Sil nearly stumbled over the boy’s cot in the hallway. She’d forgotten seeing Verti’s men hauling it up the stairs just as she was leaving, at Tallah’s behest.


    Vergil lay on it, huddled tight against the wall, his sheets a sweat-stained, crumpled mess. He whimpered softly and kicked out a leg like a dog having a bad dream.


    Three or four drops of burn-leaf extract a bell’s call after his evening meal would help ease his rest. She’d get some more the next time she went into the Agora. Tallah was taking it with her tea and had nearly depleted their entire stock.


    “I can’t leave you alone for even a spell, can I?” she asked as she walked in.


    Tallah was at her desk, head on the smooth black wood, both hands pressing on her temples. She let out a whimper as the door creaked when opened.


    “You’ve been trying to channel, haven’t you? Do you never learn?”


    Red splotches of burst capillaries rimmed the sorceress’s eyes when she finally looked up. There was a smudged streak of dried blood on her upper lip, a clot in her nose, and the accompanying stain on her arm. She groaned rather than answer Sil’s question.


    “Did Verti ask anything about Vergil?”


    No answer, just an endless stare to somewhere far beyond the walls. The corner of an eye twitched spasmodically.


    “You’re an imbecile.”


    “We’ve also told her. She refuses to listen,” Christina’s pitiless tone rose hoarsely from Tallah’s throat. “Give me something,” the idiot in question followed up.


    Sil set her satchel down at her desk and emptied out the scrolls and odd assortment of engraving supplies she’d picked up at the stores outside the Guild’s compound. She’d taken some measure of pleasure from keeping her Guard minders out in the falling snow, stamping and shuffling their feet through the freezing cold. They hadn’t even tried to hide.


    “Misery suits you. I think I’ll leave you like that.”


    “Sil!”


    But she had already lit a brazier and adjusted its flame.


    “Yes, yes, I’ll have something ready in a bit. Don’t wet yourself.”


    Two measured thimbles of her potion base got poured into a tube and set above the fire. She hummed softly the melody she’d known her entire life, measuring the time for the philter’s preparation. She dropped various other ingredients into the tube, following the words to her mother’s rhyme.


    “Eye of toad, and tongue of worm,” she cooed over the bubbling currant as she added in a pinch of dried bloodberry. “With a thumb of goose, and an ear of corn.”


    Nonsense that coaxed a smile out of her. She stirred three times with a thin metal rod then took the tube off its fire with pliers, opened a window, and plunged it into the snow bank outside. The rhyme counted out the cooling time.


    With another pinch of beaster’s salt sprinkled in, she handed it to Tallah.


    “One gulp. Straight down.”


    “What’s in this?” the sorceress asked after obeying, face twisting into a painful-looking grimace of disgust.


    “This and that. You’ll feel better in a bit. It’d be best if you slept on it for a couple bells.”


    Of course, Tallah wasn’t listening. She adjusted her spectacles, stumbled to her feet and moved over to the waiting scrolls.


    “Right then,” she breathed out, a sigh of relief in her voice as the lines of pain on her face eased out. “What do we have here?” She read the first scroll on hand, crumpled the paper, and threw it into the hearth. “You were followed?”


    “Guard cronies. And Lucian, for some reason. I wrote down everything in sight so he’d get bored and bugger off.”


    “Did he?”


    “Eventually. Strangest thing, though.” She pulled out a particular scroll and shoved it under Tallah’s nose. “Either he’s got a weird read on me, or he thought something of our previous talk, but he directed me to this. And then warned me away.”


    Tallah read and scrunched up her nose.


    “Head names the price? Deidra must’ve really pissed in Catharina’s coffee.”


    “We’ll have competition.”


    A shrug, a crumpled scroll, another crackle in the fire.


    “There’s a map in the chest. Bring it, please.” She moved the pile to her desk and dove into the work. Pointless drivel was crossed out with a charcoal pencil. An array of random words was circled and then copied to a clean sheet of rough paper. “Is this exactly as it said on the billboard?”


    “Of course.”


    “Fancy that.”


    Sil took away some of Tallah’s overcrowding tomes and cleared up a space large enough to unroll the map. An inkwell and a snuffed-out candle held it in place.


    “Anything interesting?”


    “Lots. Also lots of nothing. Need to sieve out the chaff.”


    She brewed tea over her burner while Tallah worked, then steamed a pouch of kinnettle petals above the kettle. While the tea infused, her own blend of herbs, she checked in on Vergil and set the pouch on his pillow, by his head. A few breaths and his fits subsided. Finally still, he looked every bit the child that he actually was.


    “What’s all that?”


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    A string of words crowded together on the fresh scroll in gibberish arrangement. Old Forge was circled on the map and thin lines connected the smaller settlements around it, going nearly to the very edge of Vas, to Amaranth.


    “Code. Now would’ve been the best time to get ahead of her. By Thaw most of this will be cold trails and trampled routes but at least we know where we’re starting from.”


    She reached out and plucked the steaming mug from Sil’s hands. She sipped, grimaced, looked incredulous into the cup. A slight gnashing sound came from her as she struggled to chew the half-melted sugar slush.


    “This one''s yours. Stop taking my drinks.”


    They swapped mugs while Tallah wrote down some more seemingly random words plucked from the Guild’s listing.


    “Right. Anyway, look at this.”


    She traced the path from Old Forge, down the river Calis, into Amaranth.


    “The last time I dismantled Deidra’s faction, twelve Summers ago, she had been operating out of Neant. She’s moved onto the mainland now, striking out from Amaranth and seeding discord up along the river, into Old Forge.” She drank, adjusted her glasses, and traced the string of words. “These are all Claw postings. They’re scheming big.”


    “Through the Guild?”


    “Through the Guild, yes. They code the message for embedded agents and distribute it to the most likely affected areas. That you found these here means that there’s a chance unrest will bloom nearby. They think Deidra’s coming to Valen.”


    “What happens if some hard-head adventurer decides they want to take on the mission?”


    Tallah grinned.


    “How do you think we’ve been recruiting our best Claws over the years? When someone outside the Guard turns in the request, they’ll find themselves joined by someone very insistent on partaking of the mission even without a cut. Generally it’ll be hard to refuse as they’ll often be Iluna, or a sheathed Claw.”


    “Huh. Never knew.”


    “Very few people outside the Claws know this. I had to burn it out of Caragill when you were recovering, back when I tied up loose ends.”


    “Ah.”


    She sipped her tea and looked closer at the map. She’d been to Old Forge once, when she had been a girl, and found it a quiet, rather droll place compared to her native, dark-walled, raucous Drack. Granted, that had been two lifetimes ago but she remembered liking the place. It would be a nice change of pace compared to Valen and Aztroa.


    “What’s our move forward?”


    Tallah’s shoulders slumped and she sighed over her tea.


    “I’ll get better first.” She spat the words out indignantly, loathe to give her and Christina the satisfaction. “And then we wait for Thaw. You’ll book us—” She looked back, towards Vergil’s cot and frowned. “You’ll book all three of us as a party heading into Old Forge. Peace keeping, bandit hunting, monster suppression. Nothing political. I’ll tell you which is which.”


    “And from there we try and pick up the trail?”


    “That’s the wide of it. We’ll keep an eye on the postings until then. There should be another set coming in a fortnight or so. With any luck, I should be able to predict where the Empire thinks Deidra’s heading.”


    “You’re putting a lot of stock in these.”


    “It’s a start. The first time I went after her at Catharina’s orders it took me four years before I caught up, and I had my own Claws. I don’t expect it’ll be any faster now.”


    Sil sighed and chewed her tea.


    “Solstice first?”


    “Definitely. I want Anna’s strength. Deidra was Christina’s equal at Hoarfrost.” She grimaced as if struck a blow, then resumed. “Even if her pride still won’t admit it. And the witch has the gall to call me a child.”


    “That still leaves the Storm Guard dogging us. I can bet that Rumi character is either a Claw, or she has some of her own. They’ve been following me all day.”


    Tallah waved an impatient hand and rolled her eyes.


    “Lay low. Stay quiet. I doubt they have anything on us worth a lick of salt.”


    “Then why—”


    “Because they can’t be sure we weren’t involved in killing Anna’s Sanctum. It doesn’t take a terribly sharp Claw to see that some very powerful people had a violent disagreement in there. If it were me asking questions, you’d already wish you’d have let the chimeras eat you.” She looked up at her and smiled a nasty, evil little smile. “If it were me, I’d have picked you up long before coming in for a chat like that upstart brat. Tianna’s brick-walled but you’d be fair game.”


    Yes, next time she’d let her suffer. That, or spike her currant with a diuretic. She still had some corallin’s tooth stems somewhere.


    “Charming.”


    She drifted away from the sorceress and watched the gathering dark outside. Bells sounded in the distance but she didn’t count them. Ancient instincts warned her of a danger she couldn’t see and it turned her skin to goose flesh. She’d been careful. Anyone making a report on her would only note on how dull she was and what a waste of time trailing her had been.


    It wouldn’t be enough to shake loose the invisible pinch of the Storm Guard. She couldn’t say how she knew that, but she did and the thought refused to be ignored.


    “Why isn’t your old friend already in chains?” she asked without turning her gaze away from the people moving in the streets.


    “Deidra’s a Crepuscular.”


    Ah. That explained absolutely nothing. A dagger stare at Tallah’s back provided no elaboration. Not like it mattered. Tallah would find this woman even if she hid under Catharina’s own throne. Now that she was animate about the hunt there would be nothing stopping her until she got exactly what she wanted. There were two more soul gems resting at the bottom of the chest, ready to be filled.


    What do I want?


    Sure enough, she knew what she wanted. She longed for it. It gnawed at her peace.


    Add another corpse to your pile, Silestra. Do it. You know that’s the only way it’ll end. You can’t help it.


    Sugar turned to ash on her tongue and she set the mug down. Stupid to want and stupid that she was tempted to go back out into the cold and make her way to the Agora, into that narrow alley and through that rickety door past the anvil…


    “Festival’s coming up.” She needed to fill the silence with something before her feet took the decision away from her. “You expect any of them to show?”


    Tallah shrugged without turning.


    “Isadora or Cassandra. Maybe. Depends which one’s got the figurative black eye. Ort definitely won’t come down. Anatol, like any good pet, won’t leave his master fighting alone.” She took a piece of blotting paper and carefully removed a smudge from her writing. “It’ll be a hot day under Cares when the Dryad deigns to show. She hates Winter.”


    “I doubt my Goddess will show up,” Sil said. It was absurd to even consider. Blessed Panacea had only shown up once for the Festival of Awakening, slapped Ort’s incarnate avatar, and then vanished without a word to the gathered people.


    That had been so long before Sil’s time that it reeked of myth rather than reality.


    “I haven’t been to the Festival since I was a girl,” she mused to nobody in particular. She remembered it vaguely, an outline of a memory rather than anything clear. It started up a headache, like most of her remembrances did, when she tried vainly to focus it in her mind’s eye.


    She had learned to give up before it would become overbearing. She did so now and refocused on the moment and her selfish, niggling wants. Out of the fire and into the pan…


    “Take the boy when you go. It probably won’t make him any stupider,” Tallah said with a hint of malice in her voice.


    That’s unkind, Sil thought but immediately stifled a chuckle of her own. After a tenday with Vergil, she was about ready to strangle the wretch.


    “Actually, really do take him if you decide to go,” Tallah said after staring out through the door for a few heartbeats. “Doubt he’s ever seen something like it. May do his misery some good.”