"Buy proper food for the household, and give the rest back to your people."
"But, the dhampir said-"
"Never mind. " Leesil dumped the coins in his hand onto the table. "This will be enough."
Elena looked at the pile and then at Leesil. Her perplexed frown didn't fade when she nodded and left the hall, satchel in hand.
Leesil offered Magiere a halfhearted smile. "Nothing ever changes."
"Not in this world," she replied, then shook off the moment and got up from her chair. "The sun is setting, and we should get to the edge of the town. Wynn, I want to keep this away from the people, if possible."
"Of course," the sage agreed. "But I cannot be certain where Vordana will come from until I sense him."
Leesil strapped on his studded leather hauberk and belted his punching blades as he watched Magiere prepare. She put on her own hauberk and made certain her falchion slipped easily from its sheath. Her black hair tied back with a leather thong, its red glints matched the firelight tinge on her pale face. He wished he could watch her a little longer like this. There were two crossbows, and he handed the smaller one to Wynn.
"Strap this over your back… just in case. I'll get the quarrels and meet you outside."
They walked out the manor's gate toward Pudurlatsat. As they neared the village, Wynn stopped in the road that led through its center to the river dock and knelt down. She rolled the cold lamp crystal between her trembling hands until its light burst forth, and set it beside her on the ground with her crossbow.
There was so much to remember from years past. She recalled theories and processes she had studied in her homeland guild, recorded in scant notes throughout her journals. It was little more than what all apprentice sages learned of the arcane, among all other subjects studied. All theories, summation and postulation, but it would have to suffice.
"I must focus," she said, "if I am to tune my sight to the element of Spirit that pervades this place and see any shift within it."
A simplified explanation. She wished it were as simple to accomplish.
"Get to it," Magiere said. "We'll keep watch."
Wynn clenched her hands to stop their trembling.
Ritual was the safest method, as she did not have the experience to hold all the symbols solely in her mind, as with a spell. It would also bolster potency and provide stability. She scratched the sign for Spirit in the earth with a wide circle around it, and then kneeled within the circle. She traced a smaller one around herself, and in the border between the two circumferences, she added shorthand sigils.
Wynn remained still, pushing down uncertainty, and silently recited the processes scribed in the earth. Shutting her eyes, she placed her hands over them.
She focused on letting the world fill her with its presence, its essence. She imagined herself breathing it in, and then made the essence flow through her palms and into her eyes. In her darkened sight, the scribed sigils appeared and rushed at her… into her… until her inner awareness spun with vertigo. Time stretched until she forgot how long she had knelt there, repeating the process until she felt her face-her eyes-begin to tingle beneath her hands.
"Wynn?"
"Shush… Leesil, leave her be."
"This is taking too long," Leesil muttered.
Wynn slumped, and her hands dropped to flatten on the ground and brace her up. She opened her eyes.
Across the world's night colors lay a translucent mist of off white, just shy of blue. Its radiance permeated everything like a second view of the world overlaid across her normal sight. Within the buildings' dead wood, the radiance thinned, leaving shadowed hollows in the shapes of shacks, huts, and shops. The glimmer diickened near the earth and was even brighter in her hands upon it. She looked out through the forest, and the ghostly mist became a net through the branches, leaves, and needles of trees and brush.
But even there, Wynn saw the waning essence as in the town structures.
A nearby tree with barren limbs had lost nearly all its inner sheen, its frame like a skeleton of deep shadows. It was almost dead. She swallowed hard and breamed deep to quell the urge to vomit.
"Wynn… did it work?" Leesil asked. "Can you see anything?"
She turned, and the sight of Leesil startled her. He shimmered like a ghost illuminated from within. He shone most where his dark skin was exposed and least where his hauberk and clothing covered him. His amber irises were like stones caught in sunlight, so brilliant, they pained her eyes.
"Yes…" she answered, her voice heavy with effort. "I can see."
Leesil's radiance blurred ever so slightly.
Wynn sat upright, though her stomach lurched. She looked about the forest and at the town ahead along the inland road. Nothing changed.
Then she saw it again. A perceptible shift in the glimmering mist. It moved.
"It… He is coming," she rasped.
"Where?" Magiere demanded from behind her.
Wynn looked bom ways, along the town's landward side and through the trees, trying to discern the mist's flow. It was slowly building momentum. Its currents aligned, moving in the same direction.
'To the east," she said, and heard Chap's low snarl in answer. "In the trees back beyond the town."
"Leesil, cut through the town, and try to get past him," Magiere said. "Chap and I will draw him back toward the road and try to ambush him this side of the bridge. We'll at least keep him off balance until you come up from behind. Wynn, stay behind Chap and me, and keep out of sight if possible."
Wynn reached for the dark shape of her crossbow.
The mist's currents in the earth changed before her eyes. Still heading east, they paralleled the riverside road through town.
"Wait," she blurted out. "I think… think he moved on to the main road."
Leesil hissed under his breath. "Valhachkasej'a! He's walking straight into town. All right, same as before, but I'll head east through the woods and backtrack toward him. Try to keep him occupied."
Wynn watched Leesil snuff his torch and take off into the trees. His own glow mingled in the forest's web of essence, and then he was gone.
"That's enough, Wynn," Magiere said. "We know where he is. Come on."
Wynn arose and stepped from the circle.
The world remained a distorted overlay of the ghostly and solid slurred across each other. It should have ended the moment she stepped free of the symbols scratched in the earth, but it did not.
Her vertigo sharpened. She crumpled to her knees again and vomited up her supper.
Two hands grabbed Wynn's shoulders from behind, holding her upright.
"What's wrong?" Magiere said.
"It should have stopped," Wynn gagged out. "I cannot… make it stop."
"Close your eyes," Magiere said. "Don't look at anything. But we have to go, now!"
Wynn was jerked around before she could close her eyes.
Trails of radiance flowed through Magiere, as in Leesil, yet without his strange brilliance.
And tangled as well within Magiere's essence were lines of shadow, like those of the dying tree. Ribbons of black wove through her glimmering blue-white essence, and…
They moved.
Wynn saw her hands clasped on Magiere's forearm and saw the glow from her own essence-her spirit-creeping toward Magiere's flesh. She lifted her gaze upward, but did not find the amber sparks of light she had seen in Leesil.
Magiere's eyes were pits of darkness.
Welstiel sat up without disorientation that night. For once, he had no dreams, no momentary lapse trying to remember the previous dawn.
Chane had procured a large piece of heavy canvas and, as sunrise approached, found a dense copse. He hid the horses and rigged an enclosed tent, which he covered in branches until it blended with the land.