The Seeker put a hand against the frame of the door and leaned.

“Might I assist you?” he said. He spoke with the nasal and over-refined accent of a Pyrthian. It had been some years since Eris last heard a voice like that, but she recognized it at once.

Such tones did not conjure happy memories.

She stared at him. They were near the same height, but she felt microscopic. Their eyes met for a long time.

“I mistook your room for another,” she managed at length. “My apologies.” With that she turned.

“Tarry one moment,” he said. His voice was so authoritative that she felt there was no choice but obey, like his very vocal chords commandeered her muscles. “What is your name?”

She took stock of all her options. Knife, still on her. Jade ward. Spellward. She would need both if it came to a fight. But if it came to a fight…it couldn’t, not as she was then. Such an outcome was to be avoided at all costs.

The innkeep said he asked after her, and he was a Seeker, clearly. She had grown too complacent since her escape from the Magisters nearly three years prior. What other explanation was there, but that they finally had caught up to her?

She had only one advantage, and she knew it: whoever this Seeker sought, it was a magician. Not a normal girl with normal eyes.

Pages flipped through her mind. She needed an answer. There were so many traps laid out before her; whatever else, the truth could not pass her lips.

“Guinevere,” she replied. She played her hesitation as confusion rather than suspicion.

“Guinevere,” he repeated.

“Is something the matter?” Eris stepped toward him. Although her heart was up to a thousand beats per minute, she knew how to lie—to seem unconcerned. Her childhood taught her that well.

His red eyes gave a long and vicious look. “Where are you from?”

Eris scoffed. She also knew not to overcompensate. “I apologize for stirring you.” With that she turned again, and she didn’t look back. Nor did she return to her own room next-door. Instead she walked straight back up to the inn’s ground floor.

There she ducked behind a column to catch her breath. Did her eyes have him deceived? Would he follow? She stole a glance into the hallway and saw no pursuers.

The first impulse: to flee. Leave immediately, tell no one her destination. She had some money still with her. But she needed Robur. He, no one else, knew how to brew the antipotion. But she didn’t dare return to his room, only two doors down from her own.

Instead, she went straight to the barber-surgeon’s.

“I’m sorry,” the woman, the barber whose name Eris still hadn’t learned, said, “we’re closed now. I can give you a nice clean wash tomorrow, all right?”

Eris presented her coinpurse. “I will give you ten drachmae if you fetch my friend from the inn.”

The barber stared. “What’s this about?”

“I will give you another five if you do not ask. He is in room 3-7. Do not mention me, but tell him to come at once. I will wait for him here.”

She argued back for some time, but for the ghastly sum of twenty silver coins she agreed to do this menial task. Anyone else might’ve done it, too, but what mattered to her now most of all was a safe place to stay. The barber-surgeon’s was a basement establishment, with an entrance in an alley and only a small storefront on ground level—it made a good safehouse.

She waited on that same chair where her leg was set for ten minutes. Scheming all the while. By her estimation she had murdered four men in the last two years and faced down countless supernatural horrors, including no fewer than two demons, five goblins, three elementals, a tribe of Arktids, and an owlbear. What was one more man to that pile?

Aside from that she was powerless—everything. A Seeker could fight, knew spells, had a powerful Essence. He was a magician trained for squashing little things like Eris, runaways and rogue wizards. He would be resistant or immune to her magic even if she could cast, no doubt steeped in enchanted armor, laden with magical jewelry, and bearing imbued weapons. And he would be smart. Clever enough to box her in before going for the throat.

Not as smart as her. But smart all the same.

Those ten minutes might have been the rest of the day before she saw the door crack open at the top of the stairs leading down. She ducked for cover, but soon she saw the less-than imposing silhouette of Robur with the dwarf barber behind.

Robur still looked exhausted. He’d barely been given time to rest.

“What is it?” he said.

“Keep your voice down!” Eris said. She rose to meet him.

“All right, miss,” the barber said, “I’ve fetched him, but you can’t stay here.”

“Quiet!” she snapped at her, too, “we will stay till we have a plan. Now go sweep the floor!”

The barber gawked at her, but was so stunned by the harshness. Eris didn’t watch except to see her go. She addressed Robur, still whispering, “We have been traced by a Seeker.”

The boy’s eyelids were heavy. Even this revelation didn’t stir him as it should have. “So?”

“So he intends to haul us both back to Pyrthos!”

“Perhaps he has some other intention—”

“I promise you he does not,” she said.

He shrugged with lethargy. “There may be worse fates. It has been a very rough year…”

“He will have me executed!”

“I knew a girl who absconded, she wasn’t executed. Mages are too valuable to be killed simply because they leave the academy.”

“You do not understand,” Eris said. “My departure was not amicable. I fled. ‘Tis no accident I ended up in these miserable, far-off principalities; they will have my head if I fall into their captivity!”

“…what did you do?”

She hesitated. “I breached the Vault of the Ancients.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Not when you steal the passcode off Magister Akeraz’s desk. I will tell you the rest later! We are wasting time. Take my key. Go directly to my room and retrieve my things, then return to here. We can depart once night falls, and he will have no trace with which to follow after us.”

“You cannot flee him forever.”

“If I must, I will. At least until you have given me the antipotion. Now go!”

The barber, who now had a broom in her hands, called out, “Is everything all right?”

“Everything is fine!” Eris shouted back. Then to Robur, “Go!”

No doubt the boy had thoughts of his own, but he was wise enough not to voice them in her presence, and as ever he did like he was told. He took her key and went to quickly gather their things.

Quickly. Quickly gather their things. Directly, in fact, was the word she used. Nothing more imperative than speed.

An hour passed. Robur did not return. Then another. And another. Soon a snowstorm fell over Swep-Nos, together with the shroud of night—and still no Robur.

“Miss,” the barber said. “You’ve got to leave. I need to close up and see my kids. I’ve been patient with you, but we’re just about—”

“Shut up!” Eris shouted. She growled. She didn’t want to listen to this woman’s ramblings while she thought. And she was thinking, very hard.

The storm complicated her plans of flight. But she couldn’t abandon Robur. Not while he had the rest of her things—their supplies, their money, their books, and the knowledge of the antipotion. She should’ve taught herself how to make it in case something like this happened. Then she could have left him to die. No need to run faster than the owlbear, as the expression went, when a friend was slower than you. But there was no choice now. She had to retrieve him.

Perhaps he tripped, or fell asleep. She would find him lodged in a snowbank. Waiting to be retrieved. They might still evade the Seeker together.

…or perhaps he had been apprehended and was set out for her as bait. No alternative made sense, truly. She knew it. The Seeker let her get away, but now he waited for her with a hostage. He may have been embarrassed to discover how readily she abandoned her companions at any other time, but not now.

She didn’t know what to do.

“That’s it,” the barber said. “I’m fetching the guards.”

Eris drew her knife. Anger kicked against her gut. “So be it! I am—”

She stopped. An idea. The guards. It was an unpleasant night, but the guards would still be out on the walls. The commotion of their alarum bells might offer just the cover she needed to escape. She might fetch them herself under false pretenses, but she was a human and might not be believed, at least not with urgency. It would be safer to be more dangerous. To force them to pursue her. If she walked into a trap, as she knew she would, then they might rescue her inadvertently.

They would have trouble tracking her through town during a storm. And even if she were apprehended, it was better their captivity than the Keeper’s.

It was a desperate plan, but she knew no other—and time could not be wasted any longer.

She lowered the knife at the barber. “Give your money to me,” she said.

“What?” The barber was stunned.

“Everything you have! Give it to me, or I will—” she fumbled with the blade, “kill you!”

To drive home the effect she slashed at the wall. A piece of pottery was pushed from a countertop to the ground. It shattered on impact. Eris lunged forward theatrically.

“You won’t get away with this! You’re bloody mad! What about your friend—”

A small statuette rested on another countertop. Eris grabbed it and stuck it in her cloak. “Don’t tempt me, woman.”

The barber gave the knife’s blade a long look. Then she complied. She gathered up her money from a crude vault and offered it. Eris took enough to be missed.

“They’ll hang you for this!”

“Yes, yes, I know,” she said. She flipped the operating table over onto its side. “Now fetch the guards at once. Tell them they should catch me if they can!”

With that she ascended the staircase, back into the alley.

Freezing wind caught her cloak. She made her way to the town square. The only points of light were lanterns behind windows. White downfall swirled about her. She stumbled around in the piling snow as she blindly searched for the inn, and by the time she found it she looked as if she had walked through a cotton field.

And by the time she found it, one of the town’s bells had been rung. It was distant. Barely audible through the roar of the wind. But she heard it, far-off, at the inn’s entryway.

They would never be able to pursue her outside the town’s walls in this storm. With Robur she could make it. She did not intend to return to Swep-Nos in any case.

Her hands were frozen shut as she tried for the door. At first she thought it locked, but it pulled open eventually, and she tumbled inside to the dim amber light of the inn’s first floor.

The whole place was deserted. No one here. No sounds but the howls of the storm beyond the stone walls—and the crackling of a fire at the other side of the room. This sight wasn’t so strange for this place, but she knew disaster awaited her soon. She saw no other option. She stepped forward…

The door slammed shut behind her.

The fire in the hearth went out.

She stopped. The sconces along the wall bubbled into brightness. She looked around, and she saw the room around her wasn’t deserted at all.

Slumped in one chair was the innkeeper, the dwarf Oktar; in another was Robur, limp, passed out, silent.

Atop the nearby tabletop sat the Seeker.

He wasn’t there a moment prior. The room had been deserted. It was only—

An illusion. She fell for an illusion. Before she might have sensed it, but now she had no recourse; it seemed nothing but real to her before it was shattered. But she knew some sort of trick had to have awaited her here.

“How did you know I was coming?” the Seeker said.

She stared at him, then at the sedated innkeeper. He was breathing. Suddenly she felt a jolt of hope. If the guards found her now, she might be able to win them to her side. This Seeker was clearly a menace to the wellbeing of the town.

The Seeker. Before he wore only a tunic. Now a coat of mail clung over his shoulders. A long sword at his hip. Gauntlets, a cloak, and still the symbol of the tower visible for all to see on a tabard across his chest.

She clutched the knife’s blade. Staring at him. No response came. She needed time. If he wished to talk, so be it.

“It was clever to drink the temhos potion. It would have been cleverer to conceal yourself somewhere secret first. Did you think smothering your Essence would fool me alone, when you used your own name?”

“You will be disappointed to learn the potion had nothing to do with you.”

“Truly? Why, then?” Silence. “Your friend did not consume it for himself…”

“Robur is not my friend,” she replied.

“You came back for him all the same.”

“Who are you?” she said.

“Lukon. We had best keep all things civil, dear Eris, for we have a long way to travel back to Erimos together.”

She folded her arms. “And what fate awaits me when I arrive?”

“You know your crime. The Council will pass judgement. An example will be made.”

“I know the nature of the Council’s ‘examples.’ You give me little reason to comply.”

“Compliance can be commanded,” Lukon said. “Even a march to the gallows can be made comfortable with the right perspective.”

“Poetic.”

“Step forward.”

Eris did not step forward. She prepared her knife to strike. She waited, desperate, for her contingency to arrive. For salvation to come from the heavens. For her plan to pay off.

Lukon sighed. He raised his arms, and, gesturing, prepared to cast a spell.

Eris recognized it immediately. She knew it from the slumbering dwarf and boy at the table. He was casting Sleep. A powerful, esoteric, profoundly invasive spell, impossible to resist if used properly. Its only downside was its complexity, the length of its casting. That gave her just enough time to leap out at him with her knife—

He drew his longsword with his other hand. He parried her blow and nearly struck her, but her jade ward deflected the hit. He recoiled, surprised to see her so well protected by magic, but he caught on quickly; he stepped back, and his concentration was such that he maintained his casting. He pushed forward with his hand and muttered something quietly in Regal. The smile on his face said everything.

Eris presented her other arm to block the spell. She had no notion whether or not her glove might resist Sleep, and so she stood there, wondering if she were still awake, for seconds—seconds Lukon himself spent stunned.

“This is exactly the tiresome antic-making I meant—” he started, when just then a pounding came from the inn’s door.

Muffled voices followed. Two male dwarves:

“Et’s looked!”

“Oktar never looks the damn thing. The handel’s froozen shoot.”

“Mebe the gerl looked it?”

“Sheit! Oktar! Are ye in there? Open fer us!”

Lukon turned toward the door. Without missing a single moment he extended his hand, and there, projecting from his fingertips, came the same voice as that of the sleeping innkeep in the chair.

“We’re closing up for the storm! Come back tomorrow!” were the words. It was Aethereal Voice, used to trick the guards seeking Eris down. Very clever. No doubt he had a binding on the door to keep it shut until it was knocked down.

Eris had only one second to disrupt his plan. She could try to wake Robur. Go for another attack. Yell for help.

She decided on all three at once.

She fixed a thumb and pointer finger around the gilt ring on her left hand. It had thawed somewhat, and it rotated around her skin when she turned it.

So she gripped tightly, and turned it quickly. As fast and far one way as possible, then the other.

A deafening roar boomed through the inn. The sound like a hundred lions being dropped onto an elephant from the top of a tower. The cacophony was so loud while the ring turned that glasses shook on the bartop, the fire in the sconces danced, and Lukon stumbled backward. Eris herself nearly threw up, but she was insulated from the worst of it as the wearer, and she had been prepared. She seized the initiative and dashed to Robur and shook him awake, screaming meanwhile,

“Help! He’s killed Oktar!”

The guards battered down the door. Although the magic kept it sealed along the threshold, the door couldn’t withstand axe blows, and soon it was splintered to pieces.

“You bitch!” Lukon shouted, but it was too late. One guard held a crossbow, the other a buckler and handaxe.

Eris only listened while she tried to wake Robur. No shaking did anything. No matter what, he stayed asleep, like in a trance.

Only one idea struck her.

She grabbed her knife, falling to the ground, and dragged it across his skin.

The conversation continued:

“Who the hell are ye?” one dwarf said.

“I am Lukon of Erimos, Seeker of the Gray Council on official business. Lay down your arms!”

“What did ye do tae Oktar?”

“I am in pursuit of a renegade mage. This woman here. She entranced him and the boy; I arrived only in time to stop her plans.”

A pause. “Look at her eyes!” the other dwarf said. “She ain’t a wetch!”

“Nae! Why don’t ye tell the truth, human?”

“I am an official of the Magisters. You will desist at my command!”

“Put yer sword away! We’ll take ye all in and work it out with the judge tomorrow morning!”

Robur gasped to life the moment his wound started to bleed. Eris pulled him off his chair and he tumbled to the ground.

The dwarf raised his crossbow.

“Enough!” Lukon said. He began to cast another spell.

The guard shot his bolt.

A shield shimmered around Lukon. The bolt hit it and disintegrated, but he stumbled backward. The other guard stepped forward, yelling something. Lukon parried an incoming blow from the axe, then, with his spare hand, shot out a series of cascading blue missiles. They streaked through the air like enchanted arrows. When they hit their target, the crossbowdwarf they tore holes clean through his flesh, wounds as wide as artillery, a barrage of four magical bolts.

“You were warned!” he said.

Eris did not watch the rest of the melee, as the shielddwarf and Lukon sparred. She grabbed Robur. “Move!” she said. She pulled him to his feet, then dragged him down the stairs to their rooms.

“Eris,” Robur said, “it’s a trap…”

“Get your pack! Be ready to go, we leave now!”

Eris found her room’s door open. All her things were ransacked, but she found her pack, most of her money, and, most importantly, the Manastone circlet still there. Nothing else mattered. Robur emerged soon after with his things.

“He’s too powerful for us,” he said.

“He underestimated me. He will not make the mistake again,” Eris replied.

They rushed down the corridor toward the back exit. Dwarf structures were not prone to fires, but some care was taken for such a large inn as this one—it was the center of the entire town. They climbed back up the stairs, to a side corridor on the ground floor, and tried the door.

The Portal was Held. Eris threw her weight against it, but it didn’t budge. She tried running the bronze strip of enchanted metal on her right hand all along the frame to no effect; the Spellward did not work in such a way. She swore.

Dwarves did not build windows.

“Stand back,” Robur said. His eyes ran back and forth over the threshold, then closed. He cast some spell. Eris didn’t recognize it. The process was slow and she watched down the sconce-lit corridor nervously while she waited, yet once he was done, he went for the door, turned the handle—

And pushed it open.

The freezing night air rushed in.

“What did you do?” Eris said.

“I purchased a spellbook,” he said, now so tired that he seemed sedated, “to learn to dispel magic. After the infernal…it seemed very useful. It’s called Arcane Abrogation.”

She pulled him outside. Swep-Nos looked now a tundra, so white and dark that no buildings were visible beyond three inches from her eyes.

“Did you not think it wise to tell me?” she whispered. Yet over the storm her voice was inaudible, and he didn’t respond. Nothing at all could be heard except the wind and the bells ringing.

Somehow her plan worked. With any luck they would be more focused on Lukon than her.

They both wore their winter clothes now, but a night in a storm like this still seemed a death sentence. But they couldn’t stay. It was too dangerous. Eris thought hard about where might be safer. About where to spend the night. About what her options were…

And she remembered the smuggler’s village.

Two guards in full armor, armed with battleaxes, rushed down the main road. They nearly saw her, but she yanked Robur into an alley as they passed. She faintly saw from there the outline of the town’s walls from the glow of lanterns the watch always kept lit. No doubt the gates would be closed, but then they were for keeping people out—and groups, not individuals—more than keeping them in. She went to the walls, trudging through the snow, and skirted along their perimeter until she found their lowest point. The snow piled up around their base, making them shorter still, and with Robur’s help she scaled to the top, then helped him over the edge, and soon they found themselves on the other side.

The bells still rang.

The harder part would be navigating through the storm.

Eris had an excellent memory. She remembered the ravine by the road and remembered how to get there, how far it was, and from there felt certain she could navigate to the village—if only she could recognize certain landmarks. But the ravine gave her an idea.

She stumbled with Robur through freezing cold and sharp branches in search of the road for fifteen minutes before finding it. It was covered in snow, hardly distinguishable from the rest of the landscape except by the placement of the trees at its sides, their branches still kept in check in a clearly unnatural way. Once they had it, it was slow, awful going, and she felt certain she would die at any moment. Yet even in the darkness she recognized where the road narrowed, where the dark trees stopped, and where a ravine led off into the woods below.

“Come!” she yelled. She descended that ravine, the same place she’d tossed the dying body of the smuggler only days before, and there fond precisely what she had hoped—the wind. The rocks were such, and the trees and their canopy, that the wind and snow were blocked out, and everything felt so much warmer.

It was narrow, craggy, and uncomfortable for two humans. But they would make do.

They stayed there for an hour, trying to warm up, praying for the storm to die down. At first their prayers were mocked. It only grew worse, and even their covered spot was showered with snow.

Yet at the hour’s end, the winds died down. The snow lulled. For the first time all night Eris caught a glimpse of the moon and the stars through the clouds, and she knew the time to move had come.

She took three steps and kicked a log.

She looked down.

A man, frozen solid, body broken, partially scavenged, a wound in his neck, stuck half-buried out of the snow. Not five feet from their resting place.

She took great care not to get lost or turned around as she led them to the village. Soon, although it didn’t feel soon to them, they reached the ancient chimeric tree, and they found the grove. It took no small amount of searching to locate the trapdoors beneath the snow, but they did, and they pulled it open, and there they found salvation.

With the dwarf chimney cleaned, they even had space for a fire; and with the door locked, they both slept soundly that night, well into the day.

Eris explained what happened to her and Robur explained what happened to him. When he arrived at Eris’ room, the door’s lock had been magically picked. Lukon was inside. Robur had tried to cast a spell, but it was like the mana in his lungs was stolen from him, like he was winded and couldn’t speak. Then he passed out.

“He is an expert in counterspells. ‘Tis his entire purpose. We cannot defeat him with magic, not directly,” she said.

“He is very powerful,” Robur agreed.

“Too powerful for us yet.”

Robur considered. “I wonder if this is how the mundane feel when they encounter us.”

“For the most part they do not wonder long." She rubbed her eyes, thinking. "We should flee to Kem-Karwene.”

“He will think to look for us there.”

“He may, but I suspect he shall be in poor graces with the Dwarves after killing two of their guards,” she said.

“The authorities may be after you still, too.”

She frowned. “Perhaps…yet Kem-Karwene is the only place where his search for us may be impeded. Otherwise he will pursue us with impunity.”

“We can’t stay there for long. We would merely be delaying the inevitable. We should choose our destination now and go directly.”

They both sighed at that. He was right. So they would go to the city and…do what? It brought them no closer to their goals.

“Fine,” she conceded. “Then we cross the Great Divide to Koilados. ‘Tis remote enough, and it may buy us time to consider how to deal with the Manawyrm.”

Robur shrugged. “Very well. At least it may be warmer there.”

It would be. But then Eris had no idea how warm 'warm' was.