First day back on the job, the day after the outlaws regained control of the castle and Tristan deposed Mordred. Cal pulled her hair out of her ponytail as she dragged herself up the front steps, running her hand through it. It had grown during her time in camp, surpassing its former mid-length descriptor and now settling firmly into the realm of long hair. The colour clashed with her gold-trimmed red shirt: the one she’d worn as part of her guard uniform under Arthur’s reign. It was one of the first things Cal had dug out from amongst her old things when she’d found her bunk last night. Aside from longer hair and her missing Alliance badge, which was burning a hole in her pocket instead of on her chest, it was as though she hadn’t changed. As though Mordred had never happened.

Work took her mind off the blue uniforms everyone else still wore. Cal had left early that morning to patrol the beach and returned a few hours later with a few thousand refugees in tow. She’d spent most of the rest of the day helping organise them, escorting some off to Laketon and Oliford and then returning to pitch tents on the castle grounds for the rest. Lunch had been forgotten. Dinner was a half-remembered bite of something hand-held which a colleague had passed her. The sun had set before Cal admitted defeat, remembered her empty stomach and headed back into the castle to see what leftovers the kitchen had.

She never made it to the kitchen. A bookish character pushed open a door to her left as she passed and called her name, gesturing inside.

“King wants to see you,” he said, neutral tone.

Grimly abandoning her quest for a sandwich, Cal turned and followed him.


These corridors were well-travelled, even if Cal hadn’t run them for a few months. Her feet knew the way, skidding to a halt outside the relevant door. She banged on it unceremoniously with the side of her fist, too amped up for subtlety. Buddy was probably electrocuting her brain: his thoughts had been bolting through it for the last few minutes, each one tingling.

She was bouncing on the balls of her feet by the time Flynn opened the door. Cal threw her arms around him in a brief hug, then let him go and punched him on the shoulder, then slipped past him into his apartment. It was agreeably familiar, right down to the warm smell of fresh bread drifting in from the kitchen. Bread was one of the few foods Shaman shared with Xara; it always reminded Cal of home. She turned to him as he shut the door behind him.

“You got a bottle of something?” She asked, grinning. “’Cause I can walk around this castle without having my head bashed in, now.”

She slipped her hands into her pockets, following him as he went to extract a bottle.

“And,” she pulled out a new badge from her pocket and tossed it into his empty hand. Cal still couldn’t read English, but she didn’t need to be able to read the word Captain glinting in gold letters to recognise that this one was identical to Flynn’s. “I can do it as your equal now.”