Excerpt

Towering trees sped by in a green-and-black blur, whipping the citrus-and-pine Doug fir scent through the air, smacking Jenny's uncovered cheeks and whipping errant strands of fiery hair out from beneath the leather helmet firmly strapped beneath her chin. A red-winged blackbird flashed past her head.

The late September sun warmed the heavy pig hide on Jenny's back. The sumac-red coat was buckled close, to keep air from catching leather and creating a sail. Jenny's matching leather trousers were tight over the muscular thighs that cradled the bike.

The vibration brought Anandita's calm, beautiful face to mind. Not that Jenny had ever held the woman between her thighs. Yet. She hadn't even kissed those ripe, dark plum lips, unless her increasingly horny dreams counted.

But a Knight could always hope, right? Women were supposed to love sword-wielding brutes, but so far, Anandita had gently rebuffed Jenny's tentative advances enough times she'd had to back off or feel like a shit.

She already felt like a shit. But damn, Anandita was worth a little hope. Unless it turned out she actually wasn't into women that way. But Jenny had caught enough looks that said otherwise. Wistful looks. Heated looks. Glances that made Jenny hot beneath her leathers.

In your dreams, asshole.

Jenny grinned, then sputtered and spat as a bug hit her teeth. She'd forgotten to tie a kerchief around her face after the last rest break. That'd teach her.

She grinned again, closed-lipped this time. At forty-five klicks an hour, life was good. The old hog was just a little faster than her horse and twice as fun when there were roads to be found. Plus, bikes required less fuel to run than a horse.

Only trouble was, the PR tarmac was cracked—like most Pre-Reckoning artifacts—causing the hard rubber tires to judder and bounce, jarring all the way up Jenny's spine. The Steel Clan Knights had been riding hard for three hours now, heading back from a barely successful scrap run. They'd only gathered enough to fill two of the four bike trailers taking up the rear of the fifteen-hog convoy.

Barely successful was okay. Scrap was scrap, and always useful in the forge and machine shops. They'd only had to fight off one small band of tinker-scrappers. They'd busted a few heads and run them off, but nobody had died.

Jenny had a scab on one knuckle, and Berto had a cut over his right eye, but any run where no one got killed was a good one.

So, the scrap run had gone fine, but the real purpose of the trip was a scouting mission, and that? Well, there was nothing major to report yet. And while Jenny hoped it stayed that way so they could get their tired asses back to Go No More, the Knights had been charged by the council to find out what the fracked earth was messing with the area.

Because something was. And it wasn't the usual would-be warlords skirmishing for power due west of their valley. It wasn't trouble with the crops. It wasn't the seep of old nuclear waste into groundwater caused by an overabundance of rains on hard ground in the desert areas east of the mountains. It wasn't the aftermath of fracking that had cracked the earth and caused oil spillage on otherwise plantable or grazable land.

It wasn't, thank all the Gods and Goddesses and any nature spirits that were listening, a strange sickness sweeping across the land.

All of those things were possibilities still, even fifty years Post-Reckoning, but every mage said something else was brewing. Something magic. Jenny had to trust them on that one. Magic wasn't her thing.

The dragoons purred past an old, overgrown off-ramp that used to lead to what had likely been a thriving small town, now gone to green. An occasional rectangular structure could be seen poking through tangles of English ivy and half a dozen varieties of trees and clambering vines. Those towns had been picked over early on, and were now so dense with foliage it was barely worth hacking through for what was left. Let the animals and birds have at it. And the weird faery creatures that were native to this land.

The elves of Go No More sniffed something bad in the air, and the trolls concurred, but the township's two mages couldn't figure out what it was. Council member Rafiq and Abyad the djinn insisted it didn't smell like djinn magic—air or fire—and the river nagas weren't talking about whatever it was. Like all serpents—magical or not—the nagas didn't seem to like sharing intel. Anandita also mentioned the large, half-divine serpents had been staying further away than usual, even. Jenny couldn't parse whether that was worrisome or not.

So the Knights had ranged out to sniff the air themselves, the way Pig Boy's sounder sniffed out truffles after the first rains.

Bocan passed her and circled one huge, burgundy-leather clad arm in the air. His gloved fingers pointed to an ancient cutaway ahead. The pale blue halbtroll had good eyes beneath his tinted goggles. Must've come from his human mother, because trolls were notoriously fuzzy eyed by day. The cutaway was half buried in hemlock and Jenny barely saw it herself.

She circled her own arm to alert the rest of the dragoons, pointed, and then, fist closed, lowered her arm to signal a stop.

Fifteen hogs peeled off the battered road, rumbling to a stop in the vegetation-clogged, cracked area that had been a useful road itself, back in the PR once-upon-a-time. She pulled up behind Bocan's massive hog. He'd already switched off, which meant whatever it was needed more than a short conference. Jenny hit her own switch and the others followed suit. One by one, the noise of engines cut out, leaving behind the temporary silence of a forest whose creatures were still assessing possible threat.

Jenny pulled a soft hemp kerchief from her rear pocket and wiped the sweat and bugs from her face. Slowly, birdsong filtered back through the trees. Flickers and chickadees, sounded like, and in the distance, the scream of a hunting hawk.

Tegan approached, brown pigskin-covered helmet cradled in one whip-thin, strong-as-fuck arm. Where Jenny was big-breasted and broad-shouldered, and pale as the moon where she wasn't sunburned, Tegan was wiry, small-breasted, and tightly muscled, with skin as dark as the dense forest ahead. The slippery-gendered Tegan wore per hair short, segmented into squares topped by small, coiled knots, and per buckled leathers were a slightly browner sumac red than Jenny's. Tegan had already whipped off the kerchief per wore between helm and hair, and wiped per face with it. Per helm was painted with a badass pattern Jenny envied. When the Knights next had a quiet moment, she'd have to hunt up a township artist to paint her own.

Every member of the Knights—man, woman, or person—wore the same range of colors. Their leathers were variegated shades of sumac-dyed red, and the backs of their jackets were branded with the Steel Clan's wheel and wings. But each rider decorated the leathers in different ways. Brass rings looped through epaulets on Tegan's shoulders, clinking softly together as the per stalked Jenny's way.

One of Tegan's three bladed kpingas was in per other hand, ready for throwing. A small scar sliced through per right eyebrow. The scar gave the Knight a permanent questioning air, which was funny, given that Tegan was an act-first, question-later per.

Tegan should have been a mage, but wanted nothing more than to be a Knight. Per ability to wield and shape magical energy was brutally strong. Stronger than Tegan's best throwing arm.

Jenny? While her six senses were all in pretty good working order, she had zero magic in this Post-Reckoning world where various forms of magic flowed in fits and starts.

All Jenny had was her intuition, and the tools and insignia that marked her as part of the Steel Clan. Magic be damned, all three were her inheritance and her pride.

Jenny's short sword remained firmly in its sheath on the gleaming, bug-spattered hog, though she grabbed the buckler hooked onto the hilt. The small shield worked equally well for smashing through thick vegetation, crushing an attacker's face, or protecting her tender bits from pointy things, whether animal, vegetable, or human.

She carried the buckler always, with few exceptions, and then mostly around Go No More. No buckler meant that Jenny was at home. On the road? She dropped it to eat or shit, and sometimes to fuck. If you were lucky.

All the Steel Clan riders were armed in one fashion or another. Each Knight had a favorite skirmishing or hunting tool strapped to their machines—ranging from short sword, to halberd, to axe, and machete—and every person in the township was trained in rudimentary polearm and bow. Children learned to use slingshots as soon as they could hold a steady arm, and trained in bow as young as six winters. Go No More wouldn't survive otherwise.

As idyllic as life tucked among the verdant mountains and snow-capped volcanoes could seem, the peoples of Go No More weren't the only beings in the area. There were men and beasts outside the township range, all struggling to survive. Winters were cold. Avalanches, bandits, wolves, fever, and condors were equally dangerous if timing was poor, or ill luck decided to descend.

And then yeah, there was magic. Not the ordinary small charms or spells. Not the magic most people had these days: special knacks, energy shaping, or simply the ability to be in the right place at the right time. No.

There was also old magic. Elven magic. Drake magic. Djinni magic. Magic that—up until the Reckoning—hadn't been seen in ten thousand years, except in legends. There were sudden flares of power that rocked the hills. Temporary portals that opened with no warning but a shimmering change in the air.

And further off, permanent portals leading to the old places. Places like Underhill.

More than one child had been lost to the temporary portals, at least they thought so, including Jenny's closest friend. Right around their change, it was, during the shift of body and mind that marked a child of an age for apprenticeship and testing. Maura had just up and disappeared.

Over a decade of years gone, and Jenny never forgot her. Right before Maura had disappeared, they'd shared a first kiss. Jenny could still imagine it. Imagine the way Maura's eyes had closed, right before her thin, pale lips had tentatively touched Jenny's own….

Jenny shook off the memory and scanned the woods behind the cutaway for the telltale shimmering of portal magic that even her magic-blocked eyes could generally see. There was nothing but the thick lace of hemlock spruce choking the spaces beneath the towering, ragged-angel shapes of the Douglas firs.

She caught a flash of russet underwing as a flicker swooped by. Its knocking started up fifty paces into the thick trees. The hunt for food was ever present. Jenny's own stomach rumbled in reply.

"Why'd we stop?" Tegan asked, then tilted up per chin to catch a stream of water from a deerskin bag.

Jenny looked up at Bocan. In the relative gloom at the forest's edge, he'd shoved his goggles onto the bald dome of his head. Two and a half meters tall, and solid as a rock with fat and muscle, his meaty blue fist was closed around the amulet every Knight wore somewhere on their person. His, like Jenny's, was strung on a thong around his trunk of a neck. He walked deeper into the woods, sniffing the air with a blunt nose, black eyes crinkled around the edges—with worry or thought, Jenny couldn't tell.

Jenny and Tegan both sniffed, too, then exchanged a look. Something was off, but who knew what? Jenny shrugged. All she smelled was the forest, warm vegetable oil from the bikes, and Knights who'd been in their leathers too long on the road. She gestured for the apprentice scout, Litha, to scope out the forest to the east. The girl was skinny, with shorn-off blond hair and square features. She was kind of intense.

Their main scout, Psych, was just ahead, where this old bit of road met the wild. Crouched between two hemlocks and a towering Douglas fir, the exposed skin of his hands, neck, and face were so filled with blue tattoos he might have been Bocan's brother, except for his scrawny size.

"Smells like bear shit," Psych said. "And something else I can't quite trace."

The scout smacked his tongue against his lips. "It tastes like some sort of magic, but I'm not sure."

"It is magic," Bocan rumbled. His voice sounded like his bike, deep bass and slightly gravelly, as if it needed a tune-up. "That's why I called a stop. Damn near smacked me in the back of the head."

Jenny touched her own amulet, but didn't feel a thing. "Shouldn't our amulets respond, then?"

Bocan gave her a funny look, and so did Tegan and, from two yards away, Psych.

"They are," Tegan finally said. "You can't feel that? I mean, I didn't notice it while the bikes were rumbling, but here on the edge of the forest?"

Tegan shrugged, as if what per felt was obvious.

Jenny ran her fingers over the knot of metal that was supposed to keep everyone in the Clan protected. The amulet was warm, but that was likely from her skin. She never understood how the damn things were supposed to work. Every once in a while she thought she felt something, but mostly, the metal was inert, like today. Mage and Jenny's sometime lover, Aphrodite, had said something about force fields and early warning systems, but to Jenny, the amulets were pretty hunks of metal, and not as useful as her sword or bike.

It was moments like these her lack of magic rankled. Why the fuck couldn't she feel anything? Way to lose the Clan's trust, right? She was such a fucking oaf.

The thoughts pinged through her head, like the sound of metal on a cooling engine.

Swallowing down her irritation, she asked the necessary question.

"What does the magic feel like?" she asked.

"Nasty," Tegan spat out. "The amulet's buzzing like a hornet's nest. Feels like tiny sharp needles rasping at my skin."

Jenny huffed out a short, irritated breath, then forced herself into a long inhalation. Dropping into the warrior's meditation she'd learned at her mother's knee, she focused on centering herself. Amulet still clasped inside her fingers, she slowed her breathing down. In through the nose. Pause. Out through the mouth. Pause. Her attention dropped like a stone, seeking out the stillness every warrior carried into battle and masters of every craft used before each fashioning.

Smelling the goodness of rich loam, ten layers' deep with needles, cones, leaves, and droppings, smelling the citrusy pine of the firs and the fresh spruce of the hemlock, Jenny reached out with her senses. She might not have magic, but she had training. Her awareness ranged forth like her bonded faery fox, Flex, who ran the woods of Go No More.

She felt forest and possibly an old, abandoned portal. She felt bear and wolf, flicker and raven.

Turning her consciousness back to the cast metal beneath her fingertips, she breathed in, and out again.

And felt nothing but hard metal.