She suspected that the hidden men were to come out when she finished to make certain neither Benroln nor she told anyone that he’d paid to have this poor farmer’s fields cursed.

Lehr wondered if his mother had caught the signal the merchant had sent. There were men out here somewhere, men waiting to kill Benroln and his mother when the merchant decided he was finished with them. Personally, Lehr wasn’t worried about Benroln one way or the other, but his mother was another matter entirely.

Lehr backtracked the merchant until he found a place where the man had waited with four others. Enough men to account for a couple of Travelers as long as they took them by surprise. Each had taken a different path.

They left no tracks that he could see, because the forest was inky-dark; not even the starlight illuminated the ground under the trees. But he knew they had been there because he could smell them.

He shuddered. What was he that he could scent a man like a dog? He drew his knife and picked a trail to follow.

When they came to the edge of the woods, the merchant motioned Seraph on. He and Benroln settled in to wait under the cover of the trees while she worked her magic.

She sat down on the ground at the edge of the field, just outside of the area of planting. She could see the weaving of magic through the soil. The mage this merchant had hired had done well; it was going to take her a long time to clean the field. Time for Lehr to find the merchant’s men. Time for Jes to be lost to the effects of the foundrael.

She began plucking the threads of the dead mage’s spell without further ado. As she did so, the familiarity of what she was doing settled around her with a feeling of rightness: this is what she had been born to do.

After a while the merchant became impatient. “I don’t see anything. I don’t pay good money for nothing—and I don’t put up with people who try to steal from me.”

“Tell him I can’t work unless he’s quiet,” said Seraph serenely, knowing that the calmer she was the worse the merchant would take it. His sort always liked to see people cringe in fear of him. She could have given him a light show, but the people her magic told her were sleeping in the cottage might be awakened. She didn’t want them coming out to investigate with the merchant’s armsmen lurking about—the wrong people might be killed.

“Come away,” Benroln said to the merchant with an air of determinedly cheerful deplomacy. “This will take a while. I brought a pair of dice with me. We can pass the time while Seraph works.”

Just as well he’d intervened before she’d pushed the merchant too far, she thought and turned her attention back to the field. Lehr needed all the time she could buy him.

Now why didn’t you work? she asked as she pulled the cursing magic away from stalks of wheat only half the size they should be this time of year. Nonetheless, with the strength of the spell she was unravelling, this field shouldn’t have grown anything more than a sprig of cheatgrass.

Night fell, but she didn’t pay any attention—what she was looking at didn’t require light for her to see. Finally, she detached the last of the spelling and, unanchored, the weave fell apart and lost its form.

The magic the wizard had imbued in his casting drifted off when the spell lost its power. It didn’t go far before it was caught firmly, and pulled back into the earth to enrich the soil. That was when Seraph realized how it was that the farmer had managed to grow wheat in this field.

There were other creatures that used magic besides the shadow beasts who lived in the Ragged Mountains. Most of them had died fighting at Shadow’s Fall. But some of them escaped.

This one hadn’t been strong enough to remove the spell, but it had done a great deal to mitigate the effects. Likely whatever it was, it had felt her meddling and was watching from nearby.

“Mmm,” she murmured, smiling in pleasure as she leaned forward and pressed her hands onto the field, sinking her hands into the soft ground where the magic held in the grains of dirt made her fingers tingle.

Seraph sent out a drift of Seeking magic again, this time looking for a creature not human. She found something almost immediately, but it was different than she expected: darkness but not shadow, somehow more natural, more elemental than the woods around her, something frightening. It could only be Jes.

The time had come whether Lehr was finished or not. She set the mystery of the farm’s protector aside and began her show.

She stood up and held both arms out theatrically, calling out in the Old Tongue. They weren’t words of power—she didn’t need them for this. She didn’t know many words of the Old Tongue, but she was willing to bet that Benroln knew even less.

Theatrics, her father would have scolded her, but her grandfather would have understood. Some people wouldn’t believe in magic until it came with light and sounds.

The merchant himself had given her the idea for this, and the magic embedded in the soil gave her the power. She called light filaments to sparkle and grow like cobwebs on the wheat, dancing from stalk to stalk until the whole field glittered in light that shifted rapidly through the shades of the rainbow in waves. It was a pretty effect, she thought, though it was merely light.

But there wouldn’t be a solsenti alive who would turn their heads from the field to look behind them when Seraph’s children approached. Benroln and the merchant stepped out of the trees, but a flicker of magic held them where they were.

Now to leave the merchant in no doubt of what his gold had purchased for him. This was more difficult and she would never have even attempted it if it hadn’t been for that dark, tingling soil that ached to aid the growth of the plants rooted in it.

Slowly she raised her arms together as she pushed her magic into plants. Grow, she urged them, grow and be strong.

Stalks thickened slowly and stretched up…

A defter hand than hers touched them and straightened and strengthened; balancing root, stalk, and bearding head in a way that Seraph would not have, though she knew, from the rightness of the path of magic, that this was how plants ought to grow.

Since her magic was not needed, she glanced toward the source of the magework and saw it, sitting near a fencepost. It wasn’t much bigger than a cat, a small, mossy creature with rounded, droopy ears and large eyes that gleamed with power. Its coloring matched the earth and wood so closely that she doubted that she would have seen it if the field hadn’t been thrumming with its power.

“Earthkit,” she said softly to herself. “This farmer must keep to the old ways.”

“When he had naught but old bread and milk for his own children he didn’t forget me,” agreed a voice she felt as much as heard. “Such acts are to be rewarded.”

“Indeed,” agreed Seraph. Since she wasn’t doing anything else, she added a crackle to the lights so that the merchant and Benroln wouldn’t hear her talking to the creature. “I would not have been able to heal this so well without you.”

“Nor could I break that other spelling,” said the earthkit in its rusty voice. “But I am done now.” The magic ceased abruptly and it left in a scuttling run that her eyes could not quite follow.

The wheat swayed under Seraph’s lights, ready to harvest now—at least two months early. She lowered her arms and allowed the glitter and noise to die away slowly.

“I won’t do the work of petty criminals,” she said clearly.

“Raven,” spat Benroln. “Fine. See what happens to your children now. And as for this,” he waved a hand at the field, “You may be Raven, but I am Cormorant.”

Electricity began gathering in the air.

Stupid, stupid, arrogant Raven, Seraph thought, bitterly ashamed. A storm with the heavy wheat heads atop slender, drying stalks would be disastrous.