“Things would be so much easier if I had followers. Maybe my own order. Then they could prepare the destruction of the Eye while I’m out here playing decoy, pretending I have it. But nope. Can’t be easy.”

  They had spent most of the day travelling in a completely random pattern; Triand said it threw off anyone who would follow the residue of yesterday’s teleportation. The mage still looked ill.

  It was a long track through the woods and the map Eliphas had hastily drawn for them was well-meant but not necessarily useful. And Triand, despite being paler than the lichen on the trees, was even more adamant about Iwy’s training. The fire hadn’t shown itself since the run-in at the cliff, and Triand had a new idea. For it to work, she first made Iwy read the treatise on wordless magic until she knew it by heart. In a fight, Triand said, it was always better if your opponent didn’t know what you were going to do next.

  “And we’re going to have a lot of those with the way things are going,” the mage concluded a long and not very straightforward talk.

  Iwy just nodded. She had tuned most of it out, though she wondered if Triand’s rambling would have been better than the treatise; it was a relatively small pamphlet, but ‘intention’ was mentioned fifty-seven times and ‘affirmation’ sixty-two times. Somehow, Triand explained the principle better when she said that it didn’t depend so much on what you said or thought or how, but on what you wanted to happen. Hypothetically, you could yell “chicken” and have fifty-seven black snakes appear out of nowhere. Iwy had to stop her master from being the first to test this and get back to the topic.

  Wordless magic meant a complete focus on events and an absolute absence of ambiguity. It also meant a lot more concentration and a higher chance of exhaustion as you pictured exactly what was going to happen next. Underpinning your thoughts with gestures helped it along.

  Her fire didn’t seem to play by the rules. No matter if she thought about it or if she yelled the word, if she waved her arms, performed a complicated fire sigil as decreed in How to Burn Foes, or stood still, nothing happened. It came and went as it pleased. The other spells Triand wanted her to learn were almost easy compared to this.

  Iwy got the chance to find out that Triand could draw a protective circle with any twig she found lying on the ground, or, in a pinch, the tip of her boot. All in the intention, not in the object. Her personal spell for this manoeuvre wasn’t complicated; it was “Everyone and everything except air stay out, seriously, I don’t want to deal with you”. There were prettier spells, some that rhymed, but Triand firmly believed that simple and angry words worked best. She had Iwy draw her own small circle next to their night camp and place something inside; if it hadn’t been dragged off by a forest creature by morning, the spell should have worked.

  “Here’s an idea, we could put your flask inside.”

  It was probably a mean thing to say, but she enjoyed the look of internal screaming on Triand’s face more than she should. They compromised on Iwy’s lantern and she was about to count her losses. If this was going to go the way of the fire, it would probably get annexed by a squirrel the minute she closed her eyes. Iwy shrugged and went to sleep.

  And woke up after what felt like five minutes to a whirring noise. The first morning light wrestled its way through the thick foliage. She sat up drowsily, checked that nothing about or around her was burning, and found she was missing a master.

  The lantern was still there. A couple of inches to the left, but still inside the circle. That counted. She picked it up, lit it with a match, and followed the whirring at the source of which she expected to find a witchard.

  It took a few minutes, but the bang that followed told Iwy her exact location.

  “What are you doing?”

  Triand turned. She grinned. It was never a good sign when she was grinning. She held up ... a thing. “Look, it’s working!”

  “Um, it’s smoking. What is that?”

  Triand lifted the device for inspection. It had a small glass ball in the middle, held up in a nest of twine. On further inspection, it turned out to be a glass eye. Some sort of leather strap was spinning around it madly, making a sound like a hornets’ nest. A few leaves seemed to have been glued to it, but most had fallen off. The whole thing smelled faintly of vinegar. Black smoke slowly started to form from the centre.

  Triand shook it a few times, eliciting a series of small bangs. “It’s an early model.”

  “It has someone’s eye in it.” Not that the rest was any less weird. And the noise kept getting louder.

  “Of course it does, do you know how hard this is without an eye?”

  “Why do you have a glass eye on you?”

  The device exploded.

  Iwy emerged from the blackberry bush behind which she had dived. “What was that?”

  Triand shook her bruised hand a few times as bits of string rained down and got stuck in her hair. “I thought since I can’t figure out which protective spells are on this Eye thing, maybe I could remove them by reversing time.”

  Iwy stared at her. “You were trying to change time?”

  “Yah, I mean, since delaying time works with the right material, I had a very good blueprint for that a while ago, worked once in practice too, I tried it on a sandwich, wish I knew where those plans got to … I thought if I follow Theoretical Time Manipulation by Herta Onestone and if I also use a growing spell, I could enhance ...”

  “I thought even magic couldn’t change time.”

  “Well, so far it can’t. Stopping and preserving time, as I said, mostly functioning, whenever I get a hold of my blueprint again, reversing’s the bigger problem. It’s theoretical. It’s what we call things before they start working.” Triand stalked back to their camp spot. Iwy was in no mood to discuss the actual meaning of the word ‘theoretical’. “Did your circle work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great, we can go to part two.”

  Uncharacteristically, Iwy didn’t feel awake enough for this. “Part two, is it?”

  “Drawing your circle is good for stationary protection, but in a moving situation you want to use a shield. C’mon, pack up, I’ll explain on the way. Think of a bouncy cloth.”

  “Bouncy. Cloth,” Iwy repeated, incredulity bouncing off every syllable to be met with enthusiastic red-headed nodding.

  The trick was to imagine a web. A thick one with very small holes. Iwy thought of the cloths they had always used for boiling pudding, a weave so tight no bit of batter could escape. She wondered why she could not imagine an actual shield and Triand shrugged and told her to try. Once she got the hang of it, she wouldn’t need to imagine anything. It would become a reflex. If she was strong enough, sooner or later her body would perform it on its own. Like catching an object that was being thrown at your face.

  Which was exactly how she made her apprentice train. There were suddenly far too many rocks in the forest for Iwy’s liking. She tried to imagine a really stretchy cloth that could bounce objects off, but Triand told her to also try thinking of a small explosion radiating from her that could throw things back. Iwy was ready to try anything if it stopped Triand from hurling things at her.

  And as if that wasn’t enough, there were two kinds of shield, one for protection against magic and one for actual objects. The one against magic was easy to recognise by the soft blue glow as air particles were ripped apart at its borders. If you could, you should do both, though wizards favoured the magic protection. After all, very few people went against a wizard with a sledgehammer.

  “Wait,” Iwy said. “You didn’t have one of those at Riestra. Or the other day.”

  “Yes, I did, I’m not suicidal. I made it invisible. For a few seconds, couldn’t do longer. Threw that photon mage for a loop. No one ever expects that.”

  At least Triand hadn’t thrown a dagger yet. Iwy had to admit that a shield charm was at the very least useful. Practical. Something you could use while working, if someone got a bit overexcited with the scythe, if a cow got loose, if you slipped while fixing the roof. Or if someone threw knives at you. It occurred to her that the sorceress hadn’t tried to hit any vital organs. She had nailed her to the ground with what seemed like precision. Why? She hadn’t exactly seemed like a sentimental person.

  “We should rest a bit,” Iwy suggested, a twig bouncing off her forehead. “You still look half-dead.”

  “I can rest when I’m dead,” Triand said and threw another twig into the bushes. It turned mid-air and came up behind Iwy to smack her on the ear. “Sooner or later they’ll find out about the artefact. We have to be undiscoverable until then.”

  “You want to try invisibility again?”

  A low-hanging branch snapped back and hit Iwy in the growling stomach.

  They were in the very definition of the middle of nowhere. If anyone could find them out here, they sort of deserved to. Iwy didn’t like this forest. Riansfield didn’t get much in the way of news, but you heard things. You went down to the pub, there was guaranteed to be someone from outside whispering ominously over a beverage they didn’t have to pay for. And if you happened to be in a dark forest somewhere near the northern mountains, you tended to remember everything you heard that night in vivid detail.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “I swear that tree just moved.”

  “I know,” Triand said, distracted. She was holding Eliphas’ map next to her own.

  “No, you’re supposed to say, ‘Trees don’t move, Iwy, there’s nothing weird in this forest and nothing to worry about’.”

  “I’m not that good a liar.” Triand finally seemed to get a rough grasp on their location and walked on.

  The forest was never quiet. Amongst the endless soundscape of the odd bird, the insects, or the wind in the leaves, the endless whispering was beginning to get on Iwy’s nerves. She had a feeling the trees were watching her. Triand said that was normal because they were.

  It was not as annoying as the twigs and stones Triand kept lobbing at her, though. Cloth and explosion, she kept telling herself. Just keep the cloth around me.

  “Why don’t you combine a shield with a bit of fire? Should burn off anything that gets close.”

  “Because I don’t know how. It’s why I don’t do most things,” Iwy said sourly. “Look, we should find a road somewhere. We’re almost out of food. Nothing against your random-mushroom-and-blackberry stew, but we could do with something more travel-friendly.”

  “And booze,” Triand added, patting her flask.

  “You really need to sort your priorities.”

  There was indeed a road, or rather a gravel track, but it was noticeably free of witch hunters and wizards. It led to a settlement, and since Triand still had money and was noticeably staffless, they could pass for almost ordinary travellers.

  They had hardly entered the town when it came towards them.

  The crowd flooded to the marketplace like a people whose main form of entertainment had been pin-the-tail-at-the-donkey, with ‘pin’ being substituted by ‘throw’, ‘tail’ by ‘hay’, and ‘donkey’ by ‘barn wall’, for six straight months.

  Triand grabbed a random person and forced them to a standstill. “What’s all the commotion?”

  “They caught the witch!”

  “The witch?”

  But no one seemed to be interested in conversation at the moment.

  The mage didn’t have to say anything; Iwy knew they were going to get involved.

  Triand grabbed a forgotten broom from someone’s doorstep. She looked left and right before performing a gesture that stripped the thing off its bristles.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Camouflage.” She sucked on her pinkie finger briefly before dragging it across the broom handle. Small symbols painted themselves under her touch. “Looks enough like a staff, d’you think?”

  “I guess, but ...”

  “C’mon, we’re gonna miss it.”

  The worn gallows’s main purpose these days seemed to be to dry linens on. The raised platform probably served as a dance floor every fair day, granted with a trick step. It creaked when you looked at it. The wood beam might snap the minute it was subjected to any kind of weight; the portly woman with the noose around her neck definitely seemed to hope so.

  Triand groaned as she approached and saw the hats. They were everywhere these days.

  “Great,” Iwy mumbled. “She’s probably as much a witch as the barn door.”

  There were only two of them instead of the usual pack. The younger one had his white collar freshly starched. It was probably his first hanging. His voice trembled only slightly as he read the charges to the waiting audience. Some of them had brought snacks. One particularly opportunistic merchant made his rounds with a tray of bagged walnuts.

  “Roslyn Whitecomb, you stand accused of dreadful witchcraft, to wit, cursing of the townspeople, weather making, consorting with demons ...”

  Roslyn rolled her eyes and whispered “I wish” loud enough for the entire square to hear. The audience snickered. The young witch hunter lost track momentarily. “And, and, and, uh ...”

  “Performing unholy rituals,” the older one nudged him.

  “I know, I know. Uh ... performing of unholy rituals ...”

  Triand waved her makeshift staff over the crowd. “How d’you know she’s a witch?”

  The witch hunter looked over his scroll for the source of the interruption. “What do you mean, how do we know?”

  “Well, has anyone seen her do any of that?”

  “She turned me into a frog!” someone said.

  Triand stood on tip toes and glanced over the crowd to find a squirrelly looking man. “It obviously didn’t stick. Excuse me, excuse me, sod off, excuse me ...” The mage elbowed her way through to the gallows and climbed the steps next to the bewildered witch hunters. She winked at the supposed witch. Down in the crowd, Iwy sighed.

  “Anyone else?” Triand said.

  The witch hunter couldn’t have been more confused if she were still carrying the short-term cat on her head. “Here, you can’t just ...”

  “It hasn’t rained in days,” an elderly man piped up.

  Triand’s brows furrowed at him. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Well, she made it stop raining.”

  “How did she do that?”

  “How should I know, I’m not a witch!”

  Triand pointed her staff in his face. “How can we be sure? Can you prove you’re not a witch?”

  A murmur went through the crowd. Nothing much happened so far out in the country and one hanging was as good as another if it was the only one all year.

  The man began to sweat. “Everyone can tell you I’m not a witch.”

  “So no one’s ever seen you do any magic and we’re supposed to believe that doesn’t make you a witch?”

  “Yes!”

  Iwy moved carefully back through the crowd. She didn’t know if Triand had a plan or not. Could go either way.

  At the makeshift gallows, Triand tapped her staff on the wood planks a few times. “I find this all very questionable. No one’s seen her do anything and I’m sure the frog guy was never much to look at.”

  “Hey!” The supposed enchanted frog went red as beets and decided to let off steam in the general direction of the instigator. “Who says you’re not a witch and you’re just aiding your dark sister?”

  The long-ignored witch hunter finally found himself on familiar ground again. He poked the rolled?up scroll of accusations at Triand’s nose. “Confess! Are you a witch?”

  “Yes.”

  The witch hunter blinked. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to go, sir,” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

  The senior hunter stroked his chin. “Right, a witch would never say she’s a witch.”

  “So if I was a witch I’d have to say I’m not a witch?”

  “Yes!”

  “But I am.”

  Behind them, Iwy pulled herself up to the platform and quietly removed the noose from around Roslyn’s neck.

  The senior hunter meanwhile punctuated each word as if Triand was being exceptionally dense. “Then you must say you’re not!”

  “So if I say I’m not a witch I am a witch but if I say I am a witch I can’t be a witch because no witch would admit she’s a witch?”

  “Yes!”

  Iwy nodded to the side and the supposed witch followed her off the gallows and left Triand to get on with her show.

  But the senior hunter had enough of this display. People were beginning to laugh. “Can’t you see she’s a witch herself, lance corporal? She’s trying to confuse us. Stand down, witch!”

  “Up yours. How do I know you’re not a witch?”

  “I’m a witch hunter, woman!”

  Triand tapped her chin in an elaborate show of thoughtfulness. “You know, that would be the perfect disguise for a witch. That way the witch could infiltrate whole villages or even the witch hunters’ guild itself to curse everyone and they wouldn’t ever be the wiser. It’s a conspiracy, I say!”

  Behind the crowd, Iwy caught Triand’s eye and gave her the thumbs-up.

  “But I’m no witch!”

  “Isn’t that what a witch would say?”

  “What are you, then?” the junior hunter said.

  “I’m a wizard. I got a staff.” Triand waved the object.

  “Witches don’t like wizards,” someone in the crowd said. “Well-known fact.”

  “And they’re known to wear lots of black,” another one pointed out. A few dozen pairs of eyes began to wander over Triand’s terracotta robes and the hunters’ black suits and came to their own conclusions.

  “I’m not a witch!” Droplets of sweat escaped from under the senior hunter’s hat.

  Triand shrugged. “Well, one of us has got to be one and it’s not me.”

  “But ...”

  “Witches say things like ‘but’ or ‘godsdammit’.”

  “You say that at least three times a day, sir,” the younger hunter added for consideration.

  “But ...”

  Triumphant tapping of the makeshift staff. “He said it again! Hey you, down there. How long hasn’t it rained, you said?”

  “Couple days,” said the elderly man from before who was definitely not a witch.

  “And when did these two show up?”

  “... couple days.”

  “Does that sound like a coincidence to anyone?”

  A mumbling went through the crowd, mostly to ask what ‘coincidence’ meant. As soon as that was settled, all eyes turned to the witch hunters.

  For all their faults, the witch hunters possessed a rudimentary ability to read the room, or, as the case may be, the town square. The senior hunter moved slowly backwards, dragging the younger one by the starched collar, and prepared to jump off the platform and leg it.

  “Sir, it really sounds like we’re the witches.”

  “Shut up, lance corporal!”

  Triand sprinted down the stairs of the gallows just before the angry mob hit. Chasing someone down to the river and treating them to an impromptu swimming lesson was about as high up on the entertainment scale as a good hanging.

  She caught up with Iwy further downtown, who was talking to the supposed witch.

  “Can’t believe what they said about me, demons and all, and making weather as if that was all that easy ... Oh, there she is. I can’t thank you two enough ...”

  “All in a day’s work,” Triand said. She winked again. Iwy shut her eyes but it was too late; she had already witnessed the woman giving her master the traditional up-and-down look, the one that stamped the words “Not much to look at, but who knows what’s hiding under those robes?” into her brain. She tried to find distraction in the dust cloud on the horizon that was proof the crowd was getting into the spirit of things. The town was almost empty now.

  “And all because of that damned general,” the woman went on. “Oh, you were probably late, they brabbled on something about a mission.”

  Triand came out of her flirt trance with a start. “What mission?”

  “Oh, they spun a yarn about a big witch conspiracy to dispose of the king, as if we’ve nothing else to do. I tried telling them that it’s all ... malarkey,” she added in a tone that suggested she had used a far less elegant word. “But would they listen? No. They shoved some book under my nose that apparently proves everything, and I said, and yet the printer couldn’t even afford decent paper, it’s so thin you couldn’t use it in the privy, which was when they shoved me to the gallows ...”

  “Did they say anything about the general?” Iwy interrupted, since Triand was busy nodding and getting into good graces.

  “Some chappy from Barium, name of Krammer. Chip on his shoulder about witches for some reason. What I don’t understand is the barrels. Who travels up the mountains with empty barrels? And that blinky thing they had in their cart, looked almost magical, that... Oh, it’s probably at the bottom of the river now ...”

  “Hm. Some wizard item?” Triand mused. “What’s it look like? What did it do?”

  “Didn’t get a good look, just sort of oblong and it blinked. But the wizards wouldn’t ... well, I suppose if they weren’t told what it’s really used for...”

  “Speaking of. Ever hear of a crucible of Atrius?”

  “A who of what?”

  “Nevermind.”

  “Well, I better get back. I’m sure they ransacked my cottage. Lots of cleaning up.” She stopped briefly. The look, again. “I wouldn’t turn down help.”

  “So ... is she a witch?” Iwy asked as soon as Roslyn was out of earshot.

  “Sure. So’s the cheese vendor. And that child who’s running around without a vest on.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “If you grow up among witches you just ... sort of know.”

  “Don’t tell the witch hunters.”

  Triand tapped her lips. “That’s the second time I’ve heard of this general. I got a bad feeling about this.”

  “Yeah, but ...” Iwy’s train of thought was derailed as her stomach growled loud enough to startle her master. She looked around the mostly deserted marketplace for a promising sign. It was getting late in the day and whatever puzzling she’d like to do about the witch hunters’ motivation, it was better done over a plate of something. “So, should we set up shop at the inn?”

  “You do that. I’ll be around later, I’m, uh, helping Roslyn. Making sure she’s alright and all.”

  Iwy was amazed at how fast she had learned to keep her face straight. “Of course you are.”

  Triand pressed some money on her, loaded her bundle into her arms, and told her not to wait up.