Problem was, even a simple scrying spell got tricky when the golden chains around my wrists burned with the hags’ malevolent magic. Magic that seeped into my skin like a cold sweat going the wrong way.
Beware, Adeline Riverdeep— the coven intoned in dissonant unison, all three witches’ voices speaking as one.
“For you are three, and I am one. Yeah, yeah. I know.” Technically I wasn’t “one.” I had Bob, my broom. That said, I did respect the hags. Especially the leader of the coven, Silver Maude. Who wouldn’t respect a five-thousand-year-old woman who’d wear your skin as a skirt as soon as speak to you?
But I’d grown up a halfling and cute as a blond bug on a blossom, which had endowed me with a certain knee-jerk reaction to being patronized, because I was constantly being patronized. Or matronized, as was the case with the coven. Besides, I wasn’t exactly good, so I got a kick out of irritating people sometimes.
Four travelers and a trinket. That is the deal. Remember it, or you will never unlock the power arcane.
“Thank you for reminding me,” I said in my sweetest voice. “Again. And ladies . . . bless your hearts.”
The hags hissed. One of them shrieked. But a second later, the fine golden chains looped around my wrists—the chains that bound me to the coven—cooled. I let go a relieved sigh and rolled my head, loosening my tense shoulders. I couldn’t wait for this to be over. If everything went to plan, there would be a week of group travel ahead, and I very much preferred to work alone.
I renewed my focus on the scrying spell drawn on the floor of my tiny room in the Wandering Hermit Inn. Gold-flecked chalk glimmered in the precise lines and curves of arcane geometry, taking up the few square feet of floor not already taken by the bed. White candles burned in puddles of their own sweet-smelling beeswax where each perfect line intersected, and a shallow silver bowl filled with water sat in the construct’s center, where I gripped the bowl so my thumbs dipped just below the edges of the water. This way, instead of reflecting the warm light of the candles, the water showed a wintry city street framed by dark buildings on either side. Crowds hurried through gray, ankle-deep slush, hoods pulled low. In the darkening evening, a smattering of snowflakes glinted between them like far-flung stars.
I leaned forward as the spell tracked along the street, following four figures—three bigfolk and one about my size. Excitement warmed my bones as I watched them move toward a well-lit inn with a sign over the door featuring a scrawny old man clad in nothing but a knee-length white beard.
This well-lit inn.
Making sure not to remove my fingers from the power collected at the spell’s center, I gave the silver bowl a decisive quarter turn and touched the water with three fingers. Few people knew you could manipulate a scrying spell this way, but I’d discovered it in my first year at the Regia Arcanum.
In the bowl, my point of view skipped forward a few paces and jerked sharply left. Where a second ago I had been looking at their cloaked backs, I now tracked my targets in profile against a backdrop of stone buildings. Two days straight of scrying, and I already felt I’d known these people far too long.
First through the door of the Wandering Hermit was a tall, slender elven man with fine features, white hair, and silver-gray skin. I scanned him for any sign he was carrying a powerful magical artifact—a magical artifact both the coven and I had a keen interest in acquiring.
The dark elf was easy to discern among any crowd, not for being the only dark elf in the group, but for his black coat, curled lip, and the disdain in his amethyst eyes. Beautiful, but sometimes that expression came dangerously close to making him ugly.
Talsar—no last name—didn’t have any visible sign of arcane thingamajigs, but I hadn’t really been expecting it. The hags swore up and down these people were carrying the last piece of the magical construct that would unlock the greatest power in the universe—the power arcane. But so far, I’d seen no sign on any of them.
As Talsar entered, he turned and said something to the figure behind him. Ivy Galanon was a slight female forest elf with bronze skin and auburn hair. Her blue cloak might have been nice once, but it was threadbare now. She smiled when she responded to Talsar, words muted as my spell didn’t pick up sound. The movement pulled the thin scar that marred her cheek from just below one eye to the corner of her lips. That smile plus the awful vulnerable way she looked at him made her feelings painfully obvious.
“Oh, Ivy,” I muttered, vicariously embarrassed since she was apparently too oblivious to be embarrassed for herself. “He is just not that into you.”
Whatever she said, it made the third of the bigfolk, a gargoyle woman named Firenza Gioia, throw back her head and belly laugh. With skin purple as dusk, curling black ram’s horns, and thick black hair that hung in a braid over her shoulder and halfway to her waist, she dwarfed the elves. Not because gargoyles were a particularly large people but because she was large, and because she had the kind of personality that took up space, sucking in everyone around her whether she was gleefully laughing, gleefully drinking, or gleefully killing things.
The only smallfolk in the party brought up the rear—the goblin, Ezo Twistkettle. I’ll admit I sat a little straighter because I didn’t know what to make of Ezo as much as I did the others. His smallness was relative, because the boy beneath the brown hood still had half a head on me, which put him on the tall side by my standards. Rash and impulsive and, much like the forest elf, head over tail in love. But instead of one person, Ezo was in love with every pretty girl who caught his eye. Romantic shenanigans aside, he was always fiddling with gears and wires and gunpowder. Personally, I found clockworks and guns loud, greasy, and distasteful. Machinery was for people too inelegant to work magic.
I leaned back from the silver bowl and smudged the chalk lines. No sign of the artifact on any of the travelers, which meant I couldn’t just steal it. Not that stealing it would fulfill my deal—the hags wanted the magic item and the people who carried it. But they knew what they were doing, not telling me exactly what it was. If I could have stolen it and the power arcane without their help, I would have, and they knew it.
I sighed and pinched out the candles one by one, then wrapped them in cloth and stowed them neatly in their designated compartment in my leather bag.
Looked like there would be days of group travel after all.
On my way out, I picked up my broom from where it leaned beside the doorframe. Its twiggy ends were a bit raggedy, and the polished handle had been broken off halfway up, but I didn’t mind, even though I was generally a neat person—that made it just my size.
“Come on, Bob,” I whispered. “Let’s get this over with.”
It rustled its bristles in response. I didn’t need to take it to the common room; I wasn’t going anywhere. But I could use the moral support.
After all, it wasn’t every day I lured a group of strangers to their untimely deaths. But the power to bend reality came with a price, and I was prepared to pay it.
For all it was winter outside, the common room of the Hermit was subtropical. Near a hundred hot bodies were packed into the low-ceilinged space. Damp clothes steamed from the heat of the fire in the hearth that took up half the south wall, and the whole place smelled of wet sheep and cheap beer. The orange flicker from the fire was steadied somewhat by the golden glow of lamps hung from iron hooks at intervals on the plaster walls. But that only made it easier to see the menagerie of mediocrity that patronized a midlevel tavern on a midweek night.