The south road out of Thornwall was, by the standards of roads in the region, adequate. This was a generous assessment. It was the kind of road that had been built by people who understood the basic concept — flat surface, goes somewhere, you walk on it — and had then decided that the basic concept was sufficient and that any further refinement would be showing off.

  It was wide enough for a cart, provided the cart was narrow and the driver optimistic. It was surfaced with packed earth that became packed mud when it rained, and packed dust when it didn't, and a sort of philosophical paste during the transitional periods between the two.

  Wildflowers grew along its edges in the summer months, which gave it a picturesque quality that compensated, in the opinion of absolutely nobody who actually used the road, for the ruts.

  Levin was walking south along this road at approximately half past noon, having completed his rat-clearance quest in the grain cellar (fourteen rats, all Level 0, all dispatched with a broom rather than magic because using an Arcane Bolt on a rat felt like using a siege engine to open a walnut, and because the broom, for once, had been cooperative, possibly out of a shared antipathy toward rodents).

  The three silver reward sat in his pocket alongside the bronze disc, and the afternoon stretched ahead of him with the pleasant emptiness of a calendar belonging to someone with no appointments, no obligations, and no particular desire to acquire either.

  He was thinking about soup.

  Specifically, he was thinking about whether Marda's soup — which she made on Thursdays from whatever vegetables had failed to sell at market, and which tasted, consistently, of hot water that had been in the same room as a potato — could be improved by the addition of the herbs he'd seen growing wild along the treeline.

  Rosemary, possibly. Thyme.

  Something with flavour, at any rate, which was a quality Marda's soup treated as optional in the way that some people treated exercise as optional: acknowledged in theory, avoided in practice, and discussed only when someone else brought it up.

  He was deep enough into this contemplation — he had progressed from herbs to the question of whether Marda would accept culinary suggestions, and had concluded that she would accept them the way a fortress accepts a siege, which is to say with hostility and eventual starvation — that he almost missed the sound.

  Almost.

  The sound was sharp, sudden, and carried the unmistakable tonal quality of a human voice producing the word "please" at a volume and pitch that indicated the speaker was not requesting a second helping of dessert.

  Levin stopped walking.

  The sound had come from ahead and to the right, where the road curved around a stand of elm trees that had been growing there since before the road existed and had adopted a posture of studied indifference toward the traffic passing beneath them.

  The elms blocked the view around the bend.

  The sound came again — "please, I haven't got anything, please" — and this time it was accompanied by a second voice, lower, rougher, saying something that Levin couldn't quite make out but that had the cadence and general emotional register of a threat.

  He walked forward. He rounded the bend.

  The scene arranged before him had the compositional simplicity of a woodcut illustration in a children's book about the dangers of travelling alone.

  On the left side of the road stood a girl.

  She was young — sixteen, perhaps, brown hair pulled back in a braid that was coming undone, bright eyes that were currently very wide, wearing a dress that had been patched at the elbows and a pair of boots that were, Levin noted with the involuntary professional assessment of someone whose own boots were failing, in considerably better condition than his.

  She was pressed against the trunk of an elm tree, both hands raised, palms out, in the universal posture of a person who wished to communicate that they were unarmed, unthreatening, and very much hoping that the current situation would resolve itself without anyone being stabbed.

  On the right side of the road stood the reason for her concern.

  He was tall, broad-shouldered, and dressed in the kind of mismatched leather-and-cloth ensemble that said "I dress from whatever I take off other people" more clearly than any written confession.

  A cloth mask covered the lower half of his face, which was a practical choice for anonymity and an impractical choice for peripheral vision, a trade-off that highwaymen throughout history had been making and regretting in roughly equal measure. He held a short sword in his right hand.

  The sword was, unlike the goblins' weapons, neither rusty nor bent. It caught the afternoon light with the dull gleam of metal that had been maintained by someone who understood that a sharp sword was the difference between a successful robbery and an embarrassing anecdote.

  A tag shimmered above his head when Levin focused:

  Level 4. Bandit.

  The bandit had positioned himself between the girl and the road south, which was the direction she had presumably been travelling.

  A small canvas sack lay on the ground between them — dropped, by the look of it, during the initial confrontation. Its contents had partially spilled: a wedge of cheese, two apples, a folded cloth, and a small leather purse that the bandit was gesturing toward with his sword in the manner of someone who felt that pointing a weapon at a purse was a reasonable substitute for asking nicely.

  "Pick it up," the bandit said. "The purse. Pick it up and hand it over, and we're done. Simple. Quick. Nobody gets hurt."

  "I haven't got any money," the girl said. Her voice was steady, or trying to be. It wobbled on the word "money". "The purse is empty. It's my mother's. She sent me to market and I spent everything on—"

  "Don't care. Purse. Now."

  "It's empty."

  "Then it'll be light. Hand it over."

  Levin stood at the bend in the road, approximately forty feet from the scene, and considered his options while wondering why the bandit didn't just pick the purse up and run away. Saving them both the effort and time.

  There were, broadly speaking, three.

  He could walk away, which would be easy, quiet, and would allow him to return to his soup contemplation without interruption.

  He could announce himself, which would introduce a social dimension to the situation and almost certainly result in a conversation, which was the last thing he wanted on a Thursday afternoon.

  Or he could intervene directly, which would be quick and would — he was fairly certain — generate exactly the kind of attention and gratitude that he had spent six weeks successfully avoiding.

  The girl's eyes found him.

  They widened further, which Levin had assumed was anatomically impossible given how wide they already were. She opened her mouth.

  Levin put a finger over his lips.

  She closed her mouth.

  The bandit, who had been focused on the purse with the single-minded intensity of a dog watching a biscuit, had not yet noticed that the dynamic of the situation had changed. He was still talking — something about how he didn't want trouble, how this was just business, how if she cooperated they could both go about their days, delivered in the weary, rehearsed tone of a man who had given this speech many times and had long since stopped listening to himself say it.

  Levin raised his right hand.

  His left hand held the staff; his right was free, and he extended it palm-forward, fingers slightly spread, aimed at a point approximately three feet to the bandit's left.

  He cast a spell.

  It was a small spell — barely a spell at all, really, more of a suggestion made to the air in the immediate vicinity that it might like to move rather quickly in a specific direction. A gust. A push.

  The magical equivalent of someone opening a window during a gale, except the window was Levin's hand and the gale was a focused column of compressed air that crossed the forty-foot gap in less than a second and struck the bandit on his left side with the precise, targeted force of a very large and very invisible hand giving him a firm shove.

  The bandit went sideways.

  He went sideways with the particular gracelessness of a person who had been standing on two feet and was now, without warning or consent, standing on no feet.

  His arms pinwheeled.

  His sword described a silver arc through the air as his grip failed. His mouth, behind the mask, produced a sound that began as a word — possibly "what" — and ended as a vowel of pure, unfiltered surprise. He cleared the edge of the road, passed over the strip of wildflowers that lined the verge, and landed in the drainage ditch that ran parallel to the south road with a wet, comprehensive splat that communicated, in a single syllable, the full depth, temperature, and general unpleasantness of the ditch's contents.

  The ditch was, it should be noted, not deep.

  It was perhaps two and a half feet at its lowest point, and it contained approximately eight inches of standing water that had been standing there for so long it had developed a greenish tint and a smell that suggested complex biological processes were occurring beneath its surface, none of them pleasant.

  The bandit sat in this water, legs splayed, mask askew, soaked, and wearing the expression of a man whose day had taken a sharp and unexpected turn downward — both figuratively and, given the ditch, literally.

  His sword had landed point-first in the mud of the opposite bank, where it stood upright and quivering, like an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence the bandit had not intended to write.

  Levin lowered his hand.

  The girl stared at the ditch. She stared at Levin. She stared at the ditch again. Her mouth was open. Her braid had come fully undone on one side, giving her the lopsided appearance of someone who had been interrupted mid-thought and hadn't yet decided which half of her head to prioritise.

  The bandit sat in the ditch and blinked.

  Water dripped from his mask.

  A frog, disturbed by the sudden arrival of a human being in its home, climbed onto the bandit's knee, regarded him with the cold, unblinking assessment that only amphibians can truly achieve, and hopped away.

  "What," said the bandit.

  "Afternoon," said Levin.

  "What — who — what—"

  "You were robbing someone," Levin said. "On the road. In daylight. Forty feet from a bend, with no lookout, no escape route, no real plan, and your back to the direction most likely to produce foot traffic. I mention these things as professional observations."

  The bandit stared at him from the ditch. His eyes, above the sodden mask, performed a rapid series of calculations.

  They took in Levin's height (average), his build (slight), his clothes (poor), his staff (wooden, unimpressive), and his general demeanour (calm, unhurried, holding a cup of nothing in particular with the relaxed posture of someone who had just performed a minor household task rather than launched a grown man into a drainage feature). The calculations did not produce a satisfying result. The bandit's eyes narrowed.

  "You're a mage," he said.

  "Astute."

  "What level?"

  "Does it matter? You're in a ditch."

  The bandit looked down at himself. He looked at the water. He looked at the frog, which had returned and was now sitting on a rock approximately six inches from his left hand, watching him with what could only be described as professional disgust.

  He looked back at Levin.

  "This isn't over," the bandit said, in the tone of someone who had heard this line in a play once and had been waiting for an opportunity to use it.

  He stood up.

  The ditch released him with a reluctant sucking sound, as though it had been enjoying the company. Water cascaded from his clothes. His mask hung from one ear. The frog huffed and jumped away. His dignity, which had been in the ditch longer than he had, did not emerge with him.

  He scrambled up the far bank, retrieved his sword from the mud (it came free with a pop that undermined whatever menace the retrieval was meant to convey), and pointed it at Levin from across the ditch. The effect was somewhat diminished by the fact that he was dripping, listing slightly to the left, and had a piece of pond weed draped across one shoulder like a very small, very damp scarf.

  "I'll remember you," the bandit said. "White hair. Staff. Mage. Skinny like a stick…” he paused. “Skinny wrists. I'll remember."

  "I'm sure you will," Levin said. "You might also remember to check for foot traffic next time. And possibly invest in a lookout. And perhaps reconsider the mask — it limits your field of vision to about a hundred and twenty degrees, which is why you didn't see me standing here for a full thirty seconds before I knocked you into a ditch."

  Stolen novel; please report.

  The bandit opened his mouth. He closed it. He opened it again. He appeared to be searching for a response that would restore some measure of authority to the situation, and the search was going badly.

  "This isn't over," he said again, because repetition was, apparently, his fallback strategy.

  Then he turned and walked — squelched, really — into the trees on the far side of the road, trailing water and pond weed and the faint, lingering aura of a man who had woken up that morning expecting to rob someone and was now going to spend the rest of the afternoon drying out and reconsidering his career choices.

  Levin watched him go.

  The trees swallowed him. The squelching faded. The frog, left alone on its rock, settled into a posture of deep contentment, having reclaimed its territory from the interloper with a minimum of personal effort, which was, when you thought about it, the ideal outcome of any territorial dispute.

  Levin turned to the girl.

  The girl was still standing against the elm tree. She had not moved during the entire exchange. Her hands were still raised, though they had drifted from the "surrender" position to something closer to "frozen mid-gesture," the way a person's hands remain in the air after the music stops and they haven't yet processed that the dancing is over.

  She was looking at Levin with an expression he recognised, because he had seen it on the faces of the Thornwall farmers that morning, and on Berta's face, and on Harwick's face behind the beard.

  It was the expression of a person performing a mental acrobatics — taking in the available data (thin young man, wooden staff, one shirt, terrible boots, thin wrists) and attempting to reconcile it with the observed evidence (bandit, ditch, forty feet, no visible effort), and finding that the two data sets did not produce a coherent result.

  "Are you all right?" Levin asked.

  The girl lowered her hands. She blinked. She looked at the ditch, where the water was still rippling from the bandit's departure. She looked at the road, where the sword had left a small gouge in the mud. She looked at Levin.

  "You threw him," she said.

  "Pushed. Technically."

  "With wind."

  "With a spell that moved air in a direction. The air did the throwing. I was more of a... coordinator."

  "You're a mage."

  "So I keep being told."

  She bent down and picked up the canvas sack. Her hands were shaking — a fine tremor, the kind that arrives after the danger has passed and the body, having held itself together through the crisis, decides to process the backlog of fear all at once, like a clerk who has been on holiday for a week and returns to find his desk buried.

  She gathered the cheese, the apples, the cloth, the empty purse. She held the sack against her chest.

  "Thank you," she said. Her voice cracked on the second word, and she pressed her lips together hard, the way people do when they are determined to maintain composure and their composure is equally determined to leave.

  "You're welcome," Levin said. "Are you hurt?"

  "He didn't touch me. He just — he came out of the trees, and he had the sword, and he said to give him everything, and I dropped the sack, and then you—" She gestured at the ditch. The gesture encompassed the entire event — the wind, the flight, the splash, the frog — in a single sweep of the hand that was more eloquent than any description.

  "Where are you headed?" Levin asked.

  "Thornwall. I live — my family's farm is east of the village. Harrow's Bend. I was coming back from Millhaven market." She paused. "I took the south road because it's shorter. My mother told me to take the north road. She said the south road had bandits." Another pause. "She was right."

  "Mothers often are. It's one of their more irritating qualities."

  The girl almost smiled. It was a fragile thing, the smile — it appeared at the corners of her mouth, flickered like a candle in a draught, and then retreated, but it had been there, and its brief presence changed the geometry of her face from "terrified" to "terrified but recovering."

  "I'm Ria," she said.

  "Levin."

  "Levin the mage."

  "Levin the dishwasher, primarily. The mage thing is more of a sideline."

  She looked at him. Her eyes — brown, bright, still slightly too wide — had the particular quality of eyes that were seeing something for the first time and were not yet sure what category to file it under. Levin had seen this look before, usually on the faces of people who had just watched him do something that his Level 1 status said he shouldn't be able to do, and who were now standing at the fork in the road between "that was impressive" and "that was terrifying" and hadn't yet chosen a direction.

  Ria chose a direction.

  "Can you teach me?" she said.

  The question arrived without preamble, without buildup, without any of the conversational scaffolding that normally surrounds a request of this magnitude.

  It simply appeared, fully formed, like a rabbit from a hat, except the hat was a sixteen-year-old girl who had been held up by a bandit approximately ninety seconds ago and was now, apparently, conducting a job interview.

  Levin blinked. "Sorry?"

  "Magic. Can you teach me magic? I've always wanted to learn. There's no one in Thornwall who teaches it — Harwick says the nearest academy is in Greymarch, and that's three days' travel, and the fees are — well, my family farms turnips and potatoes, so the fees are—" She made a gesture that communicated, with admirable economy, the entire financial relationship between turnip farming and magical education. "But you're here. And you're a mage. And you just did that." She pointed at the ditch again.

  "That was a gust of wind," Levin said. "It's barely a spell. It's the magical equivalent of sneezing with intent."

  "It knocked a man with a sword into a ditch from forty feet away."

  "He was off-balance. And the ditch was right there. Gravity did most of the work."

  "Can you teach me?"

  "No."

  "Why?"

  "Because I'm a Level 1 mage who washes dishes in a tavern, and I am not qualified to teach anyone anything, and taking on an apprentice requires a Level 5 minimum and a Guild-certified teaching permit, which I don't have, because I registered approximately two hours ago and my rank is Bronze, which is the adventuring equivalent of a participation certificate, and my Guildmaster's primary advice to me was to develop thicker wrists… Which have awkwardly been noticed by the bandit too."

  He said all of this in a single breath, which was a feat of both lung capacity and desperation.

  Ria listened to every word. She absorbed them. She processed them. And then she did the thing that Levin had been afraid she would do, which was to ignore all of them completely.

  "I could carry things," she said. "Your staff, when you're not using it. Supplies. I'm strong — I carry feed sacks at the farm, forty pounds each, two at a time. I know herbs. I know which mushrooms are safe and which ones make you see colours for three days. I can cook — actually cook, with seasoning and everything, my mother taught me. I can mend clothes. I can—"

  "I don't need someone to carry things."

  "Everyone needs someone to carry things. That's basically the foundation of civilisation."

  Levin opened his mouth to argue this point and then closed it, because the statement was, when examined from certain angles, uncomfortably close to true. Civilisation was, at its core, a series of increasingly complex arrangements for getting other people to carry things so that you didn't have to, and the entire economic structure of the known world could be understood as an elaborate negotiation over who carried what, how far, and for how much.

  Ria saw the hesitation.

  She pressed forward with the instinct of someone who had grown up negotiating with goats, which is to say she recognised a wavering opponent and moved immediately to exploit the opening.

  "I won't be any trouble," she said. "I'll stay out of the way during fights. I'll do whatever you say. I'll—"

  "You don't know anything about me."

  "You saved my life."

  "I pushed a man into a ditch. That's a fairly low bar for a life-debt."

  "He had a sword."

  "He had a sword and no lookout and his back to the road. A stiff breeze would have handled him. An actual stiff breeze, I mean. Without magical assistance. And he… didn’t want to just pick up the purse and run away for some reason."

  Ria looked at him. She had, at some point during this conversation, stopped shaking. The colour had returned to her face. Her braid was still half-undone, and she had a smudge of road dust on one cheek, and she was holding a canvas sack containing cheese and apples and an empty purse against her chest like a shield, and she was looking at Levin with an expression that he recognised with a sinking feeling, because it was the expression of someone who had made a decision and was now simply waiting for reality to catch up.

  It was the expression Berta had worn when she'd marched him to the Guild hall.

  It was the expression Marda wore when she handed him the broom each morning.

  It was the expression of absolute, immovable, granite-solid certainty, and it was being deployed by a sixteen-year-old girl who weighed perhaps a hundred and ten pounds and whose primary life experience consisted of turnip farming and market trips, and it was, Levin realised with a clarity that bordered on the philosophical, going to win.

  "I can't teach you magic," he said. "I don't know how I do what I do. I just... do it. There's no method. There's no curriculum. I point my hand at things and they happen. That's the entire pedagogy."

  "Then I'll watch you point your hand at things and learn from observation."

  "That's not how magic works."

  "How does magic work?"

  Levin opened his mouth. He closed it. He opened it again. The honest answer was "I have absolutely no idea," which was true and unhelpful and would, he suspected, only encourage her further, because people who don't know how things work are, in the eyes of the enthusiastic, simply people who haven't been asked the right questions yet.

  "It's complicated," he said, which was the universal refuge of people who didn't have a better answer and were hoping the conversation would move on.

  "I like complicated things."

  "You like turnips."

  "Turnips are extremely complicated. There are fourteen varieties grown in this region alone, each with different soil requirements, water needs, and susceptibility to root fly. The Millhaven White, for example, requires a slightly alkaline soil with good drainage and absolutely cannot be planted within thirty feet of brassicas because of clubroot cross-contamination. If you think turnips are simple, you've never farmed one."

  Levin stared at her.

  She stared back. Her chin was up. Her eyes were bright. The canvas sack was still pressed against her chest, but her grip had shifted from "protective" to "determined," and the overall effect was of a very small fortress that had decided to hold its ground against a siege it fully expected to win.

  He thought about the walk back to Thornwall. He thought about the tavern, the broom, the soup, the lone boot in his room, his skinny wrists, the quiet afternoon he had been planning. He thought about the warmth behind his sternum, humming its patient hum, five hundred and eight percent and counting, a reservoir of power that grew with every kill and meant nothing to anyone because the number in the blue box said "1" and the world had decided that the number was all that mattered.

  He thought about the bandit in the ditch, and the goblins in the hollow, and the four hundred creatures he had killed in six weeks, alone, in forests and cellars and on ridge roads in the dark, with nobody watching and nobody knowing and nobody to say "that was well done" or "be careful" or "you missed a spot."

  He thought about Marda, who expressed concern through silence and tea.

  He thought about the running goblin, who had looked back with something that might have been gratitude.

  He thought about thick wrists.

  "I can't pay you," he said. "I make eight silver a week, when there are goblins. Three silver, when there are rats. I sleep in an attic above a tavern. I own one shirt. My boots are held together by optimism and a reluctance to admit defeat. I am, by every measurable standard, the worst possible mentor for anyone hoping to learn anything useful about magic, combat, or life in general."

  "That's fine," Ria said.

  "It's really not."

  "My family farms turnips. I've been poor my entire life. I'm used to it. It's like a skill."

  "Poverty is not a skill."

  "It absolutely is. It's the skill of making do with less than you need and pretending you planned it that way. I'm very good at it. Level 10, at least."

  Levin looked at her. She looked at him. The elm trees looked at both of them with the ancient, patient indifference of organisms that had been watching humans make decisions for centuries and had long since concluded that the species was, on the whole, entertainingly bad at it.

  The frog on the rock by the ditch croaked once, which was either commentary or coincidence.

  "Fine," Levin said.

  The word escaped him before he could catch it, the way a bird escapes a cage when someone leaves the door open — sudden and with the immediate awareness that getting it back was going to be considerably more difficult than letting it go.

  Ria's face transformed.

  The smile that had flickered earlier returned in full force, and this time it stayed. It was a wide smile, bright, eyes narrowed, and cheeks aching, slightly lopsided, the kind of smile that rearranged the entire face around it and made the eyes crinkle and the cheeks bunch and the overall expression shift from "determined negotiator" to "person who has just been given exactly what they wanted and is trying very hard to look like they expected it all along."

  "Really?" she said.

  "Provisionally. Temporarily. On a trial basis. With conditions."

  "What conditions?"

  "I haven't thought of them yet. I'll let you know."

  "That's fine. I accept all future conditions in advance."

  "That's a terrible negotiating position."

  "I know. I learned it from the goats."

  Levin picked up his staff, which had been leaning against the elm tree during the conversation and had, in the interim, slid approximately six inches to the left, because staves, like brooms, harboured directional preferences that no amount of human intervention could fully correct.

  He settled it in the crook of his arm and began walking north, toward Thornwall.

  Ria fell into step beside him.

  She was shorter than him by several inches, and her stride was quicker, producing a rhythm that was slightly out of sync with his — a syncopation, like two clocks ticking at different speeds in the same room. She clutched her canvas sack in one arm and used the other to push her half-undone braid behind her ear, a gesture she would repeat approximately every forty-five seconds for the duration of the walk, because the braid had committed to being undone and was not interested in compromise.

  They walked in silence for perhaps two minutes.

  The road stretched ahead, rutted and dusty and lined with wildflowers that nodded in a breeze that was entirely natural and had nothing whatsoever to do with magic. The afternoon sun sat at the angle that turned everything golden and made even Thornwall, visible in the valley ahead, look briefly and misleadingly picturesque.

  "So," Ria said. "What level are you?"

  Levin sighed.

  It was a familiar sigh — the sigh of a man who had answered this question so many times that the answer had worn a groove in his brain, like a path through a forest made by too many feet walking the same way.

  "One," he said.

  Ria looked at him. She looked at the road. She looked at the ditch, now receding behind them, where a Level 4 bandit had recently been deposited by a single casual gesture. She looked back at Levin.

  "Huh," she said.

  And then — and this was the thing that surprised him, the thing that caught him off guard in a way that the bandit's sword and the goblins' spike trap and the merchant's laughter had not — she shrugged.

  She just shrugged.

  One shoulder up, one shoulder down, a motion that took less than a second and communicated, with devastating simplicity: Okay. Noted. Moving on.

  No recalculation.

  No awkward pause.

  No catching of breath.

  No look of pity or alarm or the faint hope that it might turn out to be someone else's problem.

  Just a shrug, and then she was looking ahead at the road again, pushing her braid behind her ear, adjusting the canvas sack on her hip, walking beside him as though the number "1" were exactly as interesting as the number of buttons on his shirt, which is to say: acknowledged, filed, and immediately superseded by more pressing concerns, such as the direction they were walking and whether there would be food at the end of it.

  Levin felt something shift behind his sternum.

  It was small — smaller than the pulse of a kill, smaller than the hum of the reservoir, smaller than any measurable increment of power. It was warm and was unfamiliar. It sat in a part of him that the blue status box did not track and the percentage counter did not measure.

  He ignored it.

  He was, as previously established, very good at ignoring things.

  "Come on. Marda's making soup. It's terrible, but it's hot,' he said.

  "I can fix that," Ria said. "The terrible part. I brought rosemary."

  She reached into the canvas sack and produced, from between the cheese and the apples, a small bundle of herbs tied with string. She held it up. The rosemary caught the afternoon light and looked, for a moment, like a tiny green torch.

  Levin looked at the rosemary. He looked at Ria. He looked at the road ahead, where Thornwall waited in its valley, doing its committed impression of a place where nothing happened.

  "Fine," he said, for the second time in ten minutes, and with the same sense of a door opening that he hadn't meant to unlock.

  They walked. The sun moved. The shadows lengthened. The forest started to grow quieter with every passing moment.

  Behind them, the ditch settled back into its quiet, green-tinged existence, and the frog resumed its position on the rock, and the south road stretched empty and dusty toward Millhaven, and somewhere in the trees on the far side, a damp bandit squelched through the undergrowth, nursing a grudge and a bruised hip and the absolute, unshakeable conviction that this was, indeed, not over.

  It was, in fact, over.

  But the bandit didn't know that yet, and the knowledge, when it eventually arrived, would be — like most unwelcome knowledge — both too late and too obvious to be of any practical use.

  Levin and Ria walked into Thornwall as the sixth bell rang. The bell-ringer, who had been having an excellent Thursday by his standards (upright, employed, only mildly hungover, and more energetic than usual), gave the bell an extra enthusiastic strike as they passed, which was either a welcome or an accident.

  Marda looked up as they entered the tavern.

  She looked at Levin, then looked at Ria, and then her eyes finally rested on the rosemary.

  "Who's this?" she said.

  "Ria," Levin said. "She's going to fix your soup."

  Marda looked at Ria again.

  Ria smiled.

  It was the same wide, bright, slightly lopsided smile, deployed at full power, and it hit Marda the way sunlight hits a glacier — with warmth, with persistence, and with the quiet confidence that given enough time, even the most formidable obstacle would yield.

  Marda yielded.

  It took seven seconds, which was, by Marda's standards, practically instantaneous.

  "Kitchen's through there. Don't touch the good knives. There aren't any good knives, but don't touch them anyway."

  Ria went through.

  Levin stood at the bar.

  The broom leaned against its usual spot, pulling left.

  The kettle sat on the hearth, waiting.

  The afternoon light came through the grimy windows and lit the dust motes, and the tavern settled around him with the familiar creak and groan of a building that had opinions about everything and the structural integrity to express approximately none of them.

  From the kitchen came the sound of Ria humming.

  It was a bright sound, slightly off-key, completely unselfconscious. It filled the kitchen, leaked through the doorway, echoed in the mostly empty halls except for three rooms, and spread into the common area like warmth from a fire that someone had lit without asking.

  Levin put the kettle on. He counted to two hundred once more and watched the cat fight a crusade war against a leaf that had insulted it.

  He took a sip.

  The warmth behind his sternum hummed.

  He picked up the broom.

  Pausing this time around before it could lean left as a smell came from the kitchen. The smell of rosemary began to rise.