“Follow me.”

The temple was brightly lit with wall sconces, so Seraph had no trouble picking her way through the debris left by the door. But the room on the other side of the curtain was quite different than the one she remembered. It was a rectangular room with a low ceiling. There were no flying birds, no arched ceiling.

“Is this the real room or is the chamber with the Orders the real room?” she asked Hennea.

“Which do you think?”

This room was more in keeping with a building that had been put up in less than a season’s time. It was not too different from Willon’s store, and she couldn’t smell magic in it at all…but…

“The other one is real,” she said with conviction.

That room had been too detailed to have been an illusion set up just for her, but he couldn’t show that room to just anyone. This chamber looked just as the villagers would expect.

Hennea nodded her head. “As I told you, he is a very good illusionist.”

There was a small door set unobtrusively near the back wall and Hennea led them through it and down a narrow stairway.

“We’re close now,” Hennea said. “We should be as quiet as we can.”

“Rinnie’s been here,” whispered Lehr.

“I can smell her fear,” agreed Jes, already at the bottom of the stairway.

The stair ended in a short, dark hallway that smelled of earth and moisture to Seraph; but Lehr’s nose was wrinkled with disgust and he was careful not to bump against the wall. Light pooled by an open doorway.

Seraph brushed by the others to enter the room first.

Rinnie was there; like Alinath, she’d been tied and gagged, but Seraph didn’t see any bruises. Relief washed over Seraph; Rinnie wasn’t safe yet, but she was alive.

Several hundred candles were set out to form five circles on the floor with Rinnie in the middle of the center circle. The others each contained a bit of jewelry with a single large stone in the setting.

Volis was there, too, peering over a fragile-looking scroll laid out on a table almost too small for it. He didn’t look up as they entered. As Hennea had advised, Seraph looked at his hands and saw two rings. One of them should be Raven. Seraph focused her magic and looked at the rings. Raven and Owl, just as Hennea had predicted, but twisted somehow and empty. Wrong.

In the far corner of the room, Bandor sat cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth and muttering to himself. Owl-sick, thought Seraph. Unbound by Traveler laws, Volis had forced Bandor to do something against his will, and Bandor was paying the price.

She took another step forward and ran into a barrier of magic. With a quick flick of thought she made the barrier visible. It arched across the room, leaving Volis, Bandor, and Rinnie on one side of the barrier and the rest of them trapped on the other: trapped, because the barrier now covered the doorway and sealed them all in. At least she assumed they were all there. She hadn’t seen Jes in the quick glance she’d taken.

“Volis,” Seraph said.

Her voice trembled with fury; she’d thought she had herself under better control. She was so angry at him and at those unknown men who were like him and played havoc in their ignorance. They had stolen Tier, Rinnie, and Seraph’s peace; they would pay, all of them.

Painfully, she drew the serenity of her training around her like a cloak; it was Volis who had to lose his temper. When she was certain she was calm, she said, “What are you doing?”

“Summoning the Stalker,” he said, without looking up. “I’ve been expecting you—as you can see. Once my little Raven took flight I thought she’d bring you here. At first I was upset with her, but then I thought it would not be a bad thing to have an audience—as long as they didn’t become part of the ceremonies.”

Guardians were all but immune to magic—Jes could go through the barrier. It was just possible he could get through, retrieve Rinnie, and return across the barrier with her. But if he couldn’t, he would never leave her. Trapped there, he would try to protect Rinnie from Volis—and that was unacceptably dangerous. She’d send him there only if there was no choice.

She could tell that Jes had reached the end of his control because the temperature in the room was dropping rapidly.

“You are an ignorant fool,” she said coldly. “The Eagle is not the Stalker. The Stalker is what made the Shadowed what he was. If you manage to summon it, you will not be more—you will be nothing. The Stalker has no followers, because anything that answers to it becomes a thing just as it is.”

“Don’t think I don’t know about people like you,” said Volis. “My first teacher liked to tell me how ignorant I was because he was afraid of me and what I could do. So for years I did his bidding as his apprentice. When the Master of the Secret Path found me and told me the truth, the first thing I did was arrange for my teacher to receive a lesson ensuring that he never had a chance to mislead anyone again.” Satisfaction colored his voice. “Take warning from that. You say I am wrong, but you don’t know me, don’t know what I can do.”

The growing cold made Seraph shiver, but she trusted that Jes would hold on a few minutes more. She needed to make this boy angry.

“Oh, I know what you can do,” said Seraph serenely. “Do you think that Hennea spent the whole day silent? Or do you think that I should tremble before an illusionist?” She saw her tone made him flush. Solsenti wizards looked down upon illusionists, saw their magic as a lesser thing because it neither created nor destroyed. Solsenti wizards were fools about many things. “A boy barely old enough to dress himself? A solsenti conjurer who defiles himself with the dead because he has to steal their magic or everyone would know how ignorant he was?”

“I may be an illusionist,” he said with careful dignity, “but I trapped you—both of you Ravens and your Hunter son, too. And this ignorant boy found out your secrets. I know how to summon a god.”

“You can’t even keep a Raven with geas,” said Seraph. “How could you summon a god?”

She’d hoped to anger him with the reminder of Hennea’s escape, but he was too excited about his discovery.

“It will be easy,” said Volis. “The Cormorant was the key.”

And then, pacing back and forth, he began to pontificate upon pseudo-complexities of the Orders that the wizards of his Secret Path had “discovered” over the years.

“Lehr,” Seraph said softly underneath the flow of Volis’s words. “Is he shadowed?”

“Yes. Uncle Bandor, too—though not as deeply.”

Seraph nodded her understanding, then turned her attention back to the ranting Volis.

“I took the rings, one for each Order. The Secret Path only has four Healer rings, but none of them work right. So they gave me this one to do as I wish. I have one for each of the Orders, but with your daughter I don’t need the Cormorant.”

He looked at Seraph, his face flushed with triumph. “I tried it with just the rings, but it didn’t work because the spell calls for blood and death. Getting someone of each Order is impractical—but then I remembered something I read about sympathetic magic, using one thing to represent other things, like using a feather for air. I wrote to Telleridge and he said he thought it might work. So all I needed was one of you.”

He looked at Hennea and said spitefully, “I could have used you, but I thought you liked me. I didn’t want to hurt you. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble, couldn’t I?”

“You might have,” Hennea agreed mildly.

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he turned his attention back to Seraph. “I thought that it would be easier to use the youngest one. It wasn’t hard to persuade Bandor that she was in danger and I could help her. You should be proud, Seraph; your daughter’s death will return the Eagle to the world.”