“Release him,” said the Guardian.
She cocked her head at him warily. “Why?”
When he growled at her, she found herself smiling despite the way the skin on her back flinched. “I think we’d better just leave him as he is until we find Lehr and your mother, don’t you?”
“Soft-hearted,” he said.
“Better than soft-headed,” she replied. “Should we go after Lehr and Seraph?”
He stepped around her and held open the tent flap. “I’d rather eat someone,” he said—she thought it was for Isfain’s benefit, but she wasn’t quite sure. “But we’ll head out looking for Mother first. Is Gura here?”
“Seraph told him to guard the tent,” she said.
As she ducked through the flap he put his lips near her ear and said, “Don’t feel guilty.”
She stopped so abruptly that the top of her head collided with his jaw hard enough that she heard his teeth click.
“Why should I feel guilty for kissing a handsome young boy?” she said sarcastically, without lowering her tone at all.
To her amazement he grinned at her. Guardians didn’t grin. They smiled with pleasure while they choked the life out of some poor fool who crossed them. They bared their teeth. They didn’t grin.
“I don’t know. We both enjoyed it very much, Jes and I,” his grin widened. “And we’d like to do it again as soon as possible.”
“Here you are,” said a young man in rich clothing who awaited them in a small clearing set in the side of a hill and overlooking a twenty-acre field with a tidy cottage at the far end. “I thought you might not make it.”
Benroln smiled congenially. “I don’t break contracts, sir.”
“And besides,” said the young man, “you knew there was more gold where you got the first, eh?”
He looked too young to have been a merchant for long, thought Seraph, then she reconsidered. There was a softness in his face that made him look exceedingly young, but his eyes were sharp and old.
I’ll bet that he uses that young face of his, Seraph thought as she revised her estimate of his age upward by ten years.
“Of course, sir,” said Benroln after he laughed politely at the merchant’s comment. “This is the woman who will set the spell.”
“And this is the farm right here,” replied the merchant in a light, pleasant voice. “I want it cursed—you understand. Paid good money for a mage to curse it last year—but Asherstal still got a harvest out. I told that sorcerer I wanted nothing to grow on these fields, not even a weed. I want the other farmers to avoid Asherstal for fear whatever befell him will happen to them. I want him shamed. You’d better do the job or maybe some ill might befall you, eh? Like happened to that mage I hired last year.”
Benroln looked taken aback, and Seraph wondered if he’d believed that sweet, innocent air the merchant exuded.
“Your mage’s curse is still here,” she murmured. “Perhaps you had him killed too soon. I’ll have to take it off before I can work.”
“I don’t tell a tanner how to do his job,” said the merchant. “I just pay him for good work.” He made an odd motion with his hand that might have been accidental—but Tier had taught the boys the signs soldiers used. It had the look of one of those.
Lehr had caught it, too, she thought. He faded back silently into the night. Neither the merchant nor Benroln seemed to notice—she doubted the merchant had ever seen him to begin with.
“I’ll have to go down to the edge of the field,” Seraph said.
“Fine, fine,” he agreed. “It’s dark enough that they won’t see you. We can wait in the trees that border the field.”
He led the way down. If Benroln was worried by anything, Seraph couldn’t tell—but she thought not. If he’d been properly worried about the merchant, he wouldn’t have left Isfain and Kors to tend Jes and Hennea. More fool he, to trust a man who’d curse another man’s living.
She suspected that the hidden men were to come out when she finished to make certain neither Benroln nor she told anyone that he’d paid to have this poor farmer’s fields cursed.
Lehr wondered if his mother had caught the signal the merchant had sent. There were men out here somewhere, men waiting to kill Benroln and his mother when the merchant decided he was finished with them. Personally, Lehr wasn’t worried about Benroln one way or the other, but his mother was another matter entirely.
Lehr backtracked the merchant until he found a place where the man had waited with four others. Enough men to account for a couple of Travelers as long as they took them by surprise. Each had taken a different path.
They left no tracks that he could see, because the forest was inky-dark; not even the starlight illuminated the ground under the trees. But he knew they had been there because he could smell them.
He shuddered. What was he that he could scent a man like a dog? He drew his knife and picked a trail to follow.
When they came to the edge of the woods, the merchant motioned Seraph on. He and Benroln settled in to wait under the cover of the trees while she worked her magic.
She sat down on the ground at the edge of the field, just outside of the area of planting. She could see the weaving of magic through the soil. The mage this merchant had hired had done well; it was going to take her a long time to clean the field. Time for Lehr to find the merchant’s men. Time for Jes to be lost to the effects of the foundrael.
She began plucking the threads of the dead mage’s spell without further ado. As she did so, the familiarity of what she was doing settled around her with a feeling of rightness: this is what she had been born to do.
After a while the merchant became impatient. “I don’t see anything. I don’t pay good money for nothing—and I don’t put up with people who try to steal from me.”
“Tell him I can’t work unless he’s quiet,” said Seraph serenely, knowing that the calmer she was the worse the merchant would take it. His sort always liked to see people cringe in fear of him. She could have given him a light show, but the people her magic told her were sleeping in the cottage might be awakened. She didn’t want them coming out to investigate with the merchant’s armsmen lurking about—the wrong people might be killed.
“Come away,” Benroln said to the merchant with an air of determinedly cheerful deplomacy. “This will take a while. I brought a pair of dice with me. We can pass the time while Seraph works.”
Just as well he’d intervened before she’d pushed the merchant too far, she thought and turned her attention back to the field. Lehr needed all the time she could buy him.
Now why didn’t you work? she asked as she pulled the cursing magic away from stalks of wheat only half the size they should be this time of year. Nonetheless, with the strength of the spell she was unravelling, this field shouldn’t have grown anything more than a sprig of cheatgrass.
Night fell, but she didn’t pay any attention—what she was looking at didn’t require light for her to see. Finally, she detached the last of the spelling and, unanchored, the weave fell apart and lost its form.
The magic the wizard had imbued in his casting drifted off when the spell lost its power. It didn’t go far before it was caught firmly, and pulled back into the earth to enrich the soil. That was when Seraph realized how it was that the farmer had managed to grow wheat in this field.
There were other creatures that used magic besides the shadow beasts who lived in the Ragged Mountains. Most of them had died fighting at Shadow’s Fall. But some of them escaped.
This one hadn’t been strong enough to remove the spell, but it had done a great deal to mitigate the effects. Likely whatever it was, it had felt her meddling and was watching from nearby.
“Mmm,” she murmured, smiling in pleasure as she leaned forward and pressed her hands onto the field, sinking her hands into the soft ground where the magic held in the grains of dirt made her fingers tingle.