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The forest watched me in silence.
A chorus of birds serenaded me in stereo, some from the woods and others from the town behind my back. I didn’t think there would be that many in October, but here they were, singing away without a care in the world.
Logic said that they were establishing and defending their territory so when the breeding season came in the spring, they were ready for mating. They were screaming, “My spot! Mine! Stay away!” But it was still lovely.
Curran walked out of the gates and strode toward me. “There you are.”
“Here I am. Might want to stay away from the dust. I think this is what they bombed the town square with.”
He stopped about fifteen yards away. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Yes.”
He looked at the crescent of brown powder and the spray of blood on the grass. “Blood ward?”
“Yep. They came to negotiate.”
“You haven’t lost your touch, clearly.”
“That was all them. I didn’t do a thing. I talked to them a bit and then their negotiator self-destructed. Not voluntarily.”
“I’ve negotiated with you before. That tracks.”
“Ha. Ha.”
“What do I need to safely get you out of there?”
“Burn the dust. If we could get a small sample, that would be great, too.”
“Sit tight. Don’t go anywhere.”
My husband, the funny man.
Ten minutes later the shapeshifters came out of the gates, flanking two sleepy-looking people. Troy carried very long tongs that probably came from a smithy and a plastic cup with a lid. The shapeshifters wore almost identical pinched expressions. Andre and Hakeem clearly wanted to find the nearest deep hole and crawl into it.
Troy held his breath, used the tongs to clamp the cup, scooped some of the powder off the grass, and then covered his nose, and carefully snapped on the lid. He backed away, and the two sleepy people waved their arms around and summoned two conical flame jets. Fire mages, the modern answer to magical hazmat.
It took the firebugs another ten minutes to thoroughly torch all the powder. By the end, I sat in a semicircle of blackened grass.
The shapeshifters drenched the burned area with water just to be on the safe side. I broke the ward and stepped out.
“It’s good to see you safe, Consort,” Keelan told me.
“It’s good to be safe. I need that plastic cup.”
Troy handed it over.
Jynx, who’d been rummaging through the shredded robes of the priest-mage, trotted over, and offered me a small cloth bag covered with red glyphs. I hefted it. The outline told me another one of those spheres was inside. Opening the bag was out of the question. Pulling out a rock and then being crushed under it as it expanded wasn’t on the agenda today.
“Thank you.”
I took the bag, and Curran and I walked back to the house.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“We did a perimeter run. I wanted to see if there were any other places they could hit us from.”
“I don’t think complex tactics are their strong suit.”
“Agreed. The wall is the boundary. One side defends it, the other attacks. Nice and simple.”
I reached for his arm and wrapped my own around it. A little reassurance.
“I left two people to watch you,” he said.
“What about Rimush and Jushur?”
“Jushur is in a trance, meditating. Rimush ran with us.”
Hmmm. “How did he do?”
“He kept up.” He flexed a little, squeezing my hand in the crook of his arm. “I came back, my guards were asleep, and you were gone. I followed your scent trail. How’d you end up out there?”
“Pretty simple really. I felt something. Maybe the magic coming back, maybe a sort of call to the wall. The guards were out and one of the high-level magic users waited at the edge.”
“So you went alone?”
“Everybody was asleep or gone.”
“Fair enough.” He squeezed my hand again.
“It’s not Andre and Hakeem’s fault. It was very strong magic.”
“We’ll stagger the sentries. One on the wall, another some distance away.”
I told him about the priest-mage conversation, the exploding head, and the dust.
Curran smiled. “It’s worried. It offered a half-assed peace treaty. It probably wouldn’t have honored it. It wanted to buy time to study us and prepare.”
“We’re not giving them half of Penderton. Not one person more.”
He stopped and looked at me.
“They’re dead. All the tributes are dead. It sent one of its higher-ranking humans to negotiate. The priest-mages are not wearing collars. They are skilled and valuable, and it killed that person, just like that. Like it was nothing. It already tried with rocks and didn’t get anywhere, but it threw a person away anyway on the off chance that the dust would penetrate the ward.”
“Human sacrifice,” Curran said. His expression was hard, his gray eyes dark.
I nodded. “I need to speak with my father.”
“Go. We’ll hold down the fort.”
“I’ll try to be quick.”
Curran chuckled. “You haven’t spoken to your father for three months. The only thing he loves more than talking is lecturing. He’s going to keep you there as long as he can.”
