From dreams of ghostly music guiding me through dances long ago forgotten, I awoke to the familiar rapport of gunfire. I sat bolt upright in bed, my heart hammering in my throat and my eyes wildly seeking out the source of the sound. It took only a few more seconds for the gunfire to repeat itself, and I realized then that it was muffled by much distance.

I tried to convince myself that everything was fine, and that I could go back to sleep, but my body wouldn't settle. Eventually I threw my legs over the side of the bed and pulled on a dressing gown over my nightclothes.

The floorboards were cold as I walked down the hall and stairs. At the bottom, two silhouettes of midnight blue stood against the backdrop of foggy streetlamps through the open front door. Their backs were to me, and they faced into the street, so they did not know my presence until one of the stairs creaked under my weight.

Hannabella turned first, her face moving from shadows to light. An expression of anxiety lingered on her features, but when she saw me standing on the stairs she quickly replaced it with one of neutrality. "You should go back to bed, Nadia," she whispered. "Everything's fine. They're far away."

Martin still stared out the door, and something in the rigid way his shoulder sat or the pure silence that filled the gaps between the gunshots drew me down the rest of the stairs. Hannabella walked forward, putting out her arms to try and steer me into another room, but I brushed by her and stepped onto the front stoop.

The winter air had not yet left the nights of Flauns, and ice filled the air. The sky was still clear and thin, a deep blue color, with stars dimmed by the city lights. No one filled the roads or walked on the sidewalks, yet there was a sense of many eyes watching the same thing. I craned my neck to the left and right, and saw families huddled on doorsteps, dressed in nightgowns and wrapped in blankets, staring with grim mouths and knitted brows at a spot on the horizon.

I turned my attention to the skies far to the south. Above the shadows of trees, a dirty smear of orange and brown lit the sky. It pulsed, spreading slowly, slowly, in the sky and obscuring the stars from view. It was too far away to smell ashes, but my mind had no difficulty supplying the memories of that stench that haunted me through the years.

"What is it?" I choked out.

A small silence stretched between my question and Martin's answer. "Prest."

My eyes stayed fixed on the pulsing light, but I heard the catch in Martin's voice. He was scared.

My breath shook out of my lungs, and I laid a hand on the railing of the stoop to steady myself. "I don't understand. The fighting was in Rumonin."

"They're still connected by the railways," Martin said. "All the Vigilant needed to do was bash through the lines and gain access. The destruction afterwards comes easily to them."

"So they're not waning?" My eyes stung and I felt a pressure in my chest. "The Vigilant Men are still threatening everyone? They'll be able to rise again. It's what they always do-"

Hannabella cut me off by wrapping her arm around my shoulders. "Yufra is between us and Prest, darling. It's a small city, but even if the Vigilant are able to break through the Prest, Lenostkaya, and Flaunsian troops that will be converging there, they'll have to deal with Yufra's militia." She patted me. "We're perfectly safe."

She nudged me back through the door and across to the sitting room, but as we turned to go I saw the ashen gray of Martin's face and the way his hands gripped tightly at his sides. Whether or not Hannabella truly believed that Flauns would remain safe, at least Martin saw the horror in the glowing orange smear that besmirched the midnight sky. Though his wife had been the one to experience the war in Rumonin, he recognized how easily a city could fall to the passions of liberty.

Hannabella sat me on the divan and bustled around the room trying to get it comfortable. She stoked up the fire again and lit a few candles. She draped a blanket around my shoulders and promised that we would sit up the night together and read and play cards. It was an attempt to keep my mind from the gunshots that still echoed across the flat fields that separated Flauns from Yufra and Prest.

"I'll get us some tea," she said, "and then we can all pretend that it's the summer solstice and we're staying up to meet the day."

She left the room, and I caught a glimpse of her resting her hands on Martin's shoulders at the front door. I couldn't hear what they said, but her face was worried and he looked defeated. When they finally came back indoors and shut the door, and Hannabella went to the kitchens for the tea, and Martin started toward the sitting room, I knew that no one could say Flauns was perfectly safe from the Vigilant. Hannabella may want to pretend it was summer solstice, where all the children stayed awake until the first rays of light in order to welcome in the long days and the green plants, but I saw only the winter solstice in that glowing orange fire. A night meant to herald snows and bottomless nights and harshness that killed.

We were not safe. No matter what the queen promised, no matter how many soldiers she trained, the people were capable of filling their hearts with ice and envy. The Vigilant were all around us. It just depended on if they were awakened to the passions of freedom and war.