“You never told me what happened with Aila.”

Lark gave a long-suffering sigh. “Can we not do this now?” he said. “Because right now doesn’t seem like the best time for this, if I’m honest.”

The pair scaled the walls of the fort to the second level, wedging their knives in the cracks and mortar between the rough stones. Arryn laughed as she hoisted herself up onto the wide stone ledge of the windowsill, crouching there and sheathing her knives at her belt. The window itself was closed, the shutters barred against entry or exit, but it didn’t concern her.

“Spoilsport,” she said as Lark hauled his lanky frame onto the ledge next to her. “What happened?”

“Uh…” Lark began, sheathing his knives. “We had a few drinks and afterward, uh, she kissed me.” He blushed, the tips of his ears turning bright pink.

Arryn’s eyebrows rose. “Really?”

“Don’t act so surprised.”

Arryn laughed. “What happened then?”

Lark cleared his throat. “Uh, you know, I don’t really remember.”

“You said something stupid again, didn’t you?”

Lark frowned, the freckles on his nose scrunching. Arryn only stared at him with her white eyebrows arched high, urging him to continue.

“Fucking fine. ‘Neat,’” Lark snapped. “I said ‘neat.’ Can we drop it now?”

Arryn snorted and Lark rolled his eyes. He lifted a hand to the latch over the shutters—locked from the inside—and his magic crackled against it. The shutters blew inward, splintering and sailing across the room, the paltry latch clattering broken to the floor. Once the window was clear, Arryn hopped inside, and Lark ducked his head to follow her, brushing dirt off his jacket.

They entered into a sort of office, clearly for a captain or general. Arryn and Lark crossed the room to the gigantic desk. The hallway outside was quiet, so they took their time rifling through the papers on the desk’s gleaming surface. There were shipping manifestos, accounts for the fort, and other documents stating the names and crimes of witches imprisoned there.

“Ah, found it,” Lark said. He held up a fat stack of papers. “The crown’s records on the Artifacts.”

“Perfect,” Arryn said, holding out a hand for them. He gave them over, and she gave them a quick once-over before she folded up the papers and stuffed them in a pocket. With their first objective accomplished, the pair opened the far door and checked the hallway.

Lark snapped his fingers and a small ball of flame sparked to life over his palm, brightening the empty stone hall with flickering orange light. It illuminated his fine, freckled face and coppery hair.

“To the left, down the stairs, and another left,” Lark said, reciting the directions that Sylvan’s spies procured for them.

Arryn tossed her white braid over her shoulder. She took out her trusty sword, twirling it in her hand. It was just a hilt until her touch called the blade forward. It shot out from the hilt, a curved piece of iridescent metal like a thin crescent moon, a sickle small and light enough to wield one-handed.

She heard the guards’ footsteps before they turned the corner. She ducked under the swing of one’s sword, spinning to slice her sickle across his gut. Her free hand went up, and the second guard sailed backward, dropping his sword to clutch at his throat as she pulled the air from his lungs.

Lark stepped up from behind her and threw the small dagger at his belt, made of the same iridescent metal as her sickle. It struck home between the guard’s eyes, and he slumped to the floor. Lark casually collected his knife, wiping the blood off on the guard’s livery. Arryn gave her sickle a hard flick, flinging blood onto the stone wall.

No more guards entered the halls as Arryn and Lark made their way down to the lower level, to the holding cell where their targets were kept. Where the upper level mostly consisted of offices and the like, the ground floor held a stable for the soldiers’ mounts and a courtyard where a gallows and stake stood for prisoner executions.

Sylvan’s witches certainly had come through for them. The place was virtually dead.

Arryn heard the faint murmur of voices down a hallway. They hurried to the large holding cell and found the group of six witches they were looking for.

There were four men and two women, some as young as Arryn and others as old as Sylvan. Besides the silver bars of the door and walls of the cell, all six witches also wore silver collars, like most of the witches in Ennore.

Mycha looked up, his eyes wide. His left eye was a pale hazel, the right black, his dark hair tied back in long, ropy coils. He stood and crossed to the silver bars keeping the witches enclosed.

“Lark, Arryn,” Mycha said. “What are you doing here?”

“What’s it look like?” Arryn asked as Lark knelt and took out his picks to work on the lock. “We’re rescuing you, you big dummy.”

Mycha grinned. He was tall, a collection of hard, sculpted angles and lean muscle. His skin was a soft walnut brown, bronzed from the sun and sprinkled with freckles.

Lark winced as the silver of the door brushed his bare skin. The lock clicked, but stubbornly didn’t open. He shook his red-haired head, and adjusted his picks to work more at it. Arryn stood behind him with her sickle aloft, watching the hallway.

Mycha pointed down the hall on her other side. “Arryn!” he snapped.

Three guards came thundering around the corner this time, alerted to Lark and Arryn’s presence. Arryn rolled her shoulders, giving the guards a smirk.

The first one came at her swinging an axe, and Arryn slid to her knees, arcing her sickle up under his reach to slice across his midsection. He yelled and fell, blood streaming down his front.

The other two stormed her wielding swords, but she sent a wave of her magic at them, sending them flying up into the ceiling. They crashed against the wood rafters and fell back to the floor. Their heads hit the stone with a sickening crack, and blood leaked from them.

Arryn sighed, bored already, and wiped her sickle clean on one of the guard’s tunics. Clearly these weren’t the men who had captured Mycha and the others. They couldn’t fight for shit, let alone capture six witches.

“Get over here and give me some light, you knife-happy little heathen,” Lark said, and Arryn summoned her magic forth—after flipping him her middle finger, of course.

A small ball of white light—like the summer bugs whose bodies blinked in the night—formed in her palm, and she held it up for Lark, illuminating the lock and the picks in his slender, pale hands.

Finally the lock gave a satisfying click and opened. Lark stood, hauling the door open with a whine of the hinges.

Mycha ushered everyone out, and Lark got to work on the witches’ collars. Mycha bent his head, moving his hair out of Lark’s way so he could get to the collar.

Everyone looked livelier when silversickness wasn’t weighing them down. Arryn knew what it felt like: the sheer emptiness, the energy that drained from the body and left the victim feeling debilitated and weakened. Depleting one’s well of magic left its user weary, but silversickness was far worse.

The silver collars clattered to the ground one by one, and Mycha gave the pile of them a hard kick for good measure, sending the collars flying. The witches visibly relaxed once the silver was not resting against their skin, though they rubbed at their necks like the metal still bit them.

An older woman, her hair streaked with gray, wrapped her arms around Arryn and Lark, her head resting between their shoulders. “Gods bless you both,” she said, her voice wobbly with tears. “Thank you.”

“Wait to thank us until we've gotten you all out of this shithole,” Arryn said as the woman released them. Arryn addressed all six witches. “Then Lark will take you home.”

The redhead peered at her. “You’re not coming back with us?”

Arryn shook her head and gave a small smirk. “I have my own orders,” she said. “Places to go, friends to see.” She patted the folded bundle of papers they’d stolen, tucked away in a pocket at her belt.

Lark nodded. “Alright then.” He gestured the six witches forward, and they gathered around him, their strength recovered a bit after their bout of silversickness. “Let’s get out of here.”