“Galee is about eighteen miles east of here. Why?” Kerrick asked.

“My mentor, Tara of Pomyt, lived there. She had known so much about plants and herbs that she had written everything down so she wouldn’t forget. That book would be invaluable. It’s not far—”

“We spent three days in the Guild’s record room. Wouldn’t that information have been there?”

“No. The records are of past experiments and studies. Something that was used daily would have been near where the healers worked, not put away. It would have burned.”

“And Galee probably has been burned to the ground by marauders,” Kerrick said.

“Even if the town wasn’t,” Loren said gently, “her house would have been torn apart if her neighbors knew she was a healer.”

True. “And Tara probably carried it with her when she went into hiding. Never mind.”

But Kerrick didn’t move. “Tara didn’t go into hiding.”

“How do you know?” A cold emptiness swirled inside me.

“She was on the top of Ryne’s list, and close to our starting point. Belen and I arrived in Galee a few days after we left Ryne, but she had been executed the month before. Her house had been looted, but not burned.”

Grief swelled along with an impotent fury. Killed by the very people she had loved and cared for. Whose scars she proudly wore. Whose sickness she had assumed so they didn’t have to suffer.

I pushed my useless emotions down. Nothing would change because I was angry. “The book’s long gone. Probably burned for warmth that first winter.”

“Perhaps. Or she could have hidden it,” Kerrick said.

“Maybe. But the odds are so slim there’s no sense going eighteen miles out of our way.” I was well aware that Kerrick and I had changed roles even before I caught the monkeys’ smirky grins.

“Still worth stopping,” Kerrick said.

I stared at him knowing full well he only agreed because he hoped it would sway me to decide in Ryne’s favor.

As expected, the town of Galee had been destroyed. Burned-out buildings lined the streets. Nothing left except the stone foundations. However, Kerrick was determined to find Tara’s house.

I led them to her place by memory. As her newest apprentice, it had been my job to go to the market every morning. I had gotten all the jobs no one else wanted, but I had treated each task as if it had been essential to do well—a trick I had learned from my father. Tara had called me her hardest-working apprentice, and had eventually started coming to me to help her with the more interesting cases.

Her house resembled the others—a pile of burned rubble. Kerrick and the others poked around, clearing sections. I stayed on the street, trying and failing not to recall how the six months I had lived and studied here had been the happiest of my “adult” life.

“Found something,” Kerrick said, joining me. He held a small dented metal box coated with ash.

My heart jolted in recognition. It had survived!

“It’s locked.” He shook the box and it rattled. “Hold it so I can pick the lock.”

“No need.” I dug into my knapsack and withdrew a small silver key. “The box is mine. I’d left it here when I returned home, hoping I would be back. I’d forgotten about it.”

“Yet you carry the key.”

I shrugged. “Just couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. Strange, I know.”

The key fit, but opening the lock proved difficult. Kerrick helped and soon the contents that I had thought vital at the time were revealed. Coins, a necklace and a notebook.

Kerrick held up the necklace. The pendant hanging from it was a pair of hands. He gave me a questioning glance.

“My brother Criss sent that to me a month before I left home to start my apprenticeship. He’s the one who taught me how to juggle.” I smiled at the memory. “His letter said he knew I would be the best healer in all the Fifteen Realms because I had always been good with my hands and that he was so proud of me.” Tears filled my eyes, blurring my vision. “That was the last time we heard from him or my father.” I turned so Kerrick couldn’t see me wipe my cheeks.

“What’s in the notebook?” Kerrick asked.

I flipped the pages. My crooked handwriting filled each one. Reading through a few, I realized that what I had thought was a silly diary of events actually was an account of what I had learned each day. I had already forgotten many of these lessons.

“Anything useful in there?” he asked.

“Tara’s would be better, but there’s more here than I had thought.”

“Worth going out of our way for?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now turn around.”

“Why?”

“Can’t you just—”

“Okay, okay.” I spun, wondering what he wanted me to see.

Instead of pointing something out, Kerrick hooked the necklace around my throat. He pulled my hair out, letting the clasp rest on the back of my neck. The touch of cold metal on skin sent a shiver along my spine.

“There. Now you won’t lose it again.”

We overnighted in Galee, camping on the lee side of a large stone wall that hadn’t been knocked over. After so many days on the road together, we gathered wood, cleared snow, set a fire, cooked, ate and took turns on watch without having to say a word. However, once we settled under the blankets of our sleeping rolls, conversation would start, usually after Kerrick left for his shift. Tonight was no exception.

“Has anyone else noticed that we’ve encountered no one in the past two days?” Quain asked.

“The people living around here are not the type we’d want to encounter,” Belen said.

“The trees are probably telling Kerrick where they are, and we’ve been avoiding them,” Loren said. “No sense letting Tohon or the bands of marauders know our location.”

“What about the mercs?” I asked.

“Them, too,” Loren said.

I mulled it over. “Except for today, we’ve been traveling pretty much straight north for days. You’d think we’d have to skirt areas to avoid them. And we haven’t seen any tracks in the snow. Quain may be onto something. It’s too quiet.”

“What’s wrong with quiet?” Belen asked. “Not everything has to be a struggle.”

“What are you thinking, Avry?” Loren asked, ignoring poor Belen. “Ambush near the main pass in case we try to cross it before spring?”

“It’s a bit obvious, but logical.”

“Wouldn’t Kerrick be able to use his tree mojo to detect them?” Quain asked.

I grinned at his word choice. Kerrick had tried to explain to the monkeys how his magic worked, but unless they felt it like I had, they wouldn’t be able to fully understand how the forest communicated with him. Magicians in general kept the details about their powers quiet. Either they were afraid a person would figure out how to counter them, or they liked being viewed as mysterious. Although once everyone knew, Kerrick had been open and frank with the guys.

“For his tree mojo to work, it would depend on where the ambush is. If they’re hiding above the tree line, then we’d be out of luck.”

“What about the ex-girlfriend?” Quain asked. “Do you think Jael’s going to come after us again?”

“No. Jael lost the element of surprise and she knows her power can’t counter ours.”

Quain sat up and stared at me. “Ours?”

I cursed under my breath for my slip.

Belen chuckled at Quain’s confusion. “Think about it.”

So Belen knew. Did Loren? I glanced at him. He had a faraway expression.

“Is that why you yelled for Kerrick with Flea?” Quain asked. “You wanted to combine your magic?”

“We didn’t combine it, we shared magical energy,” I said, then explained how Kerrick and I had fought off Jael’s attack. “Healers often linked together if a patient was on the edge of dying, giving one healer the strength to save the patient’s life. Since Kerrick and I have different types of magic, I was surprised we could do it at all.”

“Could Kerrick heal Ryne using your energy?” Belen asked.