could ask for. She’d oohed and ahhed at moments that almost made her seem human—if I ignored her eyes. The glamour that bled out of those orbs held the weight of every drop of the lakes that dotted the mountain. I had no doubt that if she used the Evil Eye on me, I’d be a dead man.

  Completing my bow, my whole body sagged. I wasn’t exhausted; I had more energy now than I’d had before I died. This was beyond emotion or the weariness of the day. My body shook as though I’d chiselled the words into stone. I had been talking for hours—days perhaps—but the moon still hung in the same place above me.

  What strength I had allowed me to fall sideways rather than forwards. I didn’t relish ruining my new face within hours of having it. I blinked. Hours? That felt wrong. I lay back, and tiredness slid over me like a tide. I had to consciously focus on each breath.

  The Lady approached me, kneeling beside me, and stroked my long hair out of my face. The silk had come undone somewhere along the telling. Her touch was refreshing, like a cool breeze on a summer’s day.

  “Thank you. You have a true gift with words, faces, dance, and song. I think you should sleep now. I offer you a place to rest, free of obligation and safe from harm. You shall awake tomorrow with your rewards. I have not enjoyed a story so much as this in a millennium.”

  “It’s bad luck to sleep without a name,” I mumbled, vaguely aware of an old superstition. Babes must be named when their eyes first opened, and before their wailing ceased. That’s how you got changelings—or so the superstition went.

  “Then I shall give you one for a time. There was a bard of old you remind me of: Taliesin. Do you mind if I give it to you?”

  My brain was fogged. I was dimly aware of my choices: sleep without a name or accept one given to me by a fae. Giving a fae your name was definitely bad, but no one had ever written down what to do about taking one. I fumbled for an answer, but a wave of calm washed over me as our eyes met.

  As if I had a chance of outmanoeuvring this ancient being. She’d trapped me in time, wrung me of my secrets, and for all I knew, I could’ve been dancing in the palm of her hand around a spoonful of water.

  She was beyond me. I could only hope her intentions were good. Waking up tomorrow at all would be an epic achievement.

  “Taliesin is good,” I managed to mumble.

  Waking from a deep, restful slumber in a ring of wildflowers would be a wondrous way to start any day. Finding the ring circled with snow added a fresh layer of whimsy. I was not dead, nor did it feel like I’d died again.

  The events of the previous night felt seared into my memory. The Lady’s glamour was nowhere near. Not that I’d notice her if she didn’t wish me to. I was adept at controlling my glamour, but she had likely had more years than I had hours.

  The next thing I noticed was my clothes. Someone—I suspected I knew who—had dressed me as a wandering minstrel. It was a mix of practical travel clothes, my jacket layered like a gambeson, but with pleated sleeves and striking red trousers. All the rest of my clothes were black or grey.

  I recognised the look from the tournaments I used to attend. Always coming in a respectable third, I’d only mucked up once and won. It was an achievement that sounded better than it was; I was, by that point, a couple of years older than most competitors due to my cultivation issues.

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  The look was completed by a lute lying on the grass next to me. Another skill I’d built over the years, ever striving to add the exact right kind of value. I could feel the enchantment radiating off it. Tentatively, I grabbed the instrument.

  Glamour flowed through me. The instrument held more potential than any weapon I’d ever examined. If it had been a weapon, the Knightly Orders would’ve gone to war over it. As an instrument, I hadn’t the foggiest how it might be valued. I strummed its strings, and of course, it was beautifully in tune.

  A fear unwound inside me. The fae generally known as the Lady of the Lake was Seelie: the most powerful and grounded of their kin. Their gifts tended to be swords and destiny—usually bloody and violent.

  Whether destiny was due to their power or because they stuck some poor sod with an artefact that drew the kind of attention from which Destiny with a capital D was forged, I wasn’t sure. Not having it be a blade might somewhat temper my fate.

  Sensing this was the perfect time to reveal itself, a small wisp of blade glamour flowed from the lute.

  Blade glamour. From. My. Lute.

  A terrible certainty settled upon me. Inevitability. Placing a hand around the neck, I pushed a touch of glamour into it, and things started to change. The lute transformed into a bastard sword—my preferred weapon. The changes didn’t stop there.

  With a billow of smoke, my minstrel attire was swallowed, revealed instead as pitch-black armour.

  An extremely vexing moment came when a helmet grew over my head in a burst of smoke. That was when I realised the transformation was tugging on my glamour to fuel itself. Worse: I’d just bound the artefact to myself.

  The whole damn thing was a soul enchantment. Bound to my soul until it left this plane. Normally, I’d say until death, but I knew that wouldn’t be enough to part us.

  “Well, I’ve woken in worse situations,” I said, banishing the mood that was settling over me. After all, I’d woken yesterday knowing I was going to die.

  My senses returned. Deciding there and then, I resolved to use the blade as little as possible. Pulling on the glamour again, I was washed in smoke. Now I could sense that the armour and minstrel outfit were just empty vessels for my glamour to enforce.

  This was apparently a significant difference from the practices of the lost Realm of the Mystic East. The Mystic East was a fraught topic. Depending on the source, one of two things happened. Court scholars claimed that long ago, our realms traded pointers about the nature of cultivation, sharing our knowledge of glamour while seeking to understand their view of Qi.

  First-hand accounts told a different story. According to them, a woman named Zhang Jinghua came through a rift, beat up our sorry excuses for cultivators, and was so vexed by our total lack of skill that she imparted much of her knowledge just so we wouldn’t disappoint whoever found us next.

  Apparently, our ability to enforce armour was a trick she didn’t totally hate, so that got to stay.

  The court scholars insisted this was heresy, though they always struggled to explain how the Great Empire of Atlantis became the Lost Empire of Atlantis the very same year she appeared.

  Cultivator armour could be enforced with glamour. In doing so, a cultivator sacrificed some of their available reserves, but in return, benefitted from more protection than regular enforcement. There were numerous trade-offs, ranging from mobility to combat styles.

  Armour choice was a huge topic of discussion across Euross. Albion was obsessed with plate armour, which ate up large amounts of glamour but made its knights into tanks capable of dealing with the massive monsters that spawned there.

  My new armour was half-plate—far more than I was used to wearing.

  I began to cultivate. The bellows breathing pulled in glamour so quickly it made me light-headed. It was a method designed for those who struggled to absorb glamour easily. Now? My Hearth strained to contain the rushing energy. I began funnelling the excess into the armour.

  The glamour around me was dense—not almost liquid like the mirror pool, but soupy and rich.

  I had stumbled into the stuff of legends and danced right into its maw. If I was to survive long enough not to become a footnote, I needed to get my head screwed on straight. I folded my legs beneath me and began to think.

  I wasn’t much of a planner, though one might blink at that given my meticulous revenge plot. But that had been born of necessity.

  I found that focusing on my needs provided the best defence against loss. Wants bred disappointment, but needs were easier to manage.

  Rarely did I lose what I needed, and I rarely wanted for much.

  In fact, I hadn’t wanted anything beyond ‘escape.’ Did I need to cause maximum damage on the way out? Yes. Otherwise, my mind would have wandered into the madness of the Unseelie long ago.

  What did I need right now?

  Sensing its moment, my stomach grumbled.