I stood by the empty riverbank. Where moments ago the water had been punctuated by opalescent discs of light, there was only the dull sheen of moving black and the whisper of current sliding past the stones. The bank itself looked worse for the absence, now that there was nothing left but flattened grass. That should be all I could collect today.

  In Elderstead, the canal wouldn’t have looked like this after harvesting. The water held itself in clean sections, broken into glow and shadow by design rather than chance, and lumenlilies there emerged as if they belonged to the surface itself. Here, the river refused all such order, its restless current gnawing at the bank and carrying everything downstream.

  At least the lack of nutrients gave rise to those bonetrees whose roots drove deep and strong enough to split stone. Anabeth, unsurprisingly, seemed perfectly content with that arrangement.

  She knelt at the river’s edge and pressed her palm to the ground. The packed soil parted along natural fault lines, and the stone simply cracked under the weight of her magic. The ground heaved, lifting a section of jointed root up and free as if the earth itself were offering it to her.

  She examined it, then severed only the lowest segment. The rest she guided back down, easing the soil closed again with another small pulse of stone-working until the bank looked almost undisturbed.

  “You should only take the basal portion,” she said. “Anything higher and the root loses its anchor. It’ll pull free over time, and then the whole tree goes.”

  I approve of the restraint. So she does have sympathy for the ecosystem.

  “If we over-harvest, it might die,” Anabeth continued cheerfully. “And then we wouldn’t be able to exploit it for eternity.”

  Ah. Never mind.

  The aetheric parasitic resonance detector creaked once more.

  “Oh?” Anabeth scooped the device into her hands, then bounced along the riverbank, holding the detector out in front of her. Where the creak grew loudest, she stopped, raised her free hand, and intoned, “Fulgar.”

  A lance of aether struck the empty space. There was a sound like paper tearing, followed by a choking hiss.

  Something died.

  Only then did it reveal itself. The outline sagged into visibility, traced by residual charge: a small, misshapen thing clinging desperately to the aether it had been feeding on. Semi-fluid, unevenly dense, like a malignant puddle that had learned hunger.

  “Parasitic field-slime,” she said cheerfully. “Vicious little things. That makes twenty slimes, twenty root segments. I can summon up to twenty Durands now, and they should hold shape for three days at most unless I decide to unsummon them early.”

  I turned to her slowly. “If you wished, could you summon all of them at once?” Because that would be frightening.

  “Oh! I’m afraid not.” She smiled apologetically. “I might not have enough aether for that. At my current ability, I could summon two—three at most if I were willing to accept… noticeable strain.” She tilted her head. “Why do you ask? Do you plan on taking over the local vicinity?”

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t mind if it’s Branfield!” She added, then returned to collection.

  I prayed she wouldn’t summon a stone sentinel as a mount before we found the bandit leader. Nobody with even a fragment of self-preservation would remain in the vicinity if she did.

  After we finished collecting, we made our way back toward Branfield’s eastern gate. I spotted a pair of The Wayfarers’ Compact members posted just inside the gate, carrying spears with them. Again, not magi. Magi wouldn’t carry spears.

  Would they know about the bandit Nosadiva? Even if they did, would they be willing to give away information?

  Guild channels were not neutral. Information flowed upward as often as it flowed out, and a poorly framed question could turn into a report. Maybe the reason why there were so many bandits around was because this guild and the bandits were in cahoots. That should be the reason why the weapons only ever get sold to the church. In that case, I shouldn’t just walk up to them and—

  Anabeth walked up to the two Compact members as though they were decorative fixtures.

  Wait. No! She’s literally carrying a bunch of bonetree roots with her! We’re so going to get accused of witchcraft.

  One of them had a honeyed briar loaf in hand. I could see her staring at it as she said, “Oh! Lovely gentlemen. That’s my favorite too.”

  Both men turned to her.

  She leaned closer. “The glaze ratio’s always tricky on those. Too much and it crystallizes, too little and it soaks through the crumb.” Before either of them could respond, she rummaged in her satchel and produced a wrapped loaf of her own. “This one’s from Elderstead. The honey strain is unique to the town! Would you like to try it?”

  I felt something in my soul give up.

  Fine. Not like I could do this any better than her. I should just leave it to her mercy.

  The younger guard hesitated, glancing sideways at his partner. The older one shrugged, a small, tired motion.

  “Won’t kill us,” he muttered. He accepted the loaf, broke off a piece, and chewed. “…That’s good,” he admitted.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Anabeth beamed. “Of course! The baker near the lower canal knows exactly how long to let the honey rest before glazing. It makes all the difference, I tell you. The spiced briar loaves are even better, but sadly I don’t have those with me. They never travel well—something about the oils separating if the aether’s too dry.”

  Was it just me, or had she adjusted her entire vocabulary? When she spoke to me, explanations arrived nested inside other explanations, each one assuming I’d follow if she just kept going. Here, she let each sentence land, clean and self-contained, with words that didn’t come out of a dictionary.

  The younger guard asked, “There are spiced ones?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “They use ember-thistle instead of cinnamon. It’s not enough to sting, just enough that you notice it on the way down.”

  The older guard huffed a quiet laugh. “Sounds expensive.”

  “Only if you buy them during festival week,” she leaned in and whispered. “Otherwise they’re quite reasonable. Elderstead’s markets are terribly unfair that way, once you know where to go.”

  She leaned against the gatepost as if she belonged there, entirely at ease. “Branfield’s got good grain, though. You can taste it in the crumb. I rather like it.”

  The younger guard let out a short breath. “Yeah. Lots of that’d be from my father’s fields, just south of the marsh.”

  Anabeth tilted her head. “That explains the texture, then.”

  He frowned slightly. “You can tell?”

  “Only that it isn’t rushed,” she said. “Grain like that takes time. Floodplain soil forces you to do things properly, or not at all.”

  He considered that, then nodded. “Aye. Floods ruin you if you get impatient.”

  After that, the conversation just flowed from grain to rain, from rain to whether the river had flooded early this year, to which winds flattened barley and which merely bent it.

  I watched the way they spoke to her now, with longer answers and fewer glances at the gate. One of them even set his spear against the wall so he could gesture properly.

  Maybe if I’d watched her in action long enough, I could tell if she’d applied any skills.

  There it was. She was even better at this than I was.

  It was the older guard who finally noticed her bonetree roots.

  “Those aren’t firewood,” he said.

  “No,” Anabeth said. “They’re boneroots.”

  “You have a use for them?”

  “Of course,” she said, as though the answer were obvious. “I’m a scholar.”

  She dropped the word. Scholars carried weight here in a way traders never would have.

  She gestured toward her satchel. “I’m studying long-term mineral stress in floodplain stone. Bonetrees respond beautifully to it! You see these consistent growth rings?” She pulled out the root and presented it to them. “Very honest structures. Much more reliable than quarry samples.”

  “So you’re not selling them?”

  “Goodness, no,” she said, almost laughing. “I wouldn’t know where to start.” She slid the boneroot back into her satchel, then laughed. “We ran into a few rather scary-looking fellows on the road the other day. But nothing came of it. This gentleman here—” she gestured to me, warm and proud “—has a very intimidating way of looking at people when he concentrates. Or maybe they just decided the boneroots weren’t worth it. I heard one of them say something like… Nosedive would give them a handful if they brought back these useless roots?”

  The older guard cackled. “Nosedive! Hah! The name’s Nosadiva. And yeah, you were lucky.”

  “Lucky?” Anabeth echoed.

  “You didn’t look like you had much worth taking,” he said. Then his grin faded, just a touch. “That man’s not some roadside thug. He’s a war-bred bastard who fought in the northern pushes. He’s survived things that broke better men in half. When the Saints stopped paying him, he kept doing what he knew. That’s why he’s still alive.”

  “Oh my,” Anabeth said, hand rising to her mouth in mild alarm. “That does sound dangerous.”

  The older guard shrugged. “You start to recognize men like that. Trouble gathers around them.” His jaw tightened. “He knows the Order doesn’t reach this far anymore. Knows no one’s coming when the road goes dark. If it weren’t for the Church’s blessing holding this place together, he’d have burned Branfield to the stone!”

  “I’d never want to encounter such a man!” She said at once. “We’re scholars, not fighters. If there are… particular roads we ought to avoid, or habits we should adopt, I’d hate to stumble into trouble out of ignorance.”

  The younger guard laughed. “What would you like to know?”

  By the time Anabeth and the guards parted ways, we knew not only of Nosadiva, but of four other bandit gangs circling Branfield’s roads—where they watched from, what they took, and which paths they never touched.

  “So!” She whispered from behind me as we rode Silvermane back to our tavern room. “Nosadiva keeps to the old quarry road. They watch wagons from the treeline and drop down once they’re sure they’re slow.” Her fingers ticked off points. “Six to eight people the last time the Compact counted. More if he’s hired on extra hands, but all of them should be seasoned fighters. His core team are former mercenaries from the Goblin War. He’s dangerous and will kill at sight, so we must dispatch him swiftly or flee immediately if we see him.”

  These were all great pieces of information.

  “And you know what? He avoids church wagons, hedge-mage caravans, anything that looks warded—but anything flashy draws him. Especially silver.”

  I looked down at myself, to my silver armor.

  Ah. I will be the bait, won’t I?

  “Mmmm…” Anabeth hummed from behind me. “You’d make a great looking prey. Just pretend to not be an all-powerful overlord, my lord.”

  Yeah. That can be done. I’ll just be myself.

  We were three steps from the outer gate when someone cleared his throat behind us. “Good evening, travelers.”

  We turned.

  The man wore white robes trimmed in gold thread, expensive enough to make a statement about priorities, and clean enough to prove it. The staff in his hand was polished ashwood capped with a sunburst sigil worked in electrum, warm to the eye in a way that suggested blessing.

  He came from the church.

  Two guards flanked him, both bearing the insignia of the Wayfarers’ Compact. Not the same men from the gate, but dressed the same way.

  The priest inclined his head just enough to be courteous. “My name is Priest Calsen,” he said. “Of the Radiant Concord, Branfield Chapter.”

  Anabeth’s hand slid from my shoulder, smooth and unhurried. She turned with a smile already in place. “Good evening.”

  Calsen’s gaze passed over her, then returned to me. It lingered longer than politeness required. On the armor.

  “I don’t mean to delay you,” he continued. “But it’s been brought to my attention that you arrived in town earlier today, and that you may have encountered… difficulties on the road.”

  Anabeth tilted her head. “Difficulties? Ah! So you’ve already heard!”

  As Anabeth conversed with Calsen, I just did my very best to not look directly at his eyes and at the space right above his forehead. The last thing I wanted was to accidentally trigger Silent Authority and undermine his jurisdiction.

  Calsen rested both hands atop his staff. “When travelers of means pass through Branfield under such circumstances, the Concord prefers to offer guidance, protection, where appropriate, and counsel. Would you be willing to spare a few minutes to discuss matters with the Church?”

  Ah.

  I felt Anabeth’s fingers brush my wrist once.

  “Well,” she said, “it would be terribly rude to refuse, wouldn’t it?”

  She looked up at me. I said nothing.

  “All right, my lord,” she murmured. “Let’s see what they want.”