Meegan had an ugly-looking cut on his arm, just below the shoulder. Some edge of the rock had ripped through his padded jerkin and chewed on into his flesh. I reached out towards it. Always start with a weak point.

“Myltorc! Myltorcdammu!” He chewed at the gag trying to get the words out.

I have to admit a small thrill at having the upper hand after what seemed like weeks of nothing but running, sleeping in ditches, and being terrified. Here at last was a foe I could handle.

“Oh, you’ll talk all right!” I used the menacing voice I used to scare my younger cousins with when they were small enough to push around. “You’ll talk.” And I slapped my palm to his wound, willing him to burn!

The results were . . . underwhelming. At first I felt nothing but the decidedly unpleasant squishiness of his injury as he writhed and jerked beneath my touch. I had to press hard to keep him from twisting away. At least it seemed to be hurting him, but that turned out to be more by way of anticipation than anything else, and he quieted down soon enough. I tried harder. Who knows what working magic is supposed to feel like? In the games we used to play in the palace, the sorcerer—always Martus, by dint of being the eldest brother—cast his spells with a strained face, as if constipated, squeezing his reluctant magic into the world through a small . . . well, you get the picture. Lacking any better instruction, I put into practice what I’d learned as a child. I crouched there on the mountain, one hand on my hopefully terrified victim, my face constipated with the awesome power I was straining to release.

When it actually happened, nobody there was more surprised than me. My hand tingled. I’m sure all magic tingles—though it may have been pins and needles—then a peculiar brittle feeling stole from each fingertip, joining and spreading to the wrist. What I first took to be a paling of the flesh became a faint but unmistakable glow. Light started to leak around my fingers as if I were concealing something brighter than the sun within my grip, and a faint warmth rolled beneath my palm. Meegan stopped struggling and stared at me in horror, straining at his bonds. I pushed harder, willing hurt into the little bastard. Bright fracture lines started to spread across the back of my hand.

The light and the warmth seemed to draw on me, flow from my core to the single extremity where they burned. The day grew colder, the rocks harder, the pain in my ankle and throat sharp and insistent. The spreading cracks frightened me, too strong a reminder of the fissure that had chased me when I broke the Silent Sister’s spell.

“No!” I jerked my hand back, and the weight of exhaustion that settled on me nearly pressed me to the rocks.

A shadow loomed across us. “Have you broken him yet?” Snorri squatted beside me, wincing.

I lifted my head. It weighed several times more than it should. The rip in Meegan’s jerkin showed pale and unbroken skin beneath the blackening smears of blood, a faint scar recording where his wound had been. “Shit.”

Snorri tugged at the man’s gag. “Ready to talk?”

“I been ready since I came round,” Meegan said, trying to roll back into a sitting position. “I was trying to tell that one. No need for any rough stuff. I’ll tell you everything I know.”

“Oh,” I said, vaguely disappointed, though it was exactly what I would have done in his position. “And we’re supposed to let you go after that, are we?”

Meegan swallowed. “It’d be right fair of you.” He had a nervous, sweaty way about him.

“Fair as twenty against two?” Snorri rumbled. He’d brought his axe with him and ran his thumb along its edge as he spoke.

“Ah, well.” Meegan swallowed again. “Weren’t anything personal. That’s just how many she paid for. Was just business for Edris. He spread her coin around and got together a bunch of us local men, fellas who’d seen some trouble, fellas who’d fought a battle or hired theirselves out for sharp-work before, that kind o’ thing.”

“She?” I knew plenty of women who’d like to see me take a beating, and not a few who might pay to have it done, but twenty men was excessive, and most of them would probably not want the castigation to be fatal.

Meegan nodded, eager to please, spittle drying on his chin, snot on his upper lip. “Edris said she were a fine-looking woman. Didn’t say it all polite like that, though, no sir.”

“You didn’t see her?” Snorri leaned in.

Meegan shook his head. “Edris made the deal. He ain’t local. Knows a lot of bad folk. Passes through once, twice a year.”

“She’ll be the necromancer. Did she have a name?” Snorri asked.