What I Hate Most

Stormglass reached Vantress before Queen Draxenne did.

It lay across the northern dark like a bruise: violet at the advancing edge, black behind, dense with mineral grit torn out of the Cinder March. The last evacuation wagons labored through the gate beneath her while she climbed the parapet. Wet ropes slapped stone. Wheels struck cracks that should have been repaired three seasons ago. On the road behind them, people ran with cloth bound over their mouths and one hand on whoever could not run as quickly.

Draxenne had brought twelve ceramic plates, four carts of powdered stone, and a channeling plan that could keep that road alive. At thirty-nine, she had learned not to arrive at a border dispute with only an argument.

Night-Sovereign Ombria stood at the central pylon with one bare hand spread upon its palm-worn surface.

Five brass pressure studs knocked beneath her fingers, each carrying the mechanical pulse of a different ward district. Ombria listened to all five, but gave active shadow to four: four thin planes rose beneath her boots, barely visible except where the lamps broke against their edges. The fifth stud carried pressure only until she chose to answer it. Her black coat streamed in the grit. Her face was composed, severe, and much too pale.

Forty-two years old, and still determined to spend herself as if the city had appointed her an inexhaustible resource.

“The Ninth Conduit is split,” Ombria said without looking around. “I am pulling the lattice inward.”

On the slate pressure map, a fresh white fracture crossed the border junction. The inward seal would keep the crowded inner streets behind layers of angled shadow. It would also strip the March road and the outer settlements bare.

“No,” Draxenne said.

Ombria’s smallest finger twitched as a southern district called. The nearest shadow plane flexed. “An unusually concise objection.”

“I save my ornament for listeners.” Draxenne laid one prepared plate over the conduit housing. Its clay surface was grooved for venting, its edges already dusted with mineral fuel. “The old spillway is empty. Give me the Ninth. You baffle the gale; I fuse the glass and drop it before it reaches either side.”

“Your heat passes below the inner market.”

“Contained heat.”

“A phrase beloved by people standing outside the container.”

Another stud struck Ombria’s palm. Her shoulders did not move, but the words came a fraction slower. Draxenne touched the back of Ombria’s wrist. Cold bit through her glove.

Ombria withdrew before the touch could become anything but evidence. “Do not make my body your argument.”

There it was: a fault line cleaner than the one on the slate. Draxenne could press it, or she could save the people choking on her road.

“Thirty breaths,” she said. “Whoever holds the conduit at the end commands it for this breach.”

At last, Ombria turned. She released one district plane long enough to face Draxenne fully, and darkness fell flat behind her. “A spoken yield, a spoken withdrawal, or loss of contact with the housing ends a claim. No cast enters a body. No strike touches a ward sheltering civilians.”

“Agreed.”

“The winner gains the Ninth Conduit for this breach. Nothing else. No office, no territory, no future audience, no touch.”

Draxenne smiled despite the storm crawling toward them. “You make victory sound dreary.”

Ombria put her free hand on the housing. “The first breath has begun.”

---

Draxenne locked her left hand around the lower lip of the housing and opened her right fist.

Blue-white cinders ran from the plate beneath her palm, thin as wire and hot enough to paint both women’s faces in hard light. She sent the stream for the conduit latch. Ombria folded her own shadow up between them. Flame struck the dark plane, compressed, and spat backward through the plate’s vents.

Draxenne turned her head before the flare took her eyes. Four breaths.

She dragged the stream sideways through grit lodged in the parapet seam. The cinders obeyed her attention, eating a bright path through mineral dust toward the housing’s western edge. Ombria changed the angle of her wrist. Her plane changed with it, shunting the heat toward open air.

She could have angled it into Draxenne’s ribs. She did not.

Draxenne could have let the stream lick across Ombria’s bare hand. She broke it around her fingers instead, a white fork close enough to raise steam from damp stone.

Ombria’s mouth curved by the smallest treacherous amount.

Eight breaths.

Draxenne drove a second stream through a ceramic groove. Ombria let one quiet district plane flatten into ordinary darkness, stepped onto the maintenance bridge, and drew a second contesting plane from the shadow of her moving body. She crossed the two like shears across Draxenne’s route, four planes active in all. The bridge shuddered beneath the approaching gale. Ombria’s dark silhouette held at its center, coat snapping, one hand shaping the planes while the other kept contact with the iron-rimmed housing.

Dark-queen nonsense, Draxenne thought. Appointed by a council, worked to numbness, answerable to half a million complaints, and still somehow composed like night had dressed itself for her.

Draxenne advanced.

Her first stream curled low. Her second climbed. Ombria constricted them between two shadow planes, stealing the open air cindercraft needed. Heat flashed back along the mineral path. Draxenne snapped her hands open, ending both streams before the ceramic burst.

The planes passed an inch from her throat as Ombria repositioned them. No contact. No claim beyond the conduit.

“Twelve,” Ombria said.

“You count beautifully.”

“You breathe loudly.”

“You have noticed.”

The provocation went unanswered. A pressure stud hammered beneath Ombria’s distant hand on the housing, and her gaze cut past Draxenne toward the eastern roofs. One plane turned grainy at its edge. Ombria stiffened it, pulling more heat from her own body.

Draxenne hated that precise, disciplined choice. Hated the five demands in one hand. Hated every ward that could reach into this woman and receive an answer, while Draxenne got a visit between council sessions, a duel between crises, one almost-kiss on a rain stair two years ago before a messenger had come pounding up it.

Sixteen breaths.

She drove her right palm against the parapet. Cinder flashed through three hairline cracks at once, not three streams but one divided path. Ombria caught two. The third fused the grit beneath her heel into slick glass. Draxenne kept her left hand fixed on the housing rim.

Ombria shifted exactly as Draxenne knew she would. Draxenne rose inside her guard, close enough that heat met cold between their faces. Ombria’s back stopped one handspan from the conduit housing. Her shadow pressed around Draxenne’s flame, neither able to close without violating the terms.

Twenty breaths.

Draxenne could smell rain on Ombria’s coat and the clean scorched-clay scent of her own gloves. Ombria looked at her mouth, then at the flame threaded between them.

Another district pulse struck.

“You know what I hate most? That I have to share you~.” Draxenne let the cinder brighten, a dangerous promise pointed safely into stone.

Ombria’s brows lifted. She was still crushing Draxenne’s hottest route between two planes, still keeping two other districts intact, still cold enough that her next breath shook. “Wait are we fighting or flirting because I’m getting mixed signals here.”

There were a dozen answers Draxenne might have given on an easier night. Each was polished, possessive, and useless.

The eastern stud struck again.

Draxenne cut her flame to a dull line and leaned back as far as her grip allowed. Ombria watched her, waiting perhaps for the joke, perhaps for proof that Draxenne could hear an uncertainty without turning it into permission.

Draxenne gave her neither pressure nor reassurance. She drove the dull cinder line into the bridge seam, then flared it against the western rim as if she meant to circle the housing.

Ombria blocked west.

The attack was a feint. Without releasing the housing, Draxenne snapped her right hand across and slapped it against the eastern ceramic plate.

The district pulse struck a third time.

Ombria chose.

Her housing hand tore free. The agreed rule ended her claim the instant her palm left iron. With that freed hand Ombria released the western contesting plane and used the freed capacity to raise a district plane toward the eastern roofs, while Draxenne’s safe feint ran over the empty edge of the housing. Draxenne closed both hands around the conduit rim.

“Twenty-nine,” Ombria said.

The eastern roofs settled on the pressure map.

“Thirty.”

Draxenne held the Ninth. Ombria stood exposed beside her, shadow stretched elsewhere, throat bare to any cruelty the rules forbade.

Draxenne opened her casting hand. The flame vanished. Residual heat hissed harmlessly through the plate vents.

“Mine for the breach,” she said.

Ombria’s gaze moved from Draxenne’s empty palm to her face. Whatever answer lived there, she kept it. “Then command it.”

---

For eleven breaths, Draxenne was right.

Ombria kept four costly planes active: two angled into baffles without contesting Draxenne’s grip, and two covering the districts still under load. The storm front struck the outer lattice. Violet-black dust plunged into the Ninth, compressed between Ombria’s baffles, and met Draxenne’s cinder in measured bursts. Each burst fused a cloud of razored grit into heavy black beads. They fell rattling into the empty spillway.

On the pressure map, the March road remained a steady gray line. The last wagons cleared the gate.

“You may say it,” Draxenne told her.

“The eastern baffle needs four degrees more pitch.”

“Not that.”

“Your second vent is narrowing.”

The old stone gave a thick internal knock.

Draxenne felt the wrongness through the housing: pressure returning from below instead of leaving. A buried crack opened across the spillway wall. The gale struck it, climbed, and began forcing Draxenne’s cooling beads toward the inner market.

Ombria had seen the shift half a breath earlier. “Drop your heat.”

“I can clear it.”

Draxenne opened a third stream. Her vision haloed white. The air thinned inside her chest as cindercraft consumed what her body could give it. She melted the first clot of stormglass, only to send it deeper into the outlet, where it hardened across the crack like mortar in the wrong wound.

Pressure doubled. The ceramic beneath her palms whined.

Brute force would seal the route completely. Then the trapped heat would flash back through the housing and burst into the street.

Her winning plan had become the weapon Ombria warned her about.

Draxenne closed all three streams. Darkness crashed back into her sight. She kept one hand on the housing because she had won it, because surrender tasted worse than blood, because queens did not release a wall while their people stood behind it.

Ombria could have invoked the failure. She could have taken the Ninth and sealed the city, leaving the outer road to the storm.

Instead she asked, “What do you need?”

No triumph. No rescue disguised as command. The choice remained Draxenne’s long enough to become a better one.

Draxenne lifted her hand from the housing. With the other, she pried the vented plate free and tucked it beneath her arm; it was warm, but no longer molten.

“Vents inside the channel,” she said. Without heat to sharpen her, the words came plain. “Three angled baffles. I can carry the eastern load through the ceramic. You would hold three planes, not four. Which two anchors can you give up?”

Ombria stared at her. Then another crack sounded below them.

“Come down,” she said. “We decide on the bridge.”

---

The storm reached the wall as they descended.

Grit shrieked across the stone. Ombria held four planes, turning one above the stair so stormglass streaked along its angled surface in luminous purple threads while the other three strained toward their anchors. The maintenance bridge dropped into the conduit throat, narrow, wet, and crowded with ceramic braces that Draxenne’s crews had fixed to the old masonry. Draxenne dropped the recovered housing plate atop the eleven waiting along the bridge wall. Below, the clogged spillway boiled with dust.

“I release road east,” Ombria said. Cold had shortened her words. “You take its pressure in the braces. I keep three.”

“And lower east?”

“It is open. To put its load into your brace cleanly, I must catch it first.”

“With a fifth plane.”

“For no more than three breaths.”

The plane above them rippled. Ombria’s fingers had gone gray at the tips.

Draxenne fastened both hands around a ceramic brace. Heat cracks opened across her skin beneath the gloves. “The parapet is empty.”

“The transfer may burn through your hands.”

“They are my hands.”

“An argument you found objectionable when applied to mine.”

Draxenne nearly ordered her. The old impulse rose hot and regal: give it to me, let me decide, stop making me watch you die by fractions. Command would be quicker. It would also prove Ombria right to resist.

She swallowed smoke and pride together. “Which two anchors can you live without?”

Ombria studied her grip, her breathing, the open vents behind her. “Lower east and road east. I catch the first, then taper both. The remaining three become baffles. You hold two streams, no more. If either of us says stop, I turn the three inward and you vent into the spillway.”

“And if the spillway closes?”

“We stop anyway and get off the bridge.”

It would cost both sides of the wall. It was still a real exit.

“Accepted,” Draxenne said.

Ombria lifted her smallest finger. A fifth plane sprang across the unshielded lower-eastern gap and caught its loose pressure. Cold stripped the composure from her face.

On the first breath, Ombria bent that emergency plane toward the first ceramic brace.

On the second, Draxenne fed a narrow cinder stream through the prepared brace. Ceramic glowed red, softened, and locked against the masonry. Ombria released the fifth plane. It became ordinary shadow, and the physical load hit Draxenne’s brace. Her shoulder slammed into stone.

On the third, Ombria released the road plane. It became shadow and nothing more. Draxenne ignited the second brace.

The bridge lurched. Her boot skidded to its outer edge.

The fifth plane had existed for two breaths. Even so, Ombria swayed before she reached for Draxenne, then stopped rather than take either of her casting hands. “Can you hold?”

Draxenne’s first instinct was to make the flame broad enough to blind the night.

Instead she made it smaller.

The braces cooled from white to a sustainable red. Her muscles still shook, but the mineral paths held. “Yes. Three planes. Now.”

Ombria stepped to the bridge rail. With one hand braced on basalt and the other cutting exact positions through the darkness, she changed the angles of her three remaining planes and anchored them across the broken channel. Not a wall. A descending series of blades turned sideways, each with a deliberate gap.

“First vent,” Ombria said.

Draxenne pulsed heat through it. A dense ribbon of dust whitened, rounded, fell.

“Second.”

The next pulse staggered Draxenne. Ombria widened the gap before the flame could choke. She did not take the work away. She changed only what was hers to change.

Stormglass fell around them in hot black beads, bouncing off the bridge and clicking into the spillway. Ombria advanced one step. Draxenne followed, dragging the load along the braces through molten seams.

They moved into the breach together.

There was no elegance left for flirting. Ombria’s instructions broke into nouns. “Upper gap. Wait. Now.”

Draxenne had no breath for wit. “Wider.”

“Too much draws gale.”

“I need air.”

Ombria widened it.

Draxenne drank one harsh breath and cast. Her cinder changed the storm one handful at a time: knife dust to liquid, liquid to bead, bead to weight. Ombria made the paths that let each change happen without killing them. When numbness made Ombria’s third finger fail to lift, Draxenne called the timing. When the tremor in Draxenne’s arms sent her flame high, Ombria vented the pressure into bare stone.

The cracked section came into reach.

A slab above the outlet shifted.

Draxenne saw the load path before it fell: fractured edge, failing brace, the last open spillway directly beneath. If the slab closed that mouth, the conduit would burst toward both the market and the March road.

Her twelve prepared plates were stacked along the bridge wall. Enough fired ceramic to replace the failed brace, if she melted every one into the gap. The Cinder March would have no fitted plates for its own defenses when the next front came.

Ombria saw her look. “I can take the east anchors back.”

Her voice dragged with cold. A fourth plane would make her slower; a fifth might stop her heart. She offered it anyway, not as a sovereign issuing terms, but as a woman willing to carry the cost Draxenne had not yet chosen.

“No,” Draxenne said. “Keep the vents open.”

She tore the first plate from the stack and drove cinder through it. The ceramic slumped into the fracture, bright as a piece of fallen noon. A second plate followed, then a third. Each one drank water and oxygen from her body. Each one hardened into an ugly, load-bearing mass beneath the slab.

Ombria held three planes. She did not reach for a fourth.

Draxenne melted the last plate.

The slab dropped.

The new brace caught it.

All the trapped pressure found Ombria’s three gaps at once. Her planes turned grainy, edges shivering under the load.

“Final pulse,” Draxenne said.

Ombria’s hands were nearly still. “On you.”

Draxenne set both feet against the bridge lip. She opened two streams and no more. Ombria angled. Draxenne fired.

Blue-white cinder crossed load-bearing shadow. The stormglass front folded through the vents, fused, and came down in a black glittering fall that filled the spillway without sealing it. The last of the gale went over the wall as ordinary wind.

For one breath, neither woman moved.

Then Ombria lowered her first plane through a three-count. Draxenne opened her casting hands and let the braces cool. Ombria lowered the second, then the third. Shadow became shadow. Ceramic ceased to glow. The pylons held only the harmless residue of their charge.

The ward was inert.

The road and the market remained standing.

Draxenne sat down hard on the bridge because remaining upright had become a vanity she could no longer finance.

Ombria sat beside her, shoulder against shoulder, and laughed once without grace.

---

Before dawn, they occupied a ward room that smelled of soot, wet wool, and boiled water.

Unnamed crews moved beyond the open door, shoveling cooling beads from the channels. Each scrape proved another route remained open. Draxenne’s fingers were wrapped in clean linen. Ombria held a steaming cup between both palms, though she seemed to take warmth more readily from the shared cloak over their shoulders.

The pressure map lay across their knees.

“One moon cycle,” Draxenne said. “I take the two eastern stations. My crews maintain them; my kilns replace the plates. You keep the other three anchors and your office.”

“Your veto remains yours,” Ombria said. “Mine remains mine. Either may stop unsafe casting at once; either may end the compact after a safe transfer.”

Ombria marked the terms in chalk at the map’s margin. Her handwriting was usually architectural. Tonight it leaned drunkenly downhill.

Ombria turned the chalk to the weekly duty slate and drew two small blocks. “These hours are private. The ward office does not summon me except for immediate danger to life.”

Draxenne looked at the blocks. “Private for whom?”

Ombria gave her a cold, level glance over the cup. The effect was impaired by the cloak, which had slipped over one eyebrow. “Administration first.”

“Cruel woman.”

“You did fight me for my conduit.”

“And won.”

“Then clogged it.”

Draxenne left the last barb unanswered and touched the chalk marks.

“What I said on the bridge was true,” she said. “But I shaped it like a claim on you.”

“You did.”

“I don’t hate the city for needing you, or you for answering.” Draxenne turned one bandaged palm upward between them. “I hate that by the time I reach you, you can’t feel my hand. I want time you choose.”

Ombria set down the cup. “Vantress cannot grant me to you. Your victory cannot. Your crown cannot.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Draxenne turned beneath the cloak until she faced Ombria fully.

“May I court you?”

Ombria’s expression changed by degrees. Weariness remained, along with the aggravating precision with which she inspected any proposal likely to affect her city.

“Yes,” she said. “I would like that.”

Draxenne let out the breath she had been rationing. “May I kiss you now?”

“Yes.”

Ombria closed the distance.

Her mouth was warmer than her hands and less careful than her speech. Draxenne tasted boiled water, smoke, and the sharp little sound Ombria made when Draxenne touched her jaw.

A brass stud knocked beneath the pressure map.

The eastern ward.

Ombria began to reach from habit. Draxenne’s bandaged palm was already waiting on the contact point. The signal traveled into her hand: weight, direction. She took it. Ombria watched the signal settle beneath Draxenne’s palm and did not reach again.

Outside, cooling stormglass clicked beneath the first gray light. Ombria used her free hand to pull Draxenne closer.