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Two: A Lasting Embrace

Rialla lay still and motionless on her bed, the green tinged moonlight that pierced the bedroom's thin curtains making shadows dance around the mahogany dresser and bedside table. A shadow hadn't made a floorboard creak beyond the narrow door, though. Nor had Rialla's husband, or their dog. Jiam was due back from business any day now, but he knew every inch of their noisy floor and always stepped on the silent boards when he didn't want to wake her. As for their old pit bull, Ves was locked outside for the night, enjoying the cool air after having toppled and broken Rialla's favorite flower pot in single-minded pursuit of a sparrow that had somehow found its way down the chimney.

No, whoever was outside of Rialla's bedroom wasn't supposed to be there. Rialla smiled grimly, staring at the backs of her eyelids and straining her ears for any other sound. If the trespasser crossed her bedroom's threshold, they would learn the price of disturbing the sleep of Vosenfal's hedge witch.

The door latch clicked open. Rialla schooled her expression to that of a harmless, sleeping old woman and waited, even feigning a quiet snore in case the burglar had any doubts. No screams came from the doorway, no slaps of hands to clothing as the stranger felt an army of fire ants climbing over their body. Rialla just managed to keep the twitch at the corner of her mouth from growing into a frown. She had felt the spell trigger. Apparently her unwanted guest hadn't.

Another floorboard squeaked, and she heard otherwise nearly silent footsteps approach the side of her bed. She risked a glance through barely opened eyes. The stranger's face hovered above her own, hidden in the shadows of a dark hood. A gnarled hand hid behind the fold of a dark cloak and reappeared holding something that reflected green moonlight.

Rialla rolled away an instant before the long dagger murdered her pillow. Her swiftness should have surprised the assassin, but before she could jump off the far edge of her bed, the stranger was there, blade falling toward her heart.

Before a thought could form in her mind, she struck out at the dark figure with a concentrated burst of energy more powerful than any spell she'd cast in ages. It should have torn the assassin's chest from his waist and blasted a gaping hole in Rialla's ceiling and roof. Instead, the energy shot around him in a cylindrical tornado of power, never touching the cloaked figure or anything else in the small room before it dissipated. She sensed no magic coming from the assassin, but it was clear he was a sorcerer, and a more powerful one than she'd ever met.

If nothing else, Rialla's attack served to distract the assassin for a moment. Unfortunately, it nearly incapacitated her. As soon as the swirling energy faded, she kicked the figure in the chest, catching it off guard and knocking it back enough that she could dash past it and stagger from her bedroom to the small living room beyond. It was only a few strides to the door that led outside, where she could call on Ves, her pit bull, for help. She reached the door, almost falling on the handle, and pulled it inward.

An arm wrapped around her neck and tugged her sharply back against a body whose thin build belied its wiry strength. She grasped at the hand over her collarbone, summoning more energy to give her struggles more strength than was in her, but managed nothing more than tearing the black glove from her assailant. She flailed at the other arm carrying the dagger toward her throat, but only gained a shallow gash above her elbow for her efforts. She cried out in pain, then in surprise as the assassin lifted his hand to cover her mouth and raise her chin away from her throat. He wasn't quick enough to keep her from seeing his familiar, calloused palm.

She'd read that palm on their honeymoon.

"Jiam!" The gasp was muffled by his hand over her mouth, but his name was unmistakable.

The dagger faltered in front of her face. She stared wide eyed at its slender length, the face hidden within his hood reflecting off its edge from over her shoulder. He wore a mask over his nose and mouth, but Rialla would never confuse those iron gray eyes for any other's.

He laughed quietly, the same gentle, sincere laugh she had fallen in love with decades ago. The dagger moved to his side, but he didn't release her. She was too stunned, too horrified, to struggle any more. "My dear," he said, his voice as genuinely kind as it always was, "I don't think I've ever been this happy to have someone complicate matters for me." He lowered his hand from her mouth, hugging her to him and pinning her arms to her sides. The flat of the dagger made a red stain against the stomach of her white night gown.

"What...what are you doing?" she spluttered. It had to be some joke, a foolish prank by an old, senile mind, but the gash in her forearm wouldn't let her believe it.

"I won't apologize," he told her. "No apology can suffice for this night." He walked around in front of her, yet she could still feel his arms embracing her, his solid chest pressed against her back. A glance down found nothing but air around her, but it held her as securely as his arms had. More so. Jiam leaned toward her and brushed gray hair from her eyes, caressing her cheek and smiling warmly before pulling back. He still held the dagger in his other hand, its tip glistening with blood from the slash on her arm. "You deserve to understand, at least, though even if you ever can, it won't begin to make amends. I don't have time to explain, but I'll leave you something that may help. It's in the cellar underneath the work shed."

Rialla shook her head in confusion, a frustrated tear tracing the lines of her face where he'd touched her. Her husband had lost his mind; there was no cellar beneath the work shed.

Jiam paused mid-stride through the door to their forested front yard. He took a deep breath, but only said, "Don't come after me," before stepping outside and closing the door behind him.

For several long moments, the only sounds Rialla could hear above the never ending chorus of crickets and frogs outside were her own frantic breaths and the beat of her racing heart while she strained against the invisible bonds her husband had left around her, then a sharp yet quiet yelp came from beyond the front door. Ves. The noise was muffled in Rialla's living room, almost to the point where she wondered if she'd really heard it, but it made her blood run cold. She stopped struggling, trying to hear any more sounds from her pit bull, but as before, all she heard was wildlife continuing to sing to the drumbeat of her heart.

"Jiam!" she shouted uselessly, and had to stop herself from resuming her hopeless battle against the force Jiam had trapped her in. Whatever her constraints were, magic had made them, and Rialla suspected an angry lion would have as little hope of breaking them through physical means as she did. If magic had bound her, though, magic could free her. She cast the impossibility of her husband using magic in the first place to the back of her mind for the time being, and set about discovering the nature of her bonds so she could learn their weaknesses. All other problems could wait until she was free to deal with them.

Rialla closed her eyes and mentally probed at the air around her, expecting to find it condensed into solid bands. That was the only means of binding someone this securely that she knew of, but the air surrounding her was all free flowing. She frowned, and after some consideration, searched her night gown for energetic distortion. The thin garment pressed unyieldingly against her back and around her waist in the places Jiam had been touching her. He could have enchanted it to hold its position around her, but she sensed no distortion in the gown. Rialla frowned again after extending her mental scan through the living room. What she sensed was impossible.

Any time a mage used their skills, they left a magical residue in the spell's wake, a distortion of whatever energy the mage was manipulating that resonated from their magic like ripples radiating from a stone dropped in a pond. For a spell to be self-sustaining, as Rialla's bonds seemed to be, it would disturb the latent energy around it like a swimmer treading water. A skilled magic user could reduce that disturbance to some extent, but it could never be entirely negated, and Rialla was rather proud of her affinity for sensing ambient energy, and any distortions within.

The energy in Rialla's living room was completely at peace. The only hint of anything supernatural nearby was the subtle wake of her own searching meditation. She knew of no way for a mage to disguise their handiwork's resonance as completely as Jiam had, but her husband must have discovered one.

Otherwise, the force entrapping Rialla was completely natural.

The more she thought about it, the more Rialla suspected her husband must have had such a skill for a long time, since before the two of them had met, at least. Rialla had known how to detect energetic distortion long before Jiam had rescued her from a cunning haggler in the markets of Eyrasabi and had never noticed any magic around the man in all their years together, yet skills like the ones he had demonstrated in his attack couldn't be learned overnight. Jiam's casual deflection of her initial blast of power shouldn't have been possible after a lifetime of training, and she still didn't know how he'd trapped her.

Impossibilities seemed to be drawn to her tonight. Rialla slumped against her invisible constraints, her meditative scan exhausting her mental resources after using so much energy trying to fend Jiam off. Whatever held her kept her upright just as if he was still standing behind her with his arms around her midriff, pinning her arms to her sides. In her sleep deprived haze, she now realized, she'd wasted her efforts when she'd examined her night gown. It was sleeveless, yet her arms were as trapped as her torso.

She could still move her legs, though; Jiam hadn't been holding those, so neither did his spell. Experimentally, she tried lifting first one, then the other, and found that below the waist she was indeed free to move as she pleased. Rialla smiled, having found such a simple escape to such a complex trap, and lifted both knees up to her chest. She sank down until the band that had been her husband's arms was almost around her shoulders, then cried out in surprised discomfort. Jiam had been holding her with her elbows tucked against her sides, and where an actual person's grasp might have faltered under her weight, the circle around her held her suspended in midair until she lowered her feet back to the floor. Her shoulders were too wide for her to escape.

Rialla cursed loudly after standing upright again, more at her helplessness than at the bruises on her upper arms that her careless escape attempt had left her with. Jiam's mention of a nonexistent cellar beneath their work shed had been a cruel joke. Even if there was such a cellar, she would never be able to leave the house to find whatever her husband had left for her. The best she could hope for was a villager from Vosenfal to visit and decide to feed her while she spent the rest of her life in this spirits-be-cursed trap!

The hedge witch gritted her teeth and stood a little straighter. She knew better than to give in to despair so easily. If it came down to it, she would find a way to dislocate her shoulder so that she could slip out of the band around her waist, but she would explore every magical means of freeing herself before resorting to that. She just needed to rest a little so she could try scanning for distortion again. Jiam had to have left some residue in the energy around her, some trace of his craft. She would find it and use it to unravel his spell. She just had to focus her senses more than she had in her first scan.

If there was any trace of magic in the living room, though, Rialla failed to find it before the sun's pink and gold precursors rose through the tree branches beyond the room's large, eastern windows. She had cast her senses out through the house and as far into the wilderness as she could at various times throughout the night, but her home's dormant energy was as placid as she'd ever felt it. She slumped wearily against her confinement, her mental exertions, lack of sleep, and blood loss making her dizzy. She'd managed to tuck her wounded forearm against her hip, turning her gown into a makeshift bandage, but not before a small puddle had formed at her feet from the blood dripping down her fingers. Fortunately, Jiam hadn't cut her arm too deeply.

Rialla blinked as a beam of sunlight hit that small puddle, making the crimson liquid seem to glow around the dancing shadows of tree branches swaying in the morning breeze. A few moments later, the sunlight touched her foot.

She'd been leaning back against the persistent memory of her husband's chest. As soon as the sun's rays touched her, though, that solid, invisible presence dissolved, and she stumbled backward three steps with a startled shout before landing heavily on her bottom. Rialla groaned and lay back on her polished wooden floor, the squeaking boards giving voice to her protesting joints. She wasn't prone to arthritis, but she was far too old for such sudden movement after a long night of forced stillness. Her heavy landing had given her more bruises to deal with, too.

Groaning again, the hedge witch rolled onto her side, wanting nothing more than to finally succumb to sleep on her hard living room floor now that she was free of Jiam's blasted trap. She didn't even bother trying to figure out how sunlight had triggered her release; she'd worry at that puzzle when she had the time and energy to spare. There was already too much to take care of with the few reserves left to her.

Jiam.

That thought was enough for Rialla to ignore her protesting knees and clamber back to her feet. Jiam. She had to figure out where he'd gone, track him down, and find a way to make him explain what had driven him to such madness, and she knew where to start looking.

First, though, she needed to change out of her ruined night gown. The morning seemed far too ordinary for the night that had preceded it while she climbed into a sturdy, floor length brown skirt and its accompanying green blouse. Even cleaning and properly bandaging her arm felt somehow mundane with the myriad blue birds, cardinals, and sparrows bellowing their morning greetings in the canopy above and around her house. All illusion of familiarity abandoned Rialla, though, after she stuffed her feet into woolen stockings and calf-high leather boots and opened her front door.

She had not forgotten her pit bull's subdued yelp after Jiam's departure, but had been sure Ves was all right. Even after all of the night's impossibilities, Rialla found the notion of her husband harming their dog completely unthinkable, as unlikely as the two moons colliding and showering Gotrala with stardust. So when she found Ves lying dead near her garden with Jiam's dagger hilted between his ribs, she stood on her porch blinking at the scene from her doorway, unable to associate what her eyes were showing her with reality. Ves's unmoving form was so out of place in the pleasant summer morning, Rialla was certain that her eyes had to be lying to her. Surely, no birds would be singing if Ves was dead?

Before her shock had worn off, she found herself moving toward the fallen dog on shaking legs. After her first uncertain steps, she was running, crossing the yard in a single breath, and was kneeling in front of Ves before reality had fully caught up with her. One trembling hand covered her mouth as the other rested hesitantly on the side of the pit bull's face, fingers curling behind his ear where he always demanded to be scratched. If she hadn't put him out for the night after he'd broken her vase...

Rialla moaned, low and wordless, and cradled Ves's head in her lap, the profound loss and despair she'd held at bay throughout the terrible night finally overwhelming her. This was too much. Her moan crumbled into sobs as she lowered her face to the pit bull's. She had lost more than Ves in last night's attack. Whatever Jiam's reasons for assaulting her, he would never, never, raise a hand against their dog. Sometimes Rialla felt like the man cared more for Ves than he did for her, even though their marriage had abounded in an affectionate, passionate love. No, the man who had done this was not Jiam, whatever he looked like.

Whoever had killed Ves had stolen Rialla's husband, too.

The witch's body shook with the force of her sobs as she knelt over her dog and the memory of murdered love, and the persistently cheerful birds finally grew silent to listen to her mournful cries.

Some ten minutes later, after her sorrow had escaped her eyes to bathe Ves's face, Rialla looked up from the dog's body across her garden to the small work shed on its far side. Grief hid behind a rising wall of anger, and she was crossing her garden before she knew she'd stood up, heedless of the herbs she trampled on her way to the little shack.

Rialla pulled the shed's door open wide, but had to scrub the remaining tears from her eyes before she could see clearly enough to make use of the sunlight flooding the small building. The shadow she formed on the far wall and its shelves, framed by the doorway's rectangle of light, wasn't nearly ominous enough to suit her darkening fury. One way or another, she was going to find her husband, and when she did, she would show whatever phantom had possessed him the meaning of despair.

For that to be possible, though, she first had to discover where he'd gone. There had been no signs of Jiam's cart or mule outside. The narrow dirt track ambling down the hill on which their house sat led to Vosenfal, but from there Jiam could have taken any of a dozen roads to as many other small towns. She would ask for him in Vosenfal, see if any of the townsfolk had noticed him pass through in the night, but not before she found whatever he'd left for her. He'd told her it would help her to understand why he'd tried to kill her, but she hoped it would lead her to him as well.

He'd said he left it in the cellar beneath the work shed, but as was clearly evident as Rialla stood in its doorway, the shed's floor was a solid sheet of hard packed earth. Feeling more than a little foolish, Rialla set about stomping around the little room, trying to hear any change in her footfalls or feel any shift in the dirt under her boots that might indicate a trap door hiding beneath the floor. The ground remained discouragingly, yet predictably, firm. She scanned the many shelves for any kind of hidden switch, and even went as far as to twist and pull at all the hooks holding various gardening and maintenance tools on one wall. None proved to be a secret lever that revealed some camouflaged door inside the cramped shed, though Rialla's heart jumped in brief excitement when one hook holding a garden hoe broke off in her hand. Disappointed that the cause was merely old wood, she laughed bitterly at herself and dropped both hook and garden hoe to the ground.

Rialla was almost ready to give up and take a shovel from the shed to dig a grave for Ves when a dark glint caught her eye. In one corner of the shed was stacked a pile of smooth river stones, leftovers from a project she and Jiam had worked on together to line a corner of her garden years ago. A shiny black rock she had never seen before sat on top of the pile. In shape and texture it was almost identical to the river stones, if on the small side: flat and round, like a thick hotcake. But where Rialla and her husband had gathered only white and pale, pastel stones, this one gleamed like pure obsidian.

Cautiously, she picked up the black stone. Cool to the touch, it fit easily in the palm of her hand. Rialla stepped back to take the stone from its shadowed corner and into the doorway's rectangle of sunlight for a better look, but stopped as soon as she began moving, bringing the stone close to her face and squinting at it. In the center of the rock, behind its glassy surface, danced a tiny spark of violet light. She was certain that hadn't been there until she moved. Carefully, ever wary for another trap set by her husband, some sort of delayed cruelty, she took another step toward the sunlight. The violet spark inside the stone grew stronger as she moved, expanding slightly within the center of the black stone and dancing a little more vibrantly. Another step carried Rialla and the stone into the sunlight--

And the spark vanished under the sun's stronger rays. Considering the stone for only a moment, Rialla took the two steps left between herself and the doorway and pulled the door shut, leaving her in darkness relieved only by narrow shafts of daylight squeezing through cracks in the walls and ceiling. Though the stone in her hand seemed to give off no light of its own, the violet spark within it was now a violet blaze, a purple flame that swirled in a disk through the stone, not quite approaching its edges. The rock itself had paled to a murky, translucent gray.

Rialla focused her senses on the stone, trying to read its energy to better understand its purpose, something she should have done as soon as she noticed the spark inside it. What she sensed, though, was a completely unexceptional river stone, molded into its shape by the caresses of water and time, and most definitely not radiating a wake of energetic distortion. As far as Rialla could feel, there was nothing supernatural about the rock. Somehow, she wasn't surprised.

She cast her worries about her magical skills to the back of her mind--had she somehow burned out her ability when she'd launched her blast of power at Jiam earlier?--and focused on the puzzle in her hands. Distortion or no distortion, the stone was clearly unnatural. Had the sunlight somehow fed the flame within it? Rialla abandoned that theory when she raised the stone toward a sliver of light shining between the top of the doorway and the shack's slate tiled ceiling. As soon as she lifted her arm, the violet flame receded slightly, the stone around it darkening a little. As she brought it back to the level of her chest, the blaze flared back to its previous strength.

An idea forming, Rialla took a step from the work shed's door. Sure enough, as soon as she moved, the stone darkened and its flame weakened. A smile pulled at the corner of her mouth, despite her undiminished anger. She still didn't know the stone's purpose, but she understood how it worked. After carrying it around the shed in different directions, she quickly found that the violet flame grew stronger and the stone became more crystalline the closer she brought it to the corner opposite the one where she'd found it.

Moving swiftly now, with purpose, Rialla knelt in the corner of the shed where the violet flame burned the strongest, the door on one side of her and sacks of dried grain stored on shelves on the other. The stone was so clear now that what was left of it between her hand and the blaze was completely invisible. It looked like Rialla was holding a disk of purple fire suspended in the air immediately above her palm, though she could still feel the cool, smooth surface of the stone against her skin. As she brought the blaze closer to the dusty, unremarkable junction between floor and walls, it flared wider, until finally, inches from the corner, the violet flame grew beyond the limits of the stone and caressed her hand. She gasped in surprise and dropped the stone, her fingers and palm going numb. Instead of falling straight to the floor, though, it shot the rest of the way to the shed's corner as though drawn to a loadstone, flaring to twice its previous diameter and illuminating the entire shack in violet ambience.

Rialla stood slowly and looked at the tools and supplies around her, letting her eyes adjust to the new illumination. Aside from the strange purple glow, the only thing that had changed in the shed was the floor. In the middle of what had a moment ago been unyielding earth, a narrow, tightly winding spiral staircase now descended into darkness.

Her breaths coming more quickly with excitement, the hedge witch reached for the stone that must have been in the middle of the expanded violet blaze, hoping it might sustain its strength and be useable as a light source now that it had been placed in the position needed to trigger its potential, but as soon as her fingers entered the flame, they lost all feeling, as though her farthest joints had been suddenly and painlessly severed. She hastily pulled her hand back. As soon as her fingers were clear of the blaze, the numbness faded and left her unharmed, but it was clear she couldn't pick the stone up again. Even if she was fortunate enough to touch it without being able to feel it or see it through the light, her fingers would be too useless to grasp it.

Rubbing at her hand to convince herself it was still there, Rialla turned back to consider the dark staircase. The violet light only penetrated a few steps' distance down into the darkness; she had no way of knowing how far it went or what waited at its bottom. She could return to the house to fetch an oil lantern, but she suspected that opening the shed's door would interrupt the spell she had managed to activate, and she wasn't sure reactivating it would be as simple as closing the door again.

Her mind made up, Rialla took a deep breath and stepped carefully down into darkness.

She reached the cellar floor more quickly than she expected. The ceiling of the brick lined room was only a foot or so above her head once she was standing at the bottom of the spiral staircase's two revolutions, but the cellar itself was much wider than the shed above it. Every wall was lined with empty shelves save one, and there were two rows of free standing shelves as well, one to either side of Rialla and the wrought iron stairs, and both appeared as empty as the rest of the room. She ignored what she was able to see of the shelves in the dim illumination, drawn instead to the shelfless wall.

A small desk crouched against the gray bricks with a simple wooden chair waiting at an angle in front of it, as though someone had just gotten up from the desk before Rialla entered the cellar. On the desk sat a large, closed book between a pair of thin candles, one of which was already lit and flickering weakly in the unfelt breeze of Rialla's entrance. She approached the desk slowly, for some reason reluctant to see what Jiam wanted her to find now that she was so close to it.

Rialla cautiously placed her fingertips on the book's cover, its leather binding soft and darkened with age. It bore no title on its front surface or on its two-inch thick spine, and Rialla could sense nothing out of the ordinary about it through the touch of her fingers or of her mind, though she knew well by this point how little that could mean. Very slowly, she opened the book to its front page.

A single candle's light wasn't bright enough for her to make out the book's writing, so she picked up the lit candle by its unadorned, lead stand and used it to ignite its twin, then staggered backward in surprise when the second candle flared to life with a dazzling white brilliance. By luck alone, Rialla was able to keep hold of the first candle as she stumbled into a stand of empty shelves in the middle of the cellar, blinking. The other candle's wick must have been treated with magnesium. The process wasn't unheard of, but its results were too expensive for anyone short of royalty to afford.

Even after her eyes adjusted to the new brilliance, it hurt to look directly at the magnesium candle. Narrowing her eyes to slits, she went back to the desk and set the first candle down, its orange flame barely visible now, then turned her back to the miniature white sun, holding Jiam's book.

Rialla knew immediately who had written the tome. Her husband's handwriting was unmistakable, the symbols small and concise, efficient. He always wrote as small as he legibly could to fit as much information as possible on a single page. Two words were centered at the top of his book's first page, as small as the rest of the text and only distinguishable as a title by being underlined: "Pumpkin Pie."

The witch's brow furrowed in consternation. The title was neither joke nor code; what followed on the page was a list of ingredients and detailed instructions about how to bake them into a seasonal pumpkin pie. She admitted that Jiam was a better than average cook, but she couldn't imagine what would make him think he needed to hide a recipe book from her, let alone how it was involved in his sudden attack.

The next entry, marked by more underlined words beneath the pie recipe less than halfway down the page, confused her further. "Birch Fishing Rod." The following text was exactly what its title implied: a detailed yet simple guide for constructing a commonplace fishing pole. After these instructions, Rialla read, "To Fix a Thatched Roof," which headed an entry that extended to the second page.

She didn't know of any house with a thatched roof since before the Great Tsuravi War, centuries ago. Skimming through the repair directions disinterestedly, she almost passed the next title without noticing it. There was only one line of text between two underscored headings, and she had to read the entry twice before she was convinced it was really written in the book.

Happiness, Ten Minutes

Tear of child, Wool sweater, Scent of dandelion.

No explanation or instruction followed those three abstract items before "Spiced Pineapple Mead" took over the rest of the page.

Glaring down at the book as though it were deliberately trying to make no sense, Rialla scanned through four more pages of mundane recipes and instructions before coming across an entry as abstract as "happiness." Its list of ingredients was almost as brief, and just as cryptic:

Orange Glow, Thirteen Seconds

Blueberry juice, Cobalt fragment, Neloan pepper, Snowball.

Rialla puzzled over this for a short time before leafing forward through the tome, noting only the underlined titles in hopes that one of them would offer the understanding her husband had told her she would find in the cellar. As she delved deeper into the book's pages, the unexplained, abstract ingredient lists grew ever more frequent, eventually outnumbering the practical recipes and directions, though never fully replacing them. The entries became stranger, too, their lists gradually taking more and more lines of Jiam's small handwriting before another underscored heading interrupted them. Almost a quarter of the way through the book, Rialla stopped turning pages. She was looking at ingredients for "Paranormal Heat Reduction," which were sandwiched between "Cabinet Volume Expansion" and "To Hold Breath for Three Minutes." The latter, she was surprised to find, was actually a guide explaining how to put oneself in a near-meditative state to be able to stay under water for long periods of time, but it was of no more use to her than the random objects listed before it. She was getting nowhere.

Exasperated, Rialla turned to the tome's end, the pages in her way thudding loudly against the inside of the front cover as she turned them all in a single handful. The book's very last page was blank, front and back, and she flicked it aside to find her husband's last entry. "Bypass" was almost falling off the top of the page, the ingredients below written exceptionally small to keep the entry from overflowing onto the book's last page. Numbering in the hundreds, most of the items listed had a small dot of ink next to them, and she recognized Jiam's simple method of marking off things he'd already obtained; he used the same ink dots to check the lists Rialla would send with him when he shopped for food or supplies in Vosenfal. When Rialla's eyes fell on the last ingredient in her husband's final list, marked with a fresh blot of ink, she almost dropped the tome.

"Last breath of he or she who trusts you most, forcefully taken."

Unaware that she'd been pacing while rifling through the book, Rialla almost fell onto her bottom again when she tried to sit in the cellar's chair, from which she'd moved a fair distance away. Legs shaking, hands trembling around the tome, she strode back to the chair and sank into it slowly. All of a sudden, she knew why Jiam had stopped trying to kill her the night before. As soon as she saw his hand, as soon as she recognized him, her trust in Jiam had been shaken. What had he said when he realized she knew who he was? "I've never been so happy to have matters complicated," or some such.

Her husband had wanted to use her life to further his completion of this list, this "bypass." However glad he was that she no longer met the ingredient's criteria, he hadn't hesitated in taking the next best option. Only one loved and trusted Jiam anywhere near as much as Rialla did.

Ves.

The hedge witch brushed forming tears of frustration and grief from her eyes to clear her vision and read through the ingredients again, carefully, a suspicion growing in the back of her mind. She paid little attention to the items Jiam had apparently already obtained, whether they were as commonplace as a rusted iron corkscrew or as intangible as the purpose she had been supposed to fulfill--how had he gone about storing Ves's last breath, anyway?--focusing only on the ingredients her husband had yet to collect. There were three of them: "Moon filtered sunlight," "Adult dragon blood," and "Saltwater."

Dragons were creatures of myth, Rialla knew, but the blood of one was as irrelevant to her as it was impossible for Jiam to find, no matter how she expected he would gather it regardless. The other two remaining objects were all that concerned her.

In thirteen days, the Veporligh hour would occur, when Parol, Gotrala's smaller, color shifting moon, would cross the sun's path and transform its rays into prisms of color. It would be centralized over Boendal, Eyralia's only port city, major or minor.

Rialla might still not know why this bypass was important enough for Jiam to murder her to complete it, but she knew where he was going, and she knew when he planned to be there. She closed his book and rose from the chair to climb out of the hidden cellar.

Jiam Meruvian would not be vacationing by the ocean without his wife.