When Leanna, infamous throughout the kingdom of Stalhaven as the Wrath of Winter's Dawn, first saw Penlyn Kipps, she ran into a tree.

Granted, the moss was at least twenty feet in the air, growing as it did on one of the sturdier branches of the aforementioned tree, but still. The Scourge of the Veil was not exactly prone to running face first into large, immobile objects.

Penlyn, on the other hand, had run into a number of trees in her time. Fallen out of quite a few of them as well.

“You all right down there?” Penlyn asked, shifting somewhat precariously on her branch to look down at the tall, intense-looking woman who had hit the trunk of the tree on which she had been lounging.

Dazedly, Leanna blinked up from where she had quite suddenly come to sprawl amongst the fallen autumn leaves in a pool of bloody-hued robes and a fan of dark hair. “Yes. I’m fine.”

“Come out of nowhere sometimes, don’t they? How many fingers am I holding up?” Penlyn asked.

“Um, none?”

Penlyn glanced down in surprise at her own hand, then snorted. “Right. You know how sometimes you just say things because it sounds like something you should say, but don’t fully think about why it sounds like you should say it? Happens to me all the time. But hey, if you told me how many fingers I wasn’t holding up just the same, then the way I see it, we’ve both done alright.”

Spirits below, how hard had Leanna hit her head?

“However, the fact that you haven’t really moved isn’t a great sign, either. You need some help getting up?”

“Definitely not,” Leanna said, her left eyebrow throbbing horrendously. If only she could figure out how to get her limbs to move again in order to prove it.

Penlyn nodded knowingly, her short, chestnut-colored waves bouncing against her browbone. “Yeah, I get it. Sometimes you forget how comfortable grass is until you’re laying right on it. I try to go roll around in a field of flowers at least once a fortnight, just to keep the feeling fresh.”

Leanna stared up at her incredulously, genuinely unsure whether or not she was attempting some kind of joke. “You seriously go to an empty field and roll around in the dirt by yourself once a fortnight?”

“Well,” Penlyn said with a small, playful smile, “hopefully not alone.” Then she winked.

Actually winked. The Wrath of Winter’s Dawn had not been winked at, let alone been a part of a conversation featuring innuendo, in…well, a somewhat embarrassingly long time. Leanna was horrified. She was something, anyway, considering how fluorescently pink her previously ghostly cheeks had suddenly turned. Finally, she was able to prop herself up on her hands, letting the pin-straight strands of her hair fall over her burning skin.

“Right. Well. I’ll just be going now.” If only she could figure out how to move her legs as well as her arms…

“Are you a sorcerer or something?” Penlyn asked, her head propped up on her hands as she sprawled on her stomach on the mossy branch. Her boot-clad feet bobbed casually in the air, somehow conveying an air of genuine and unmalicious curiosity. Leanna didn’t trust it for a second.

She scoffed. “Yeah, or something.”

Penlyn smirked. “You got a name, or something?”

“You don’t know my name?” This woman was either having a laugh or had been living under a rock for what Leanna guessed was about twenty five years of life. Everyone, everyone, knew her name. Again, not an ego thing. Just the facts.

Penlyn’s eyebrows scrunched in concern. “Oh, should I? Have we met before? I’m sorry, I’m so bad with names and faces. Much better with plants. And bugs. Anything that can photosynthesize or has a thorax I can handle, but people…”

Leanna shook her head. “No, we haven’t met before, I just…it’s…never mind.” She started to rise, then paused. “Wait. If you don’t know who I am, how did you guess that I’m a sorcerer?”

“You’ve just got the whole…” Penlyn waved a hand to indicate Leanna’s general aura, “look to you. You know, with all the broody energy and dark layers and such.”

Leanna attempted not to be offended and failed horrifically. “First of all, I am not broody. I do not brood. This is just my face. Second of all, it is unseasonably chilly, and I travel a lot. Light layers are practical.”

“So you’re not a magic-wielder then?”

Leanna opened her mouth, then shut it again. “That’s irrelevant. You can’t tell someone is a sorcerer just by looking at them.”

“Apparently, you can,” Penlyn said, fully grinning now. Leanna did not appreciate that grin, even if the golden afternoon sun was filtering through the forest canopy in a way that made the strange woman practically glow, and combined with that smattering of freckles across her brown skin and, spirits, those dimples—no, stop, Leanna told herself. Keep thinking that way and you’ll end up face-planting into another tree.

Then, from a distance, the distinct sounds of disgruntled shouts and boots crashing through undergrowth filtered through the foliage.

“Well, shit,” Leanna said. They’d found her. She attempted to surge to her feet, then grimaced and swayed from the pain radiating out from the left side of her face.

“Whoa there,” Penlyn said. “Maybe you should sit back down, you don’t look so great.”

“I’m fine,” Leanna grunted, squinting through the pain. She patted down all of the pockets hidden in her robes, making sure she hadn’t lost anything in her tussle with the tree. She had her bag of powders, her coins, some bread and cheese, a water flask, her pocket sized spell book. But where were her glasses?

The shouts were close enough now that she could almost make out the words.  She got down on her hands and knees, rummaging through the grass for her spectacles. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“You lost something there? Give me a second to climb down, I can help you look for—”

“No!” Leanna exclaimed. Chances were that the woman would land right on top of them and crack the lenses. It was impossible to find a decent eyeglass shop anywhere near this province, let alone one that wouldn’t laugh the Bone Mistress back out onto the street for asking to buy something so human as spectacles. “You stay right where you are.”

“Alright then, if you say so,” Penlyn said.

The shouts and sounds of crunching leaves and snapping branches drew ever closer.

“Hey, this might be a crazy question, but that angry mob heading toward us wouldn’t have anything to do with you, would it?” 

Leanna didn’t respond, still running her fingers through the grass.

“It’s not an accusation or anything,” Penlyn continued, “it’s just that the last time I checked I hadn’t inspired any angry mobs myself recently, and you were running through here in such a hurry before the whole tree incident, and you’re looking a bit stressed out, and also, I’m pretty sure they’re chanting something along the lines of ‘kill the Spirit Sorceress’. Or they could be saying ‘swill the nearest horse dress”, it’s not an incredibly clear chant, but I do think—”

“Found it!” Leanna said, raising her thankfully unscathed glasses into the air in triumph.

“I heard her, she’s over there!” shouted a voice from the woods, now dangerously close.

Cursing under her breath, Leanna scrambled to her feet. She shoved her glasses into one of her pockets and dug through another for her mugwort powder. Normally, the powder would be her last resort, but the angry mob was far too close for her liking, and her face throbbed at the thought of running, or getting accosted by a self-righteous man holding a pitchfork. She dug her fingers into the last few pinches of dried mugwort she had left at the bottom of her pouch. It wouldn’t get her far, but it was the best she could do right now.

On the hand not holding the powder, Leanna nudged one of her many rings to the knuckle of her index finger. The ring was inlaid with an amber-hued gemstone in the shape of a teardrop, the pointed end sticking out beyond the band. Leanna curled her finger and dragged the point across the fleshy part of her right hand below the thumb, drawing forth a small, gleaming pool of blood. She mixed the mugwort powder into the warm liquid on her palm, drawing symbols as she incantated under her breath.

“So, not to rush you or anything, but those guys are getting really close now, and they sound pretty peeved. Do you think we should—hey, is that blood?”

Leanna ignored the woman in the tree and focused on her incantation. One wrong syllable and she’d end up miles from where she meant to be, half-buried in an elderly farmer’s bucket of compost and being sniffed at by a deer. Not that she knew this from experience or anything.

The ground began to feel spongy beneath her feet, and the tips of her fingers tingled from the spell work.

“Okay, that’s it, I’m coming down there. You can’t just—oh, bugger.”

Then, several things happened very quickly.

The mob of angry villagers finally broke through the trees, hoisting pitchforks and torches even though it was a cloudless midafternoon, all red-faced with righteous anger and a dash of bloodlust. (It had been a few years since these particular villagers had had a good reason to get their mob together, and they thought they should really go for it, considering they might not get another opportunity for a while.)

The ground beneath Leanna's feet finally liquefied into the milky translucence of a medium-range portal, and she began to sink softly but quickly into it, like a finger through warm butter. 

At least, she would have, if not for the large, warm, and surprisingly soft object that landed directly on top of her with a quick gasp of "sorry!", sending them both tumbling through the portal.