The metal snaps into shape, Mended around the neck of a thrall, and bearing the mark of one of a thousand petty farmers from the outlying countryside. This is not countryside; this is a city as large as Kintargo, but the background chatter is in something like Skald, not Taldane, and snow flurries blow outside the wizard shop. She knows the city's name - Kalsgard - but she knows it as a fact learned out of a book, and a word overheard from her captors. Even that level of familiarity is taken from her when she leaves the city.
The master of her house takes no particular notice of her - but the second son, eager for glory and full of ideas to improve his raiding party, notices the way she tells stories to the child she says is her daughter, who she has, through will or luck or mercy, not yet been separated from. He sees the latent talent in her, and sees the means by which to control it.
The raiders cut a bloody streak across the land two years in a row, emboldened by the magic that now surges from the thrall's poetry. She's the only woman among them. She learns to weave lullaby cantrips a dozen different ways, when they ask her to sing in the evenings, in a sometimes vain attempt to stave off giving them anything else.
The third year, the group decides to crusade at the Worldwound instead - not for the sake of their immortal souls, but for the sake of greater glory.
The metal is shock-cold against her skin, dripping with blood. She struggles to remain conscious with both a head injury and a chest wound that ought to be fatal, unable to remember how she got here. Soldiers carry her into a fortified city on a stretcher. A healer casts what looks like Heal, when lesser magic fails, but even that doesn't settle the matter; the wound is powerfully cursed, and remains after they let her go. She's still thinking about how to find her master when the horde of demons descends upon the city, Deskari and his massive locusts nearly blotting out the sun. She tries to run, but the ground opens up beneath her, and she finds herself buried alive.
But she is alive, and she picks herself up, in the darkness of the crack in the earth. There are others here, and she pries the rocks off of them. The path back is hard - they almost die several times, along the way - but they make it, in the end, back to the surface, where she is promptly stabbed almost to death by demons once again.
When she wakes in the newly fortified tavern, recovering from a new set of nearly-fatal wounds, she realizes for the first time that she doesn't know whether she is free. She hides the metal under a rag she pretends is a scarf, suddenly embarrassed at the confusion and then pity in the eyes of the Mendevians. She helps Irabeth defend the city because she wants to. Because she feels she can, and it seems like the thing to do. The people she saved from the crack in the earth volunteer to go with her, and she realizes that she doesn't mind fighting beside them so much.
She spends two days going on more raids than she did in two years, stealing souls from the jaws of death instead of valuables from honest farmers. Children. Clerics. Nobles. Soldiers. Casters. Thieves. Beggars. The Storyteller himself, who does not seem to know his own power.
If she dies in Kenabres, she thinks, the saga writers would think it a good death.
The metal still rests around her neck, but both it and its meaning are nearly forgotten.
Her party - adventurers, now, as they were not at the beginning of the week - stand beside her, their backs to a massive broken crystal, the artifact that they came here in an attempt to retake. They are afraid, desperate, and obviously outmatched, half of them standing their ground only because there is nowhere they can possibly run.
A lilitu and far too many lesser demons stand before them, laughing. "So even Iomedae will resort to dirty tricks when you have her cornered. Don't celebrate yet, mortal. There's no one to hide you from me now. Look, you're already wounded. I'll have no trouble finishing you off now."
The cursed wound does open, spilling blood across her clothes. Somehow, though, she feels stronger for it, and in a moment the wound closes up as if it never were. Indescribable power courses through her, power foreign to any but the gods. A burst of energy surges outward from her, scorching the inside of her collar with not-quite-fire.
"Your goddess sent you to die," says the lilitu, unmoved. "You think that's a victory? All you've done is postponed the deaths of all the other mortals, and not even for very long. But your wait for death is over! You won't see what I'm going to do to your little friends, because I'm going to kill you right now."
But she attacks first, crying out the Fourth Act Of Iomedae in poetic form. The sword in her hand shines, so radiant it is almost blinding, and comes down on the nearest demon with far more force than any ordinary human ought to be able to bring to bear. Her companions stand their ground alongside her, like the grievously injured knights in the poem, all of them attacking with far more power than any of them should be capable of. In perhaps half a minute - not more - every demon but the lilitu has fallen, while the adventurers remain nearly unscathed.
The lilitu's voice is outright panicked. "How are you doing that? Where is your power coming from - "
The metal hides behind a new red scarf, a welcome gift from Anevia. Irabeth comes to escort her to Queen Galfrey's review of the troops. The queen has invited her, she believes, to serve as a badly needed symbol. She doesn't mind being a symbol, if it makes the Worldwound forces stronger.
The queen gives a speech before rows of crusaders that fall slightly out of line at the prospect of catching a glimpse of that symbol. Today, says the queen, is a day of sorrow and pride - sorrow for our dead comrades, and pride that we held Kenabres against Deskari's attack. A necessary speech, Korva thinks, but an empty one. She assumes it will contain no new information, but then -
"I, Queen Galfrey of Mendev, declare this day the first day of the Fifth Crusade! And I am glad to introduce the one who will lead the attack on the forces of the Abyss, the hero of Kenabres, Knight-Commander of the Fifth Crusade! Your leader, until victory or death!"
A deafening cheer goes up from the crowd, and for a moment she can't breathe. She wants to stop them, to tell them no, to say she has a daughter in bondage in the Thanelands, that she was dragged across the icy fields and then fell into a hole, to say that she was only ever in Mendev by the threat of the lash and of action against her daughter. She wants to run away, to scan the wall of troops around her for a thin point where she might be able to slip through. She wants to cry. But the queen has made the appointment impossible to refuse, by giving it to her without warning during a speech that brought hope to aching hearts.
"I'll give you some time to look around the camp," says Queen Galfrey, and she realizes belatedly that the queen has started talking to her directly while she couldn't hear. "And then I shall expect your presence at headquarters."
She suddenly understands the shape of her position. In a moment, the scattered pieces of her fall back into a familiar shape.
She nods. She resolves the question of whether she is free.
The metal sits on a leather cushion, held away from the thrall's neck, as a dwarven smith with a symbol of Torag on his breastplate gathers his tools together.
"You know," says the dwarf, "I asked you during the attack whether you wanted this thing off, and you said your master wouldn't be too pleased if he found you again without it."
"That was then," she says. "I have a new master now."
The metal snaps apart, and remembers no more.
