The Dark Wizard Of Donkerk

by Alexander Wales National Novel Writing Month 2014/2015/2016 Target Word Count: 150,000 Current Word Count: 173,324

Author's Note: This work is essentially stuck in 'first draft' state until I can find the time and incentive to put other things aside and devote myself to fixing the numerous typos, restructuring the plot a bit, punching up the prose, and some general tidying up to make it the novel that it's meant to be. It's presented here for your enjoyment, if you're the sort of person who likes to read mostly-finished things, but I'm very aware that it's not in its ideal final state. Consider yourself warned. Special thanks to ketura for making fixes to the Scrivener-compiled HTML.

Table of Contents

The Orphan

The Kidnapping

The Drowned Witch

The Separate Paths

The Castle Spirit

The Wayward Princess

The Mentalists

The Journey North

The Fated Meeting

The Dueling Deceptions

The Twist in the Winds

The Foresworn Citadel

The Revelations

The Dark Wizard of Donkerk

The Crown in the Castle

Epilogue

The Orphan

Omarr and Hirrush stood over the onyx altar that had cost them a dauphin’s ransom. Lit candles burnt steadily in a carefully arranged pattern that zigzagged through the room, lending the air a faint smell of smoke. These arrangements were largely forgotten as the two men argued over the squealing baby.

“Does it have to be tonight?” asked Omarr. He held a gem-encrusted dagger in his meaty hand, which was no longer poised above the altar but instead held idly at his side.

“The tome was specific,” replied Hirrush. He ran his fingers through his lanky hair. “It has to be a new moon. So yes, tonight is the night, unless we want to wait another month.”

“Only I thought that perhaps he’d be wailing,” said Omarr. “He just looks so … so happy.” He frowned at the baby, which was making distinctly cute noises at them.

“I know what you mean,” replied Hirrush. “When I was younger, living in the city, there was a baby next door that cried through the night, every night, for a week straight. I couldn’t sleep for the screaming. I yelled sometimes, matched his volume as I tried to get my frustrations out, but of course it did nothing to deter him. He kept on wailing with a stamina that was impressive in retrospect. It was on those nights that I had decided that I would be capable of killing an infant, if it came to it.”

“Yes,” replied Omarr in dismay. “We could maybe try to make him scream at us, to make it easier?”

Hirrush leaned forwards. When he caught the baby’s attention, Hirrush twisted his face into the meanest, most vicious scowl that he knew how to make. The baby giggled and tried to grab at his nose, and Hirrush quickly withdrew, as though it were the hand of some sulfurous demon reaching towards him.

“Poke him with the dagger,” said Hirrush.

“What?” asked Omarr, staring at the dagger in his hand as though he’d completely forgotten that it was there. “Why?”

“Just to get him screaming,” replied Hirrush. “Just to make it easier, so that we can do it for real.”

“You poke him,” said Omarr, holding out the bejeweled dagger to his partner.

Hirrush frowned. He made no move to touch the proffered weapon.

“I don’t know why you grabbed the happiest baby in the orphanage,” he said.

“I wanted to get out of there without making any noise,” explained Omarr. “He was nice and quiet, hardly did more than coo at me. I grew up in an orphanage, remember? The Foresworn Sisters can be vicious when it comes down to it, even for small offenses. I have no idea what they’d have done if they’d caught me and I wasn’t keen to find out. If you wanted a particular sort of baby, you should have said so. The tome only said he had to be healthy.”

“Well,” said Hirrush, clearing his throat. “Perhaps we can wait until next month then? When we’ve had time to acclimate to the idea a bit more?”

“Sure,” Omarr nodded. “Next month.” He looked down at the baby. “What do we do with him?”

“Take him back, of course,” said Hirrush. “And next month we’ll get a different one, one more … amenable to the, ah, process.”

❧❧❧

Ventor loped down the roads as the sun set, trying to get to Leshampur before nightfall.

He moved with long, bounding strides because he was more powerful than an average man, with legs more capable of pushing hard against the ground. He was more powerful because he had taken six different oaths when he was ten years old and steadfastly kept them for twenty years afterward.

Ventor imagined the Oath of Fealty as a thin golden chain. He had been told to go to Leshampur, to find and retrieve the infant child foretold by prophecy, so he imagined the golden chain pulled taut ahead of him, urging him forward. Somewhere not too far ahead, that golden chain led to a baby, and from there threaded all the way back to Marurbo and the throne room. Only when the task was complete would Ventor allow himself to imagine the golden chain of fealty as laying slack on the ground, connecting himself to the king but demanding nothing.

The prophecy had come crashing down the moment the queen had gone into labor. Ventor had been one of five people to hear it.

A princess with hair of flame lays beneath the throne, Vengeful spirits cloak her fragile form. Blood-soaked clothes and shattered bone, The dark wizard wrapped in brewing storm.

As the princess draws first breath, The swaddled savior is left behind. Where the blackened river crosses land of Neth, The infant forged by those who shape his mind.

The king had gathered a council of sages within the hour. As his wife was talked through her second birth, he planned for the what the prophecy had foretold. The words were analyzed carefully. Prophecies were rare and rarely good. It was said that the utter destruction that resulted in the Scour had been heralded by a dozen prophecies in the three days preceding it, and the enormous wave that reduced Pereldra to rubble had been foretold in cryptic terms a good decade before it came to pass. The sages said that avoiding a prophecy was possible but difficult. More often than not the actions taken to avoid a prophecy ended up causing it instead. Still, if the unborn princess might be saved by some direct action, it needed to be taken.

Leshampur was one of fifty places identified by the sages. It had a river running through the center of it, and though it was not a river known for being particularly black, it had once been an outpost of the Nethian empire some six hundred years prior. The sages had argued amongst themselves about what the adjective “blackened” might mean. They had predictably arrived at a half dozen different conclusions. It was possible that the “blackened river” was not a literal river at all, but instead a coal mine or something similar, in which case Ventor’s journey would be for nothing.

He knew that it was unlikely that there was a child waiting for him in Leshampur, but he imagined that there was all the same. It was easier to push himself if he thought that he was doing something worthwhile, so he decided to think that this wasn’t all for naught. Sometimes it was just as easy as that. He’d been traveling for four days, and the princess had almost certainly been born already, which meant that the swaddled savior had already been left behind, assuming that the sages were correct in thinking that the obvious reading was the right one. If he had taken the odds at face value, he would have been tempted to stop by the side of the road and take another short rest with his breastplate laid on the ground beside him. Instead he pushed onward, taking no argument from his aching muscles. The forest turned to farmland, and the space between buildings grew smaller and smaller as he went. He arrived in Leshampur just as the last sliver of sun was swallowed by a nearby hill.

“I need to find the orphanage,” said Ventor to a startled villager.

“Where did you come from?” the villager asked. Ventor couldn’t tell what sort of profession the man held and didn’t much care. The golden chain of fealty was taut, but Ventor had no idea where it might be pulling him.

“I come on behalf of King Aldric himself, by his direct order,” said Ventor. “The orphanage, where is it?”

The villager stared dumbly at Ventor, taking in the seven-pointed star etched on his breastplate before coming to the slow realization that he was speaking to an oathkeeper for the king. Finally, he seemed to come to his senses. “It’s on the outskirts,” said the man. “On the other side of the city. I can take you there, if you need a guide.”

Ventor should have said a few words of thanks, but he had taken no oaths of kindness, so he merely sprang away from the villager and continued to take his enormous bounding steps as he crossed the city. He drew stares and shouts from people he passed on the streets, but he moved quickly enough that he didn’t have to deal with the commotion. He spotted the orphanage from three blocks away thanks to the small spire with a seven-pointed star at the top and put on an extra burst of speed that his sore body could barely handle. His oaths gave him more energy than a normal man had, but he’d been pushing himself to his limits for far too long. If there was no child waiting for him at the orphanage, his quest was far from over.

One of the Foresworn Sisters answered the door on the second knock and frowned when she saw Ventor standing before her. She was young and pretty, and she wore a winged wimple above her light blue dress. Ventor imagined his Oath of Chastity as a silver chain, and he imagined it binding him tightly as he looked at her.

“I hadn’t expected someone so soon,” said the Sister.

“So soon?” asked Ventor with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“We sent out for a rector just this morning,” said the Sister. “But I can tell from the look on your face that you’re not here because of that request at all.”

Ventor frowned. “I’m afraid that I might be,” he said. “I’m seeking a child that was abandoned here sometime in the last four days, or who was abandoned elsewhere and then brought here.”

“You had better come in,” said the Sister. She gestured inside. “My name is Clarice. I fear that we have much to talk about.”

❧❧❧

It had been a dark and stormy night when they had laid everything out for the ritual. Omarr had stolen the baby while the stars were obscured by thick, roiling clouds, with heavy winds to cover the sounds of him moving about. The rain had just started when he’d gotten back to the cottage, though the baby didn’t seem to mind. The flashes of lightning and sounds of thunder had been wonderfully atmospheric when they’d been handling the dagger, but now that they’d decided not to go through with it — at least not that night — the weather had taken another turn, and it was just a simple downpour that neither of them wanted to go out into.

Their library had just short of two hundred books in it, bought or stolen from all over Donkerk and the lands beyond. Thick illuminated tomes abutted skinny volumes bound with twine. The vast majority of these books related to magics, dark or otherwise, but after half an hour of searching, Omarr retrieved a slender little guide for farmers, which happened to contain within it instructions on how to care for a child if it had lost its mother. These instructions amounted to no more than five scant lines, but that was still more information than the dark wizards had before.

“A goat for a wet nurse?” asked Hirrush with a raised eyebrow. He glanced at the baby, which was swaddled in cloth and laid down on the table. “How credible is this book?”

“Well, it’s just for tonight,” said Omarr. “Once the storm has passed, I’ll take him back to the orphanage.”

“And then next month we’ll take one less …” Hirrush looked at the child. “Less animated.”

“I’ve been thinking,” said Omarr. “It will be harder to take a baby the second time. They’ll notice this one missing, and the Sisters will be more cautious. They’ll install locks, or purchase a dog, or simply keep someone on guard.”

Hirrush sighed. “That’s something we have a month to figure out. And I agree, it would have been better to have this done tonight, if we were going to do it.”

Omarr picked up the baby and rocked him back and forth like he’d seen a woman do once. The baby smiled at him and reached for his face.

“You’re going back to the orphanage,” Omarr said to the baby. “You got quite lucky tonight.” Though as he said it, he realized it sounded too threatening. Then again, they’d been meaning to sacrifice this baby, so perhaps it wasn’t fair to try pretending otherwise. He would have apologized to the baby, if Hirrush hadn’t been standing there, as little sense as that made. He had no idea how he would feel next month, but he was beginning to get the feeling that it wouldn’t matter what baby they managed to get their hands on. It had all sounded so simple in the abstract, though Omarr couldn’t say whether he would have been able to convince himself without Hirrush to talk to.

They brought in one of the goats from the small barn. To their faint surprise, the baby cheerfully suckled at its teat. Hirrush burped the baby, something they only knew to do from that same slender book, and afterward they changed his diaper, which required the sacrifice of some cloth to make him a new one. The baby fell asleep in Omarr’s lap not long after, having not once cried.

“I worry about returning him,” Omarr said in the morning.

“If it’s the Sisters, you need only lie to them,” said Hirrush. “Tell them that he was left on your doorstep. I don’t know what reason someone would have to steal a baby and then bring it back the next day, but the Sisters won’t either. I doubt you could be arrested for it. Questioned, perhaps, but not put under lock and key.”

“Only the next baby we steal, they’ll come asking after me,” said Omarr.

“A problem that can be solved with more lies,” replied Hirrush. “I can take him back, if you prefer.”

“Would you?” asked Omarr. He ran his fingers through his thick beard. “I would appreciate that.”

Half an hour later, Hirrush returned with a frown on his face and the baby cradled in his arms.

“Change of heart?” asked Omarr. He was on top of the roof of their cottage, repairing what the storm had torn up. The cottage was two stories high, with a top layered in sod that helped to compress the logs and keep the house from having drafts in the wintertime. From a distance, it reminded Omarr of an old man with green hair. The cottage listed slightly to one side, the result of three years of neglect after Hirrush’s father had died, before the two of them had come to claim the farmstead. They had talked about tearing it down and building a new place to live on the land, but money always seemed to find its way to other things: rare books, for the most part. The land itself grew wild, save for the area that the goats grazed the grass down to stubble. The small garden they kept out back was the only bit of farming that they cared to do.

“The storm was heavier than it seemed,” said Hirrush. He let the baby play with his finger, showing none of the fear he’d had the night before. “The bridge was washed out. The water alone wouldn’t have been enough for it, there must have been some bit of debris that struck it. At any rate, the waters are still too high and turbulent for fording or rafting, so it seems that we’re stuck with him for the time being.” Hirrush looked down at the child. “We can keep him for another few days, I suppose. I would drop him on someone’s doorstep, if we had any likely neighbors who might take him and if I thought I could do it without being seen.”

Omarr cleared his throat. “Another few days then, and we’ll bring him back after that.”

❧❧❧

“As you said, a child was left here three days ago,” said Clarice. “There was no note left with him.” Her hips swayed as she led him down the hallway. Ventor idly wondered whether she had taken an Oath of Chastity as well. He imagined the same silver chain wrapped around the both of them, but if the chain was his alone, he would have to bind himself all the tighter.

“We took him in of course,” said Clarice. “Though most of the children we get are brought by their family along with some explanation of why they can’t care for the child, or by the guards following some accident that leaves the child without their parents, it’s not entirely uncommon for children to be left on the doorstep. Usually by young mothers who haven’t taken the Oath of Marriage.”

A strand of blond hair peeked out from beneath Clarice’s wimple. When she turned to talk to him, Ventor could feel his eye drawn to it.

“Two days ago, someone crept into the orphanage in the middle of the night and stole the baby,” said Clarice. They entered into a small office with a multitude of papers in neat stacks. “Of course we thought that it was the mother, or possibly the father, or some other family member. It’s not uncommon for there to a dispute of some sort, though we’ve never had an outright theft — we would of course prefer for these children to be with their families, so in most cases someone could simply come here and adopt the child in the usual fashion. Sometimes young women give their children to the orphanage and return years later when they feel that they’re able to care for a child.”

“And in this case?” asked Ventor as he took a seat. “Do you believe that someone left the child on your doorstep and stole him back under cover of night a day later?”

“I don’t know,” said Clarice. She leaned forward, and the shape of her breasts became visible under her dress. The Oath of Chastity had seemed so easy when he had taken it at the age of ten. “We don’t take this kidnapping lightly of course, no matter who perpetrated it. That was why we sent for a rector, in the hopes that we might be provided someone who could track down the kidnapper. But I take it that you’re not here for that reason.”

“There is a prophecy,” said Ventor. “It was ambiguous enough that I can’t say for certain, but I think it very likely that the child named in it was the one left at your doorstep. As to the culprits … the prophecy did not say. I have some skill in tracking though, and it’s possible that I might be able to track the kidnapper down. I gave my oath that I would try to find this child, or those who mean to raise him. Is there anything more that you can tell me?”

Clarice sat back in her chair, and folded her hands on top of the desk. “One of the Sisters raised a theory when it happened,” she said slowly. “There are those who would steal a child to raise as their own, in an attempt to bypass the process of adoption. We make supervisory visits to those who have claimed one of the children from us, which rankle some. But there are also those who might want a child for more nefarious purposes, particularly a young one. Dark wizards, or black witches.”

Ventor clenched his fists. “A problem in these parts?”

“Not as such,” said Clarice. “Which is why I don’t credit it much. There are a handful of hedge witches within a day’s walk of here, but none that I know of that have done anything truly black. Animal sacrifice seems to be the worst of it. It’s not impossible that one of them has gone over the edge, I’ll grant that. And no dark wizards, to my knowledge.”

“We don’t suffer such in the capital,” said Ventor evenly.

“I am aware,” said Clarice with a smile. “I don’t approve of it any more than you do, but when the dark practitioners aren’t directly hurting anyone it’s difficult to move the guard to do anything about it. That goes double when there isn’t anything that the guard can do about it. Take the matter back to the capital, if you wish.”

“I will,” said Ventor with a sigh. The wind seemed to go out from his sails. Four days was too long to travel. “I’ve pushed myself hard to get here so quickly, and it seems that this quest has turned into something completely different. Do you have a bed I could use for the night?”

Clarice’s mouth twisted into a mischievous smile. “I do,” she replied. She leaned forward. “Some beds are warmer than others.”

“I’ve taken an Oath of Chastity,” said Ventor, though he regretted it immediately after the words had left his lips. Clarice seemed completely unfazed by this.

“I as well,” she said. “But together we might examine the wordings of our Oaths and see what we might permit ourselves.”

Ventor cleared his throat, but before he could formulate a response to that, the Sister stood from her chair and moved past him, with her dress trailing behind her.

❧❧❧

Adrianna came to their cottage five days after the new moon.

She had been a milkmaid before she became a witch. She came to the attention of Omarr and Hirrush the year before, when they heard a rumor of a hedge witch practicing close to them. It had taken a week for them to track her down, and once they did, they gave her a quick and dirty lesson in the social aspects of practicing dark magic. She had inherited the profession from her great-grandmother, a fearsome old woman who had left one too many books behind, which Adrianna had proceeded to poke her nose into. The magic she did — as her grandmother before her — was mostly healing magic, the kinds which Omarr had often argued had no business being illegal. A sacrifice of the smallest toe on the left foot could remove a man’s limp and cure him of chronic pain for a time, but it was a crime all the same, albeit a crime that nearly everyone would look the other way on.

“Hirrush isn’t feeling well,” said Omarr as he let her into the cottage. It was the simplest lie they’d been able to think of. A quart of pig’s blood dribbled in a circle would keep any sounds from the second floor from reaching Adrianna’s ears.

“Anything I can help with?” asked Adrianna.

“No,” said Omarr quickly. “Though … do you know of a ritual to cure the common cold? And if so, what the price to be paid is?”

Adrianna frowned. “I would have to check gran’s books, but I believe that a sacrifice of a healthy tooth can cure someone of it.”

“A steep price,” said Omarr.

“They often are,” Adrianna replied. “Sometimes unreasonably so. People come to me with their problems, and all too often they turn away when I tell them what it will take to make the problem go away — if the problem can be made to go away at all. Just last week I had a man come to me with his son, who was wasting away. The poor boy was going to die, that was obvious all around. I told the man that it would cost his life to save his son. He decried me for a witch — which I obviously am — and he told me to keep my foul magics to myself.”

“Did you know he wouldn’t pay the price?” asked Omarr.

“I suspected,” Adrianna replied. “He had four other children — healthy ones. He wouldn’t be able to support them if he were dead. But even if the sickly son had been his only, I doubt he was the sort of man to give his life.”

Omarr checked that the kettle still had water in it. He put it on top of the pot-bellied stove before sticking another piece of wood in with the embers. When that was done, he tapped at his lips with his finger.

“Better to tell him that it was impossible,” said Omarr.

“Oh?” asked Adrianna.

Omarr nodded. “Better not to anger people for no reason. And as to the price … if he had been willing to sacrifice himself for his son, to let you spill his life’s blood on the ground, would you have actually gone through with it?” They had agreed not to tell Adrianna about the ritual they’d been ready to perform on top of the block of onyx, but perhaps he could get a sense of what her reaction would be.

“Maybe,” said Adrianna cautiously. “Would you?”

“We’re not in the business of helping people,” said Omarr. “But yes, I likely would. A life for a life isn’t an easy decision by any means, but there are times that it’s justified. If you can exchange forty good years for sixty, well, that can be seductive.”

“Seductive,” repeated Adrianna skeptically.

“But the point I was trying to make,” Omarr said, “Is that if you weren’t going to do it anyway, it’s better not to offer. If you’re a witch, one that people know, you need to make friends. That man might forget about you, but he might also harbor a grudge. When his son is being buried, he might be thinking of you and the offer you made him. And it might be that he gets angry with you. Might be he decides to rid the world of you.”

“I have my magic,” said Adrianna. “But I take your point. ‘Don’t upset the locals’ is the first rule you taught me. That was actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Omarr took the kettle from the stove and poured the hot water into a mug with curled fingers of dried wortroot he pulled from a twisted braid beside the kitchen window. The smell sucked at his nostrils and made his hair stiffen. “Did you upset the locals?” he asked.

“No,” said Adrianna. “But someone else did. Someone stole a baby from the orphanage in Leshampur.”

Omarr kept himself from freezing in place. “When? The bridge was washed out, last I heard. I’m surprised any news has come through.”

“There’s an oathkeeper come up from the capital,” said Adrianna. “He leapt across the river.”

Omarr swore, and nearly dropped the tea.

“I talked to him —”

Omarr swore again.

“Look, it’s fine,” said Adrianna. “He came by my gran’s place because he had heard some of the legends about her, and I told him that she’d died some time ago. He thought it was suspicious that I was alone, but I invited him in and we talked for a bit. He cautioned me away from dark magics, if you can believe that. He can’t prove anything, even if he suspects. He was after this missing child like a dog after a bone. I’m hoping that keeps him from going after me. I just thought you should know. There are plenty of people who know me, enough that could point him in my direction. I’ll lay low. So far as I’m aware, I’m the only one that knows about you, so you should be safe, but just in case — be on the lookout.”

“We will be,” said Omarr.

“Omarr, he passed through the wards like they weren’t even there,” said Adrianna with a frown. “It’s supposed to be hard to get to my place.”

“That would give away the game,” said Omarr. “Your gran put up those wards, and she was a clever one. Hirrush and I will stop by in a few weeks when this has blown over and inspect them a second time, but I have little doubt that there’s some bit of mental magic in there that allows passage for those who are only asking questions. If he’d found his way barred by black magic, he would have been on you in an instant, so the wards let him pass, and pretended at not being there.”

“It gave me a start,” said Adrianna. “But I suppose that your explanation makes sense.” She stood up from her chair. “I did have one other question, before I go.”

Omarr nodded, and took a long sip of his tea.

“Did you and Hirrush take the baby?” she asked.

Omarr frowned. “Yes.”

Adrianna turned away from him.

“He’s upstairs,” said Omarr.

“But you took him for some dark ritual?” Adrianna asked, still facing away from him.

“Yes,” said Omarr. He cleared his throat. “We didn’t go through with it.”

Adrianna let out a breath she’d been holding in and turned back around. Omarr had thought perhaps she would be crying, but her eyes were dry. “Well, let me see him then. We’ll have to wait for this whole thing to blow over, and then … then I don’t know.”

“You don’t need to have any part of this,” said Omarr.

“Nonsense,” said Adrianna. She put her hands on the side of hips. “You’re my mentors, and you’ve given me some strong protection already, and if you’ve done some fool thing, then I can protect you in return. It’s what gran would have done. Though she didn’t hold truck with human sacrifice.”

Omarr had seen enough of the wards around Adrianna’s place to know that this wasn’t strictly true, but he and Hirrush hadn’t shared that fact with Adrianna just yet. He got up from his chair and gestured for her to follow him up the narrow staircase to the second floor. The silence ward popped like a bubble as he passed through it, though the baby wasn’t making any noise. Hirrush raised an eyebrow at Omarr’s appearance, then frowned when he saw Adrianna behind him.

“We weren’t going to tell her,” said Hirrush. The baby lay cradled in his lap.

“An oathkeeper from the capital has shown up in Leshampur,” said Omarr. “He paid her a visit. Naturally her thoughts turned to us.”

Hirrush swore loudly, then gave a guilty look at the baby.

“What have you been feeding him?” Adrianna asked. She held out her hands, and Hirrush reluctantly handed the baby to her.

“He’s been suckling at one of the goats,” said Omarr.

“Hrm,” Adrianna replied. “I would say that he should have a proper wet nurse, but a goat or donkey is as good as he’d have gotten at the orphanage.” She spent a few moments checking over the baby and seemed to find everything satisfactory. “And what are you planning to do with him?”

Omarr and Hirrush looked to each other. The idea had briefly been floated that perhaps they could sacrifice him when the new moon came again, but that had been three days ago, and neither had mentioned it since then. The presence of an oathkeeper changed things substantially, mostly in that it cut their options down.

“We might keep him,” ventured Omarr.

“Keep him?” asked Adrianna. She looked between the two of them. “To what purpose?”

“To raise him,” replied Omarr. “If he went back to the orphanage he would more likely than not spend ten years eating gruel and getting whatever feeble education the Sisters provide him with. When he’s ten years old, he’ll be taken to the monastery and told to swear some oaths. If he keeps them, he’ll be an oathkeeper, bound to a pitiable existence in return for awe inspiring powers. If he doesn’t keep the oaths, he’ll be sent out into the world on his own with nothing but the clothes on his back and whatever he can steal.” Omarr had run away the day before initiation, but he’d seen the path that was being laid out in front of him.

“We haven’t decided yet,” said Hirrush. “But if there’s an oathkeeper on the lookout, it might be best to lay low either way.”

The baby cooed in Adrianna’s arms.

❧❧❧

Two months passed before Ventor was called back.

It had taken him four days to get to Leshampur, but that was with an oathkeeper’s speed, and he’d pushed himself hard even then. He had sent a letter back to the capital in the morning, and the response had taken three full weeks to get back to him, carried by merchants and travelers. When the oathkeepers weren’t otherwise engaged, they were sometimes used as runners between the larger cities of Donkerk, but with the prophecy in the air those services had been halted.

He frowned at the letter as Clarice slipped an arm around his stomach from behind.

“Anything interesting?” she asked with a purr in his ear.

“I’m going home,” he said.

“Oh,” replied Clarice. She disentangled herself from him and sat back on the bed.

Ventor had not violated his Oath of Chastity, but it felt wrong all the same. They were skirting the spirit of the oath, even if they’d been careful not to cross the letter of it. He had gathered that he was not the first man she had done such things with, though he hadn’t dared to ask, for he suspected that he wouldn’t take her answer well. The other Sisters hadn’t commented on the arrangement that she’d made with him, though he had received a scowl from one of the older ones. One of the perks of being an oathkeeper was the fact that if anyone questioned whether you had broken your oath, you could simply make a twisting jump and land with perfect poise on the top of a two story building to answer them. The seven-pointed star on his chest signaled strongly to the people he met on the street, but not so strongly as the plainly visible power of his five oaths.

“I’ll miss you,” said Clarice with a soft voice.

“Miss me?” asked Ventor. He turned to look at her — to take her in. She had been forward on his first night in Leshampur, and she had never stopped being so. She was beautiful and confident, and even with their nights aside she had been a valuable aide to him as he ranged out around the city. Missing her wouldn’t be the half of it.

“We both knew that it wouldn’t last forever,” said Clarice. “Come now, no need to be sad about it.”

“No,” said Ventor. “If there were some way …” He trailed off.

“But there’s not,” said Clarice.

He’d wanted her to ask him to break his vows. He wanted her to feel as strongly about him as he did about her. His chest felt tight. His normally still heart was beating too fast. He imagined the silver chain of Chastity binding him tightly and the golden chain of Fealty pulling him back towards the capital. The letter from the king didn’t carry the full weight of a direct command, but it was plain enough that he needed to come back as soon as prudent. The two months in Leshampur had yielded little, with the most promising lead being the orphan that had been stolen the night after the princess was born. The trail had mostly evaporated.

“I visited a young woman shortly after I got here,” said Ventor. “Witchcraft runs in her blood. I visited her again two days ago, and there was something off about her, a falseness in her answers. She was sweating. A witch, I have little doubt of that, but it might be that she had some involvement with the kidnapping. I could write back to the king and ask for more time to pursue this.”

“Because of me,” said Clarice. “Not because you’re acting in the interests of the king that you’ve sworn your oath to.” Her voice was firm. She sat away from him, no longer touching.

“It’s not that simple,” said Ventor. “There’s a legitimate reason for me to stay.”

“No,” said Clarice. “This is how oaths get broken. You travel down a path, pretending it’s a good one, and one day you look back at the path you’ve walked, and you realize that it was bad all along. And just like that, the spell gets broken, and you’re left as nothing more than a mortal man.”

He wanted to ask if she loved him, but he didn’t want to her say no. He wanted to get angry with her, but he didn’t do that either. Instead, he simply walked away, without so much as a kiss to say goodbye.

It didn’t occur to him that perhaps he had been right in wanting to stay, even if is reasoning was clouded.

And so it was that the orphan was raised by two dark wizards.

The Kidnapping

“We need money,” said Omarr. After they’d put Henry to bed, they’d cracked a small cask of ale and drank from the large mugs. A fire crackled in the fireplace. Adrianna had come to like the two men, somewhat despite herself. They had taught her much. While their theft of Henry had soured her opinion, their subsequent adoption of him had warmed her back up. That had been five years ago. Now she acted as something of an aunt to the boy, stopping in from time to time to dote on him. For their part, Omarr and Hirrush seemed to be loving if unconventional parents.

“What do you do for money?” asked Adrianna. She grew most of her own food and took in coin from the people who came calling for her services. Disappointingly, much of it involved sex in one way or another, and Adrianna suspected that it was because the people were committing one taboo and didn’t care whether they compounded that taboo with the taboo about dark magic. Her gran had a thick book devoted to virility, pregnancy, and contraception, which she was forced to consult often.

“You know that we’re not conventionally moral people?” asked Omarr.

Adrianna looked up towards the ceiling, at where Henry lay sleeping in his room. He was a cute child, with rosy cheeks and curly blond hair. “I am aware,” she replied.

“We were kidnappers,” said Hirrush. Omarr shot him a look, but Hirrush continued. “It’s the simple truth, no sense in coating it with sugar. We never harmed the children, and each one of them was returned safe and sound —”

“Wait a minute,” said Adrianna. She pushed her ale away. “The duke’s son? That was you?”

“Just so,” said Omarr.

“As I was saying, we returned each of them safe and sound, and we made enormous piles of money doing it,” said Hirrush. “Not even as much as we could have. We always made sure to only ask for as much as we knew they could give to us without sparing it real thought.”

“You were kidnappers,” said Adrianna. “And you need money. So you’re going to kidnap again?” She felt slightly queasy, though partly that was because she was on her second mug of ale.

“We need to raise Henry right,” said Omarr. “We have no skills, and we can’t ply our one true trade. You’ve seen that the garden has expanded in recent years — look, it’s not that we want to do this, but when you weigh the harm caused against the good done, you have to see that on balance we’re in the right.”

“Or at least neutral,” said Hirrush.

“Harm against others,” Adrianna replied. “Good for yourselves.”

“Good for Henry,” said Omarr. Hirrush nodded. “We live a small life. A quiet life. We don’t need much, but we don’t have much either. The cottage has a lean to it that’s going to need fixing in the near future if we don’t want to risk a collapse. Henry grows out of his clothes almost as fast as we have them sewn. If we want him to be something more than just a farmer’s son … we’re going to need resources. We’ve never lived a life of luxury. It’s not about that. It’s about providing him with the sort of boundless world a child should have.”

Adrianna sighed. “You’ve already made up your minds,” she said. She looked around the cottage. It was simple and sturdy, with the exception of the lean. Nothing in it spoke of men who squandered their money, save perhaps for the rows upon rows of books that filled one of the rooms. She had always thought of Omarr and Hirrush as scholars of dark magic rather than practitioners, and they’d done little to prove her wrong. “What about the child you’re going to kidnap?”

“What about her?” asked Omarr.

“You have understandable gripes with the nobility,” said Adrianna. “I can understand how you think the loss of money would be justified. If you’ve thought about the horror of having a children stolen, perhaps you can justify it by thinking that these nobles deserve it. And possibly you’re even right. But what about the feelings of the child, who — and I mean no offense — who will have to live with being taken by the two of you?”

“She won’t remember it,” said Hirrush. “That much we can be sure of. We have magic to make sure of that.”

“She,” said Adrianna. “You’ve already been planning this. You’ve already picked out a target.”

Omarr laid his meaty hands on the table. “The problem is, we need a confederate.”

“Me?” asked Adrianna. “I’m not so motivated as either of you.”

“Three weeks ago a man died because you didn’t have a healthy calf,” said Omarr. “Don’t pretend that’s a problem that money couldn’t have solved. Don’t pretend that it didn’t affect you.”

Adrianna felt like a bucket of ice water had just been splashed on her. The numbness reached to her core. “I’m not pretending,” she replied.

“I’m only trying to say — look, having the money isn’t about greed, it’s about being able to rearrange the world to your liking. Gold paves many paths,” said Omarr. “The king has more money than he can possibly use, and he spends it on frippery and lavish displays. In our hands, we could do good — not just good for Henry, but for the people around us.”

Adrianna looked between the two of them. “King Aldric? Are you mad? Are you seriously saying that you intend to extract a ransom for the prince?”

“Not the prince,” said Hirrush. “The princess.”

“You’ll be killed,” said Adrianna. “Instantly. The oathkeepers, the royal mentalist, a thousand men and women with swords drawn and racing for you, and that’s leaving aside the logistics of penetrating the walls of the castle and getting out with a child.”

“And if you believed that we could do it?” asked Omarr. “No, don’t answer. We’ll tell you how we’re going to do it. When we’re done, you can think on it for a few days, mull things over, and then say whether you’ll accept our request for help.”

Adrianna listened.

Adrianna left.

Adrianna thought about the man who had died in her arms for lack of coin. She thought about every man, woman and child who wouldn’t be able to pay the price that was demanded. She thought about the leak in her roof that wouldn’t go away. She thought about the book on physiology that she hadn’t had anywhere near the money to buy. She thought about Henry and the difference it would make for him. And she thought about the king, sitting in his throne room with a magical crown of gold, flanked by men in silver breastplates, and drinking his fine wines.

When she came back, Adrianna agreed to help.

❧❧❧

Sofia was five years old.

The castle was her playground; she ran on bare feet down the hallways, beneath the arched doorways, around the seemingly endless number of people that worked for her father. She had three women to watch after her, but her father didn’t seem to mind that she would dart off away from them at the first chance she got, except for the one time she’d left the castle entirely and he had screamed at them for what seemed like hours. She hadn’t gone outside the castle before or since, but that didn’t matter too much, since there always seemed to be some new corner to explore, and there were three courtyards to play in if she wanted to be outdoors.

Her favorite toy was a small tiger. A tiger was an animal that they didn’t have in Donkerk. It had black and white stripes, and pointed ears, and flopped around by her side whenever she went running. Her father had shown her a picture of a tiger which had been drawn in a large book, and told her that it was just like a kitten the size of a horse, and that sounded wonderful. She had asked her father whether he’d be able to bring a real tiger into Donkerk from somewhere to the south, if just to visit, and her father had said he would try his best with a wink to one of his aides, which meant that he wasn’t going to try at all.

In the afternoons, she would curl up in a ball near one of the windows and nap in the sunshine, taking her stuffed tiger with her. Whichever woman was watching her would procure a chair from some nearby room and bring it over to sit next to her, which Sofia didn’t mind too terribly.

“You run too much,” Rowan said one day. He was three years older and often in a bad mood.

“No I don’t,” replied Sofia. She had her tiger clutched closely to her.

“When I’m king, I’m going to make a decree about running,” said Rowan. “I’m not going to allow it.”

“Maybe I’ll be king,” said Sofia. “And then I’ll make a law that says that people have to run around all the time.”

“You can’t be a king, you’re a girl,” said Rowan. “You would be a queen, like mom was. But you won’t be a queen either, because I’m older than you.”

Sofia asked her father about this and was told that this was mostly true, much to her consternation. Late that day she made an extra effort to dodge the woman who was looking after her and crawled off to some faraway part of the castle where there were extra beds for when people came to visit. The room she liked best there had a large bed with posts going up to the ceiling and lace hanging down. When the door opened up, she thought it would be the woman who’d been following her, but instead it was a large man with a thick black beard and meaty fingers.

“Who are you?” asked Sofia.

“No one,” replied the man. “Can you come here for a moment?”

Sofia set her stuffed tiger down on the bed and came closer. The man was well-dressed and smelled like the wheat. When she was five feet from him, he reached for her and grabbed her around the waist like her father sometimes did when he wanted to set her on his shoulders. She didn’t like the man grabbing her like that, but before she could tell him not to, he had pulled out a knife and cut off his finger. The world went black just after that, and all she could hear was her breathing, and the beating of her heart, and the huffing of the man as he carried her through blackness.

❧❧❧

“Baking is a kind of alchemy,” said Hirrush.

“Like potions,” said Henry.

“Yes,” said Hirrush. “Like potions. You take these simple ingredients like eggs, flour, and butter, and by mixing them in the right quantities and doing the right things with them, you can create something wonderful.”

“Like cookies,” said Henry.

“Yes,” said Hirrush. Omarr and Adrianna sometimes talked to Henry in a higher voice, to let him know that they were talking to him and not to anyone else, but Hirrush never did that. He didn’t make any effort to use simple words either. While it was hard to understand the big words, Hirrush always answered questions. “Now, your father and I don’t trust alchemy, for the simple reason that alchemy so often doesn’t work. Alchemy is the realm of hucksters. But baking at least tells us that it’s possible to transmute one thing into another and make something more valuable than the sum of its parts. I believe that it’s good instruction on being precise when following rules, and learning when the rules that have been set out for you might reasonably be broken. Though alchemy might not be all that it’s cracked up to be, those lessons will serve you well when it comes time for you to practice true magic.”

They followed the recipe together, though Hirrush did most of the things that required true delicacy. They had just added in a handful of raisins when an ethereal doorway opened and Omarr stepped out of the blackness. He had a girl of around Henry’s age under one arm. It was one of the most impressive bits of magic that Henry had ever seen.

“You’re back!” cried Henry, momentarily forgetting about the flour on his hands and wrapping Omarr in a hug. Omarr had been gone for four whole weeks. He hadn’t said where he was going, though Henry had overheard enough to know that it was to the south.

“I’m back,” said Omarr with a sigh that didn’t sound too happy.

“Put me down!” cried the girl.

Omarr pulled away from Henry and set the girl carefully on the floor of the cottage. She had long red hair, pale skin, and wore a light green dress that hung down below her skinny ankles. Her face held a scowl that looked small to Henry; she was the first person his age he’d ever met.

“I’m bleeding,” said Omarr with a steady voice.

“The cut was supposed to seal instantly,” replied Hirrush. “The ritual didn’t perform as expected?”

Omarr held up his left hand, where his pinky finger was completely missing. There was only a nub where it had been. Henry stared at it in fascination for a moment before returning his gaze to the redheaded girl his father had brought home. “Walking between realms went just fine,” said Omarr. “It wasn’t even as cold as they said, just blackness and forward movement until I got here.” He rolled up the sleeve on his right arm, and showed a red circle that was trickling blood. “She bit me.”

“You shouldn’t have picked me up,” said Sofia with her arms crossed. She looked around the cottage, and Henry watched her eyes darting from the dried herbs in the kitchen to the table and chairs, to the hearth, and back to his fathers. “Where is this?”

“You’ve been kidnapped,” said Hirrush. He opened a drawer and pulled out some gauze. He eyed the princess carefully, then when she showed no sign of movement, he began to tend to Omarr’s wound. “Where we are isn’t important. What’s important is that you behave. Don’t do anything too foolish until your father has paid us for your safe return.” Hirrush turned to Henry. “Keep up your work. And put on some water for tea.”

Henry spared another glance at the girl, then did as he was told, though he paid more attention to what his fathers were saying than to forming the dough into balls.

“My father is the king,” declared the girl. “He will have your heads.”

“Is that true?” asked Henry from the counter. He was standing on a stool.

“It’s true that her father is the king,” replied Omarr. He dug around in a pocket with his left hand while Hirrush wrapped his other arm. Omarr finally found a coin and flicked it to Henry, who caught it with a flour-covered hand. The back of the coin had a man’s head on it. He had a thick, bulbous nose and a rather serious demeanor, at least from what Henry could see on the coin. Henry idly wondered whether any kings ever smiled on their coins. “And it’s true that the king might want to take our heads — your father and I, that is, you’re not in any danger — but the plain fact of it is, we’re cleverer than the king. We full well intend to get away with it.”

“My father is clever,” pouted Sofia.

“Your father is strong, powerful, rich, and by most accounts charismatic above and beyond the magic of the crown,” said Hirrush. “Most people say he’s kind, and I have little reason to doubt them. But being clever is something that he leaves to his sages.”

Sofia looked unhappy, but said nothing. Her ferocity and pride faded in equal measure as the minutes passed.

“You can have a cookie when they’re done,” said Henry.

“And tea,” added Hirrush. “We have no quarrel with you.”

Sofia gave no response, but instead walked toward the front door. From his vantage point, Henry could see his fathers share a look, but they didn’t move to stop her. She pushed the door open just a crack, glanced back at Hirrush and Omarr, and poked her head out.

“I could run away,” she said, though it was nearly a question.

“You could,” said Omarr. “But you’re not in the castle anymore, and you don’t know where it is you are. No one but us knows that you’re a princess, Sofia. And if you stay here, you could be home in a handful of days. We have a bed made up for you already. We’ll make sure that you’re nice and warm at night. We even have some clothes for you to wear.”

“You can run away later,” said Henry, speaking loudly so that she could hear him from the kitchen. “It will be easy to get away when they’re asleep and can’t chase you.” His fathers gave him a disapproving look, but Sofia nodded and closed the door.

The kettle began to whistle. Hirrush, having finished bandaging Omarr’s arm, began to make tea. He took a small bottle from a high up shelf and added it to a cup full of hot water. Henry had never seen that herb used in tea before, but Hirrush gave him a look and he said nothing.

“The first cup for you,” said Hirrush to Sofia. He placed the cup in front of her, then moved past her to take the stairs up to the second floor. Sofia sniffed the tea, took a sip, and then began drinking it down. Hirrush had added a lot of sugar to it. She had barely finished the cup when she slumped over in her chair. Omarr caught her before she could slide off and hit the ground.

“Is she okay?” asked Henry.

“She’s fine,” said Hirrush, who was coming back down the stairs with a pair of pillows. He put one beneath Sofia’s head, and the other on the floor. When he laid down, he rested his head on top of it, close to Sofia’s. “She’ll wake up in an hour or so. I just hope I’m not too rusty.”

“What’s going on?” asked Henry as Hirrush closed his eyes.

“Your father’s going to take a peek inside her mind,” said Omarr. He walked into the kitchen and started making cookies with Henry, who had practically forgotten the task with everything that was going on. “One of the reasons that we’re going to get away with this kidnapping is that your father and I have skills that nearly no one else in the whole kingdom shares.”

“Inside her mind?” asked Henry. He scrunched up his face. “How does that work?”

❧❧❧

It only took half a minute of meditation for Hirrush to step into his own mind. When he’d first begun the practice at the age of six, it had taken the instruction of a yogi, five hours of meditation, and the aid of a pinchwort tea, but the years of practice made it easy. The headaches would come later, when he had left the mental realm behind.

Hirrush’s mindscape was a large temple atop an immense spar of gray rock. There were a few scraggly trees that grew from small toeholds and a great white roiling mass of clouds that surrounded the column of rock and obscured the ground. Hirrush sniffed to himself when he saw how the clouds were moving. Within a few seconds they had gone still again, back to being a thick white sheet that undulated in a wind that could barely be felt. Hirrush was more nervous about this than he’d let on to either Omarr or Henry; the clouds below often reflected his emotions. Stilling them would still his troubled mind, but only for a time.

He made a quick tour of the temple before attempting the breach. Everything was where he’d left it. The library still held a copy of every book he’d read. He glanced over the memory representations, which all seemed in order and unblemished. His defenses were solid, even though several years had passed since he’d shored them up; he took the time to do this now, securing his mindscape against any possible intruders. His mindscape had once been where he spent most of his time, making modifications to the land and feeling the effects ripple through his mind. It had been freeing, a journey of mental modifications which had made him feel right with the world. If he was ever troubled or anxious, he had only to dive into his own mind to set things right.

The headaches meant that those days were over.

Knowing that he couldn’t put it off any longer, Hirrush walked up two flights of stairs to the viewing room on the top floor. Here he could feel the three other minds around him more keenly. Omarr’s mind was familiar, open, and accessible. The young mind of Henry had a golden note like a ringing bell. The third could only be Sofia. When Hirrush pressed against her mind with his own, the barrier between them felt spongy, with much more resistance than a five-year-old should have had. It wasn’t a good sign, but this course had been set from the moment the girl was taken through the spirit realm and brought to their house.

Hirrush moved through the barrier slowly, like moving through molasses, pushing against the mental matter that was abnormally thick. When he finally arrived inside her mindscape, it was with a sudden release, all the pressure gone at once. He popped into place on the lurching deck of a large ship at sea. There were undulating waves moving the ship and a thick downpour that obscured Hirrush’s vision. He held his hands out to the side and pushed against the storm, causing the waves to calm themselves and the rain to let up, though not entirely. Changing another person’s mindscape was difficult, an expenditure of his own mental energy, but there was no way that he’d be able to get anything done with the whole mindscape heaving about him.

The ship wasn’t accurate. That was common enough among mindscapes, which didn’t suffer from the same constraints as the physical world. His own temple was built in an architectural style that had never existed, and of course it raised questions about how anyone could have brought the materials up to build the temple, or how a living could be sustained so far from civilization. There were no animals, no edible plants, and not even any barrels to catch rain. Hirrush had contemplated making the changes required to have it be plausible, but that had been before the injury that left him with his headaches, and after that, idle mentalism had stopped.

The rigging of the ship consisted mostly of ropes that didn’t go anywhere, that hung from the masts and came down onto the deck without real purpose. It would have driven a sailor mad, Hirrush was sure. There were other details that his time as a ship passenger told him were wrong, a lack of tar on the sides, a few places where the boards seemed too short or the grain went the wrong way. With the sea mostly still, the ship had stopped moving so violently. The visibility had become good enough that he could see a lighthouse in the distance — a curiosity, given that most mindscapes had a background that lacked real clarity or distinction. He was sure that the meat of the mind was internal to the ship, in what were no doubt cavernous rooms that you’d never see on a real ship. In the mental realm, there was no need for a room to be constrained by the geometry of the hull which contained it.

Two thick doors led the way down to the innards of the ship, and these opened before Hirrush could make a move towards them. A tall man in robes of bright purple stepped forward. He was completely bald, and his face wore a scowl. The face was familiar to Hirrush.

“What good did you think this would do, Ibrahim?” asked Hirrush. “She’s five years old.”

“Better a weak defense than no defense at all,” said the royal mentalist. This was only a shade of the man, a fragment left behind from an excursion, but he was a threat all the same. “Still having headaches? I’m surprised you could even make a breach. Though I have to confess that I’m unsurprised that you would try to manipulate the mind of a child.”

“No manipulation,” said Hirrush with an even voice. He was steeling himself for the battle to come; he was more rusty than he had admitted to Omarr when they were making this plan. “I just need a baseline.”

“You’re not going to get it,” said Ibrahim. He lunged forward, with a knife flickering into his hand from nowhere. Hirrush dodged the first two slashes, and took the third on his forearm, but it was a simple matter of thought to heal the wound. Ibrahim’s fragment was powered by the brain of a child, a brain not yet developed enough to have any real force or direction behind it, even with whatever modifications the royal mentalist had made. Hirrush manifested a spear in his own hand and stabbed Ibrahim through the leg with a quick motion, which made a wound that didn’t close up at all. Ibrahim favored his other leg, and the knife he was holding flickered into the shape of a shield.

“It must be nice to beat me for once,” said Ibrahim. He spat to the side.

Hirrush made no comment. He simply grabbed the shield with one hand and shoved it to the side while stabbing forward with the spear. It struck Ibrahim’s fragment straight through the chest. He popped like a soap bubble. Hirrush held still for a moment, waiting for a second attack, but it never came. It was a pathetic battle, fought with real weapons, but it had been the best he could muster. No doubt if they had taken prince Rowan it would have been more of a challenge. Hirrush’s forearm looked fine, but still throbbed where the knife had sliced it.

Hirrush shook it off, and went exploring.

❧❧❧

“But what’s he doing in there?” asked Henry.

“He’s just looking,” said Omarr. “He says that minds are like books, but that book is constantly being written in, and revised, and pieces of it are torn out. We want there to be no trace of us in the princess’s mind when we give her back, but that means that we need to know what it looked like before she spent time with us.”

“You can remove memories?” asked Henry with raised eyebrows.

“Hirrush can,” said Omarr. He opened the oven and peeked in at the cookies. “You need the baseline, and as he’s described it there’s a good deal of art to the removal itself. It’s easy enough for people to know that they’ve missed something — it’s not terribly stealthy. But yes, that’s more or less it. The princess will be aware of missing time, but she won’t know what it is that she missed.”

“Will I be able to go into people’s minds when I’m older?” asked Henry. “Like how I’ll do dark magic when I’m older?”

“Ah,” said Omarr. “Now that’s a question.” He glanced over at the two prone bodies. Hirrush laid with his lanky hair on the pillow, with his sharp elbows pressed into the floor. His face was tense. Beside him, Sofia had her mouth halfway open. The princess was drooling slightly. Her face was blank, with no sign of what was happening between the two of them. “Your father wants you to become a mentalist. But it can be dangerous, in ways that black magic isn’t. And there’s some question about whether you’d even be able to. Your father tried with me, but I never got farther than entering my mindscape. That itself is rare enough, though I had more of an advantage than most that try to follow that path. Hirrush thinks there are maybe a thousand people in all of Donkerk that can manage as much. Those that can cross the barrier between minds number in the tens. Maybe even less. But it’s possible, with training, that you could do what Hirrush is doing now.” Omarr pulled the cookies out from the stove. “There, perfectly done.”

Omarr watched Henry closely. He and Hirrush often talked about the future that they wanted for the boy, but it wasn’t clear what Henry himself would want. If he wanted to be a mentalist, Hirrush would try his best to train him in the art, though Hirrush had an enormous handicap in that regard. If Henry wanted to be a dark wizard, they would teach him everything they knew. They would try their best to steer him away from the bad paths. Too many dark wizards had met their end atop a pile of corpses, or corrupted by some new ritual they were sure was going to work, or cut down by the oathkeepers before they’d done much more than say the wrong things to the wrong people. But it seemed just as likely that Henry might grow up and want to become a baker, or a stonemason, or something completely unrelated to the lives of his fathers. Hirrush wanted to push Henry toward greatness, but Omarr would have been content to let the boy wander. He couldn’t say that either path was truly wrong.

“When will they wake up?” asked Henry.

“They’re not truly asleep,” replied Omarr. “Your father’s in a deep trance, and Sofia is … well, I wouldn’t call it sleep.”

“Will she be okay?” asked Henry.

“Perfectly fine,” said Omarr. “Before you came along, your father and I had less cause to be good. This will be the fifth time we’ve done this, and each time the child was returned successfully.”

Henry furrowed his brow. “You kidnapped the princess five times?”

Omarr almost laughed, but the subject was a bit too serious for that. “No, different children. Lesser nobility with far less at stake. It’s dangerous work. But each time the child was returned, with only a blank gap where their memories of us should have been. And your father and I would be wealthy for a time, until we spent all the money we’d gotten.”

Henry frowned. “But taking things that don’t belong to you is bad,” he said slowly. “Including people?”

“Yes,” said Omarr with a nod. “But good and bad are a balancing act. Every time, your father and I decided that the good was greater than the bad. The king will be mad at us. It will hurt him that his daughter is gone, and he won’t like parting with the money, but once that money is in our hands, we’ll be able to raise you properly without having to expose ourselves to the outside world.”

“Like when you brought that woman in?” asked Henry.

“That’s it exactly,” said Omarr.

Adrianna had come to their cottage several months ago, as she often did, though this time it was with a request; a woman was dying and Adrianna could do nothing to help her. They hadn’t wanted to have a part in it, but eventually Omarr began to crack under Adrianna’s pleading. On a chilly spring morning, the woman was brought to the cottage. It was the sort of exposure that the two dark wizards truly didn’t want, but Hirrush had dug up a book called Wasting Diseases and the Culling of Major Animals which detailed a ritual that would require using the block of onyx that they kept in the small shed behind the house. The block had cost a dauphin’s ransom and taken an enormous amount of effort to bring to the cottage in the first place. Because it was so heavy and unwieldy, there was nothing for it but to bring the woman into their inner circle. Omarr and Hirrush had argued about it, even though they were in agreement.

The ritual had required the sacrifice of two full-grown bulls, supplied by the woman’s husband. Omarr and Hirrush had laid the woman down on the block of onyx, positioned a bull on either side of her, and then slit the throats of both the bulls in unison. The beasts had kicked and sprayed hot blood, but as the outer spirits watched, the ritual took hold, and a blackness ripped through both of them like lightning. The animals crumbled into piles of black ash; the woman walked away with fresh, new innards. They had let Henry watch the preparations, but not the ritual itself. And now their presence was known, at least to that woman and her husband. They had a strong incentive not to tell anyone, since they’d paid for an illegal act to be performed on the woman. It was still a risk.

Hirrush and Omarr had little in the way of practical skills. They would have plied a trade in dark magic, in the same way that Adrianna did, but people were more kind to witches than to wizards, especially a pair of wizards raising a small boy. Henry had changed things far more than they’d first expected he would. In the beginning they had treated him much like an animal, if truth be told. He needed to be fed and changed, and played with from time to time, but it was only slightly more work than when one of the goats had kids. Omarr wasn’t sure whether they would have kept him if they’d realized the depth of the commitment they’d made — much like the ritual itself, it was something that they’d decided on in the abstract, with the consequences not apparent until the reality of the decision unfolded in front of them. The boy had shaped their lives. Omarr would have thought that his reaction would be regret, but instead he was vaguely pleased by what a central focus the boy had taken for himself.

Sofia yawned and sat up slowly, looking around with glassy eyes. “Cookies?” she asked.

Omarr watched Hirrush carefully. He was slow to come out of the trance, and clutched at his head, digging his fingers into his hair. “Ow. Ow, ow ow.”

Omarr had prepared a different sort of tea, this one a mild sedative. He knelt down next to Hirrush and fed it to him slowly. Hirrush muttered another “Ow” and spilled a bit of the tea, but he drank most of it down. He laid back on the pillow, still clutching at his head. Henry had, of his own volition, put a half dozen of the cookies on a plate and brought it over to Sofia, who took one in each hand and ate them greedily. Hirrush would be out for the next few hours at the least, possibly even more, but if he’d gotten the baseline there was nothing much to worry about beyond the pain of the headache. Omarr turned his attention to the children.

❧❧❧

Some hours later the four of them sat down to a dinner of roasted chicken, peas, and mashed potatoes. Sofia had been more relaxed for a time, following Hirrush’s excursion into her mind and the calming of her emotions, but now some sullenness was appearing. Emotional manipulation was difficult and never lasted long before it needed to be reapplied. Hirrush picked at his food, trying to ignore the pounding in his head. He was sluggish and practically worthless; though the sun hadn’t yet set, he was committed to going to bed just after he’d finished eating. Omarr could watch the children for at least that long. Hirrush had finished putting up the ward that would keep Sofia from escaping the property, but he had used the last of his father’s bones some years earlier. He wasn’t entirely certain that the substitution of bones stolen from a graveyard would hold so well. Thinking about it made his head hurt more. He took another sip of tea to help keep the pain down.

“No word from the capital, princess,” said Omarr gently. “We’ll have a response in due time though, and handle the negotiations. I’m sure he’ll see reason.”

“You should do what a king says,” said Sofia with a pout. She prodded at her chicken. “Is there magic in this?”

“No,” replied Omarr. “We don’t use magic on something so frivolous as making chicken taste better.”

“Could we?” asked Henry.

“If we acted on the chicken while it was still alive,” said Omarr. “Then, maybe. But dark magic isn’t for talking about at the table.”

Henry ate quickly, something that he had learned from Omarr. He stopped after two quick mouthfuls of chicken and looked at Sofia. “Why should you do what the king says?” he asked her.

“Because he’s the king,” said Sofia.

“But why is he the king?” asked Henry, skipping entirely over the question of kingly authority, which seemed to Hirrush to be the obvious place to challenge her. He and Omarr would have to teach him better methods of argument.

“He’s got a crown,” said Sofia. She tentatively ate a small piece of chicken. It apparently met with her standards, as she began to eat the rest of the food in bits and pieces without complaint. If she had learned proper manners, she had apparently decided that they were on hiatus for the duration of her kidnapping — she was a messy eater.

“So if I take his crown I’d be a king?” asked Henry.

“It doesn’t work like that,” said Omarr. “The king of Donkerk wears the Boreal Crown. I’ve heard he has only to think it, and the crown will land atop his head. It’s the most powerful magical item known to our kingdom, infused with the spirit of the land. The crown can’t be taken from him, and someone who doesn’t wear the crown wouldn’t be accepted as king.”

“Oh,” said Henry. “So he made a dark pact?”

“No,” said Sofia around a mouthful of food. “My father would never do that.”

“Eight hundred years ago,” Omarr began, “When Neth had broken and fallen, it was an untamed land, with just the outposts of the ancient empire. One of the officers left in Donkerk was the king’s great-great-great-and-so-on-grandfather. The land of Donkerk had a spirit once, like the ocean has the elder spirit Kell, and the desert has Pothis. The king’s ancestor treated with the elder spirit, and the kingdom was formed by the binding that they underwent.”

“So it was a pact,” said Henry.

“Was not,” said Sofia, though it didn’t seem like she knew whether to direct her glare at Henry or Omarr.

“Pacts are a fine line,” said Hirrush. “If I sold a passing merchant one of our chickens, the two of us haven’t made a pact, we’ve made a transaction. If I told you that I was going to give you a cookie, that wouldn’t be a pact either, only a promise that I’ve made to you that I can freely break. For a true pact, you need some trust, and either that trust comes from neither party being able to break the pact, or from the pact holding firm for a long time. A pact needs consequences, or retribution, or something solid to make it real.”

“So did the king make a pact or not?” asked Henry. His food was mostly forgotten.

“I’d have to handle the Boreal Crown to know for sure,” said Omarr. “And there’s a fat chance of that ever happening. Could be the spirit just likes having a king around and it’s more of a convenience than pact. But the crown’s sat atop the head of a member of the royal line for eight hundred years, through two invasions and a civil war, so I’d lean towards it being a powerful pact of some sort.”

“Eat your peas,” said Hirrush to both Sofia and Henry. “They’re not just a garnish.” It was the first thing he’d contributed to the conversation. His head throbbed afterward, like forcing the words out had pushed all the blood in his body into his head.

“So I can’t be king?” asked Henry.

“Not of Donkerk, no,” said Omarr. “You could call yourself a king, but everyone would look for the crown, and you wouldn’t have it, so they’d know not to follow you. The crown makes its way down the bloodline of the king, and you’re not his son.”

“I might be,” said Henry with a smile. He turned to Sofia. “I’m an orphan.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“They don’t know who my mother is, and I’ve got two fathers, but I was born with a different father,” said Henry.

“My mother is dead,” said Sofia with a nod. “She died when I was born.”

“That doesn’t excuse either of you from eating your peas,” said Hirrush.

“I don’t like peas,” said Henry.

“I don’t like peas either,” said Sofia.

“No one likes peas,” said Hirrush. His head hurt, and he tried to shake it off. “That’s not the point of peas. They’re like a black magic that makes you go big and strong, and you just ignore the fact that they taste terrible.” Omarr stifled a cough. Hirrush looked towards Sofia, and though his head was swimming, he could see that he’d made a misstep by calling them magic.

“Think of it like a noble obligation,” said Omarr.

“What’s that?” asked Sofia.

“A noble obligation means riding out into battle to defend the commoners,” said Omarr. “It means facing down malevolent spirits, and saving damsels in distress.”

“That’s boy stuff,” said Sofia with a frown.

“Oh, there are plenty of women warriors,” said Omarr. “Now please, kindly, eat your peas.”

❧❧❧

“How long are you going to be watching me?” asked Rowan.

“Until your sister is returned to the castle,” said Ventor. It was the third time the prince had asked.

“Can you leave?” asked Rowan. The prince had a mop of brown hair that seemed badly in need of cutting to Ventor, who kept his own hair cropped close to his skull. The prince laid back on his bed, looking at the ceiling.

“No,” replied Ventor. His eyes slowly scanned the room for the fifth time in the last ten minutes.

“I’d like to be alone,” said Rowan.

“I’m afraid that what you would like is not of concern to me,” said Ventor.

“By the power of your oath to the king, I command you to leave me alone,” said Rowan. He was eight years old, and he didn’t sound the least bit powerful.

“I gave my oath to the king,” said Ventor evenly. “Not to you. I am sorry that you dislike it so, but I have my orders, and I cannot disobey them.”

Rowan sat back on his bed and harrumphed. “When I’m king, will you follow my orders?”

“When you are king, I will take the Oath of Fealty anew and pledge my service to you,” said Ventor.

“When I’m king, I’m going to make it so that you don’t follow me around,” said Rowan.

Ventor had no response to that so merely turned to look out the balcony. They still had no firm idea how the princess had been taken from the castle, though it was a certainty that magic of some sort was involved. The sages had gathered together in conference, but they had produced nothing more than wild speculation. The castle once had hiding holes and secret passageways, but those had been closed off a hundred years ago. An investigation had shown that they were still sealed. Everyone who worked in the castle had been interviewed, and a good number had gone before the royal mentalist for further interrogation, though that had yielded nothing of any value. A goodly number of oathkeepers had dispersed into the city, on the theory that the kidnapper couldn’t have gotten far, but they hadn’t turned up anything either. There had been guards stationed at every entrance and exit. Someone should have seen something, if not when the kidnapper entered the castle, then at least when he left with Sofia.

“I’m going to the library,” said Rowan. He unfolded himself from the large bed he’d been laying on. “You can come with, if you’d like.”

Ventor suppressed annoyance and followed the prince.

“Ventor?” asked Rowan as they walked down the halls. “What were you like when you were my age?”

“I would prefer not to discuss that,” said Ventor.

“Because you would have to tell me the truth?” asked Rowan. He looked at Ventor with a gleam in his eye.

“No,” replied Ventor. “I don’t wish to discuss it because it was not a pleasant time in my life. I try not to dwell on troubling times.”

Rowan frowned. “When I’m king, I’m going to make you tell me about it. So you should just tell me now.”

“Why do you wish to know?” asked Ventor.

“You were an orphan, weren’t you?” asked Rowan. “Like all the oathkeepers?” He kicked a small pebble down the hall, and watched it skitter across the flagstones.

“I was,” said Ventor. “My father was sent off to fight in the Perrian War, and my mother died while he was abroad. But not all the oathkeepers come from such circumstances. Some are given by their families to the High Rectory, and some join later in life. Sometimes it comes after a failed apprenticeship, but often it happens simply because they feel a calling.” He would have preferred to speak of less personal things.

“I could be an oathkeeper,” said Rowan.

Ventor said nothing. There was some precedent for it, but the kings of Donkerk hadn’t held oaths since the Juniper Rebellion. It would make the High Rectory nervous even if they heard that the young prince had been idly saying such things. His claim that he would use Ventor’s oaths against him was somewhat more troubling on a personal level. He could only hope that the prince matured as he aged. Hopefully the kingship didn’t pass on early.

The library was a large one, with books stacked in neatly ordered rows and two large ladders that ran along curved tracks all about the place. Every book was the same size, with similar binding. When a new book was added to the exhaustive collection, it was rebound to make it the same as the others, with only a few exceptions. All in all, it was a fortune in books and not a small one. The librarian was a short woman with graying hair and half-moon spectacles. She looked up at Rowan and Ventor with surprise as they entered, then quickly shelved the book she’d been reading.

“Prince Rowan, it is a pleasure to see you again,” said the librarian. “What can I help you find this day?”

“I want to read about dark magic,” said Rowan.

The librarian and glanced at Ventor, adjusted her dress, coughed into her hand, then said, “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

Rowan gave an exasperated sigh. “I don’t want to learn how to do dark magic, I want to know what it’s capable of. I want to know whether it was used to take my sister.” The librarian glanced at Ventor again, and Rowan turned to look his guardian up and down. “There’s nothing illegal in just knowing what dark magic does, is there? There have to be books about it.”

“It’s not illegal to know,” said Ventor. “But telling people what dark magic is capable of can often send them down the path of practicing dark magic. The king has decreed that we must be careful with who gains that knowledge.”

“Oh,” said Rowan with a frown. He turned back to the librarian. “So this library doesn’t have any books on dark magic at all?”

“Why dark magic?” interjected Ventor. “There are so many varieties of magic in the world, the eloists, the elementalists, the denialists, the mentalists, the spirit callers — why focus on the one area that carries the risk of tainting you, if not in spirit, then in the public perception?”

Rowan turned back to Ventor. “You said that the knowledge is tightly guarded,” he said. “So even the sages probably don’t know as much about dark magic as they do about other kinds of magic. There’s a royal mentalist who knows everything about mentalism, and we trade with the Isles enough that we know what the eloists can do, but the dark wizards are a blank spot. We don’t have a sage of dark magic, do we?” Ventor shook his head. “I think it’s probably more likely that my sister was taken by a dark wizard, because dark wizards are always evil.”

Ventor thought on this. A big part of the problem was that he had no clear instruction in this regard. He had been commanded to protect the prince from harm, but it wasn’t clear that what he was asking for would really lead to any measurable harm, especially as it came from the right place — wanting to save his sister. Yet dark wizards often started out with good intentions. The king had only put Ventor in charge of the prince’s security, not his upbringing. When he’d started guarding the prince, he had assumed that he would simply stand in the corner without saying a word until the princess was found and the kidnappers brought to justice. Now he was being asked to make momentous decisions.

“We do have a few books about dark magic,” said the librarian carefully after Ventor had been silent for a long moment. “Nothing that would teach you even the most basic ritual, but a few that chronicle the most famous dark wizards of the age and a few that describe the signs a dark wizard is practicing.” She looked to Ventor, with her eyes pleading for guidance, but Ventor had none to give her. “Our oldest book on the subject is from the time of the Nethian Empire, before the founding of the kingdom. It gives an exhaustive detailing of the attributes of their monstrous warriors.”

“Bring me all of them,” said Rowan. “I’ll read at the table.”

The Drowned Witch

Sofia was faster than him, and that bothered Henry. She sprinted across the short grass with bare feet, her red hair floating on the wind behind her. He couldn’t keep up. He’d thought that she would tire herself out, but instead she just kept running, running in circles around him, or running away from him, making him feel slow and stupid. He didn’t feel bad when his fathers were faster and stronger, because they were bigger, but Sofia was his size. While he might have graciously accepted losing a race to her, he’d lost every race.

“Race you to that goat!” called Sofia, pointing at Frederick, an old goat with a long, curled horn.

Henry saved his breath and simply ran. For a moment he thought that he’d make it there before her, but then it became obvious that she was just toying with him. She ran like a streak of lightning to beat him by a full three seconds. Frederick lifted up his head and looked at them in the goat’s equivalent of surprise, which involved chewing on cud and slowly looking back and forth between them.

“I’m tired of racing,” said Henry.

“Because you lost?” asked Sofia. Her smile was a little bit mean.

“Can we play make believe?” asked Henry.

Sofia huffed, then shrugged her shoulders. “I’ll be a queen and you can be my tiger.”

“What’s a tiger?” asked Henry.

“It’s a big cat,” said Sofia, as though this were the most obvious thing in the world.

“I don’t want to be a cat,” said Henry. “Can we play inside? I have toys there.”

Sofia seemed hesitant, but nodded all the same. She liked him better than she liked his fathers. She’d been with them for two days, sleeping in the bed they’d set up beside his own. While she seemed fine while it was just the two of them, she was much more subdued when his fathers were around. He didn’t know whether it was because they were grown-ups, or because they were dark wizards, or because they had kidnapped her, but he could imagine that she was thinking about all those things. Omarr had been watching them from inside, but said nothing as Sofia dashed into the house and up the stairs with Henry close behind her.

“You have a small room,” said Sofia, and not for the first time. Henry didn’t know if she was right or not; this was the only home he’d ever known. Certainly his room was smaller than any other in the house. It was fitted into a corner of the house where the eaves dipped down low enough that his fathers had to duck, but it had a large window and plenty of space to put his toys down on the floor, even with the second bed tucked in for Sofia. His fathers had built in cabinets and drawers all over. Henry had stuffed them with all sorts of things that he’d collected from around the cottage and the lands that surrounded it. He had a drawer filled with interesting rocks in a variety of colors and shapes, dried flowers that he’d pressed into books with Hirrush, and bits of animals — the horn that Frederick had lost when he got his head stuck in a fence, a bird’s nest that had dropped from the crabapple tree, and a small turtle shell, among others.

“Do you have any real toys?” asked Sofia as she looked through the drawers at all of his treasures.

“What are real toys?” asked Henry.

“Things that are meant to be toys,” said Sofia. She picked up a tiny vial with a dead cricket inside. “This isn’t a toy.”

Henry took the vial from her. It had been one of Hirrush’s, but it had been dropped and developed a crack down the side. Henry had added it to his collection. The cricket had been found later. “He’s a mummy,” said Henry. “Trapped in his tomb, like the kings of the dead pyramids in the Scour.” He smiled, and look up at Sofia. “Don’t you make believe?”

“I do,” said Sofia. “But I make believe with real things. We could make believe that the grasshopper was alive in his bottle —”

“Cricket,” Henry corrected.

“— but he’s not a mummy at all,” she finished.

“That’s boring,” said Henry.

“If you had real toys it wouldn’t be boring,” said Sofia. She sat down on the floor, with her skirts around her, looking idly around the room.

“We could build a toy,” said Henry. He began to look into the drawers, which Sofia had left open. He pulled out a handful of utensils — two forks and a spoon, each with their imperfections, though not quite unusable. If his fathers knew he had these in his room, they would take a hammer and straighten the tines, then stick it back in the kitchen drawer. He laid the forks side by side, then picked up a teacup with a chip in it and placed it between them. He laid the spoon into the cup upside down, with the bowl of the spoon sticking out. “There, it’s a bird,” he said.

“It is?” asked Sofia. He could tell that she was only humoring him because she was bored, but that was okay.

“The forks are his legs, and the spoon is his neck and beak,” said Henry. He picked the assembly up, and pressed the forks against the sides of the cup. He made the bird walk by picking up the cup and moving the tines of the fork across the ground. The spoon slid around in the cup, and threatened to tip out.

A brief frown seemed to cross her face. She opened her mouth, then closed it again. “What does he eat?” Sofia asked.

“Pebbles,” said Henry. He walked the teacup bird over to where Sofia had set down a few of the rocks from his collection, and then used the spoon to pick them up one by one and put them into the teacup. Sofia watched for a while without saying anything. Privately, Henry decided that his cup-bird wasn’t eating the pebbles, but collecting them for a nest. The nest would be built someplace high up, away from the predators. He wasn’t sure what the cup-bird ate, just that it wasn’t really pebbles.

“He should eat noodles,” said Sofia.

“Noodles?” asked Henry. He looked up at her, and for a moment saw that her face had softened. She grew suddenly serious and turned her nose up at him.

“Noodles,” she repeated. “He should eat people food. He should slurp it up.”

Henry nodded, and continued to walk the bird around the ground. It was an awkward walk, with the tines occasionally poking into the small cracks between the floorboards.

“Do you have any noodles?” asked Sofia.

“We eat noodles sometimes,” said Henry. “I don’t know.”

“You should check,” said Sofia. “He’ll get hungry if he’s got nothing to eat.”

Henry set the bird down, and it became two forks, a teacup, and a spoon again, right until Sofia picked it back up. Henry glanced back at her as he got to the stairs, and saw a faint smile on her face. He was certain that when he got back, she would have invented all sorts of new rules for the bird.

“Dad, do we have noodles?” asked Henry from halfway up the stairs.

“Pasta?” replied Hirrush. “No, none cooked.” He was laying on the padded bench next to the fireplace, which contained nothing but a pile of embers that he occasionally stirred with a poker. His headache had gotten better, but it had still left him practically useless. Henry didn’t like see his father hurt like that, but both his parents had assured him that there was nothing to be done.

“Can I cook some?” asked Henry.

Hirrush opened one eye and looked at Henry. “I don’t think we have any.”

“Oh,” said Henry. He turned to go back upstairs, then turned back to his father. “We’re playing.”

“Good,” said Hirrush. His smile was strained and faded quickly. Omarr came in from outside and sat down in a chair next to Hirrush with a worried look on his face. Omarr gave a similarly strained smile, though obviously for different reasons.

Henry marched back up the steps to his room. He liked Sofia, but he imagined that she would tell him that they always had noodles in her castle. Before he could say anything though, he saw the cup-bird moving. Sofia had backed away from it. She was staring at it in wonder.

“What did you do?” asked Henry.

The forks that made the bird’s feet had bent. As the bird walked forward, Henry could see the metal hinging like a real joint. The whole thing was animate, the spoon-head dipping and bobbing like a gardener snake sniffing at the air. The flat of the forks held firmly to the side of the teacup without anything keeping them in place. It moved like it was its own creature.

“I didn’t do anything,” said Sofia softly. Neither of them could take their eyes off of it.

“Dad!” called Henry, without looking away from where the assembly of utensils was exploring the floor.

Omarr came up the stairs slowly, but stopped dead in his tracks when he saw what was in the room. “What have the two of you been doing?” he asked slowly. He slipped a penknife out from one of his pockets and poked it into the side of his index finger, which drew blood. Henry had seen this one or two times before, enough that it was almost boring, even if it was dark magic. Omarr spread the bead of blood over the tip of his finger, and pointed towards the cup-bird. The bird showed no reaction.

“It’s a house spirit,” said Omarr. He wiped his bloodied finger on his shirt. “We’ve never had a house spirit.”

“It can’t be,” said Henry. “We made it.”

Omarr looked at him carefully, but didn’t seem to have much of an answer to that.

❧❧❧

Adrianna was having second thoughts.

Marurbo was the largest city in Donkerk by a wide margin, situated right where the Lenten River met the Juniper Ocean. The king’s castle was situated on a broad stretch of rock that split the river in two, right at the river’s mouth, but the city itself spread out on both sides of the river, the two halves stitched together by five separate bridges. It was said that a million people lived in the capital, and it was the center of both trade and industry for Donkerk and for hundreds of miles past it (though much of that area was desert, ocean, impassable mountains, or the Scour). Two weeks ago, the largest city that Adrianna had ever been to was Leshampur, which barely rated as a city at all. The capital had too many people and too much noise.

She sat in her room at the inn, and listened to one of the criers. There had to be hundreds of them in the capital, each staking out their own corner of the city. Omarr had come down with her, and on one of their first days in the big city she had asked him what kind of pay the king provided for that kind of work. He had laughed and told her that the criers were the ones that paid the city. A license for being a city crier ran into the hundreds of silvers. The criers made their money by yelling out enticements for the local businesses, driving people into taverns or shops whenever there wasn’t some pressing royal decree to be read out, a service which those taverns and shops paid handsomely for. The service of a crier, Omarr explained, was the difference between riches and ruin.

But Omarr had gone, and now she was stuck listening to the crier outside her window yelling in his booming voice about pickled fish.

It had been nerve-wracking when Omarr had left for the castle. After an hour had passed, she’d been sure that her door would be broken down by a whole squadron of oathkeepers, even though the whole plan was that Omarr would travel the Shadows Between Realms with the princess and end up back at the cottage some ten days of travel away. But Adrianna hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that something either would or had gone horribly wrong, and though Omarr didn’t even know which inn she was staying at — a precaution against his capture and torture that had done nothing for her confidence — she was certain that she was only minutes from some terrible fate arranged by the forces behind the king. She had been a milkmaid before her gran had died, and while she dealt with matters beyond the understanding of the common people, she still felt like she was horribly out of her depth, even after six full years of being a hedge witch. She wondered whether she would ever feel like her gran must have felt. Adrianna had to refer to the books constantly and trudge out to the leaning cottage to consult with Omarr and Hirrush. The few times she’d seen her gran use witchcraft, she’d done it with a confidence and power that suggested she could have thrown away her books long ago.

Armed men never showed up at her door. Eventually she’d had to go down and buy a bowl of soup. She ate it slowly, and was still sitting at one of the ale-stained tables when word first came that the princess had gone missing. She had asked whether the princess had run away or been taken, and though no one seemed to know, that at least told Adrianna that the princess had been taken, which almost certainly meant that Omarr had lost a finger and carried her through the Shadows Between Realms. The ritual was a powerful one that they’d dug up from some book or another, and though they had never used it before, Omarr and Hirrush had seemed confident enough that it would work. That faith had apparently been rewarded.

She sat in her bed, and listened to the town crier repeating the same things over and over again with only minor variations. Her job now was to wait.

The crier began to call the phrase “Eighteen fallen march on the waves” around noon on the third day. That was part of the instructions that Omarr had left behind when he had taken the princess. The king was signaling that the ransom would be paid. It was Adrianna’s cue to leave the inn and take up her part in the scheme. Her heart was beating fast, and her hands were already sweating, even though she hadn’t done anything yet. She wore a long dress that covered half-calf trousers, and a vest whose small pocket she patted a third time, just to make sure that the teeth were still there. She walked down to the docks, and found the small alley sheltered from view that she’d picked out several days ago.

Adrianna pulled one of the two teeth — top front incisors, mirrors of each other — from her pocket. The place where Omarr had written on it — when it had still been in the man’s mouth — was smudged, but she could still make out the circle he’d drawn. Omarr had killed the man with practiced ease. Though she knew it shouldn’t have an affect upon her, she couldn’t help but feel a little queasy.

She wasn’t sure how Omarr had found the man, and she hadn’t asked, but on their third day in the capital Omarr brought her to a tall, narrow house in a seedy part of the sprawling city. They’d made their way through a gathered crowd of solemn faces that spilled out into the creaky hallways. People watched them, but said nothing. Conversations died as they approached. Most of those they passed had the same hooked nose and high cheekbones, and all had straight black hair. Omarr moved like he knew where he was going, and people parted for him, giving him more room than even his broad shoulders needed. The house didn’t seem to be laid out with an particular plan in mind, but each room held people, all looking bleak. Eventually the seemingly endless series of doorways, hallways, cheap furniture, and musty smells gave way to a bedroom.

The man was old, though not so old that he should have been dying. He had the same nose as the men and women they’d passed on the way in and the same straight black hair, though it was streaked with gray. His eyes were watery and his skin was loose. He looked at Omarr with distaste. Omarr closed the door behind them, giving them privacy from the dozens of prying eyes.

“Well,” Omarr had said with a gentle smile. “No cold feet?”

The old man shook his head. “Two hundred gilders.”

“Two hundred,” agreed Omarr. “Does your family know?”

“You saw the looks,” said the old man. He coughed violently. Omarr watched with a frown. “You best pay my sons, else they’ll pulverize you.”

“So long as they don’t try to do that after they get their payment,” said Omarr. “Else I’ll sprout a set of wicked claws and rend them to pieces.” His voice was loud enough to carry past the door. “Seven trueborn sons?”

“Eleven,” said the old man. “Seven of them trueborn, at the least. I was told it wouldn’t matter if I had more, so long as it was at least seven.” He licked his dry lips. “Will this hurt?”

“Suffocation doesn’t hurt, if done right,” said Omarr. “And I give you my word that I’ll be doing it right, as little as that might mean to you. You’ll feel a sense of panic. You might try to fight back against me, but know that you’re doing this for your family. That animal instinct to fight won’t serve your interests.”

“Death,” said the old man. He closed his eyes. “Do what you will.”

Omarr stepped forward and used his thick fingers to lift the man’s upper lip. There was no protestation from the man, just a slight flinch and a tightening of his closed eyes. Omarr took a black pencil from his pocket and made two quick circles, one on each of the incisors.

“The symbols themselves don’t matter,” said Omarr. He kept his voice conversational. It took Adrianna a moment to realize that she was talking to him. “There are a number of rituals with a delayed effect that call for a symbol to be marked on the focus, but the mark is just to get the spirit’s attention. Most of the time when you see something fancy, a hundred lines each just so, a carefully precise ellipsis or angles measured in exact degrees, all done up in pretty colors — most of the time, a circle made in waxy charcoal will do just as well.”

Omarr took a pillow off the bed and pressed it to the old man’s face. Omarr was a big man, with a meat to his body like a bear, but he was friendly too, and in general he showed nothing of the obvious danger that a man like Hirrush presented. Adrianna had expected to see him conflicted, or saddened, but his face betrayed nothing of that. He was workmanlike, pushing the pillow firmly into the old man’s face, and when the old man began to kick and thrash, Omarr moved his head back from the flailing hands and put more of his weight into it. The thrashing became weak and feeble, then stopped entirely. After three full minutes had passed, Omarr pulled the pillow away and felt for the man’s pulse.

“I didn’t even learn his name,” she said softly.

“Mendel,” said Omarr. “Mendel Lavit, may he rest in peace.” He pulled a pair of pliers from within his tunic and turned to look at her. “He and I made a fair exchange, and I hastened an end that he knew was coming. He was in pain. Now, I’d recommend that you look away — this part you don’t need to see.” Adrianna heeded his advice, but that didn’t help to block out the wet crack as Omarr extracted the two teeth he’d marked.

When she turned back around, Omarr was setting two hundred gilders on a bedside table. The old man — Mendel — he looked almost peaceful, if not for the blood that dripped from his mouth. Omarr had wiped his hands on the bedspread, but they were still stained red.

After they were out on the street, having walked past the silent house full of Mendel’s sons and daughters, Adrianna finally asked.

“Why did you bring me?”

“You agreed to this,” said Omarr. “Six years as a hedge witch and still it’s a lesson you haven’t taken to heart. We sat in the cottage with you. We explained the plan. We said a man with seven trueborn sons would have to be suffocated for the spell we needed. We explained that we would find a man who was willing to give his life for a little gold, or if possible, who wanted to die. Mendel had days left to live. Maybe hours. I waited patiently, to give him as much tim