Propped on his black toenails, Fumbus craned to see the bearings on the pretty brass compass. He swiveled an expectant grin back and forth between the wizard and the wayfinder, not sure which face was harder to read. Colder still was the reinforced door before them...though not for long. The fuse on the goblin’s bomb was hissing shorter, apparently outside Ezren’s notice.

Lem cleared his throat, and Merisiel guiltily ceased fiddling with her dagger, giving her full attention to the halfling standing on the table in front of her.

“Now, mister, why would you bother yourself with questions like those?”

“They tell stories of this stuff up in Ustalav. Call it ‘fishgold’,” Jirelle said as she turned the heavy statuette over in her hands. The craft of the ugly thing wasn’t impressive, but the value of the red-tinted gold was undeniable. “You should throw it back.”

Feiya followed her fox familiar’s nine white tails over the rocks and up the flank of a rocky butte. The night’s cold still clung to the hollows of the land, but she didn’t mind it. After years in Irrisen’s snowy woods, the chill comforted her. Cold, she understood. These too bright plains with too few trees, however, were pure mystery to her.

Merisiel took a deep breath, held it, then let it out slowly as she tried to relax, her arms balanced, palms up, along the chair’s slender armrests. It wasn’t working. Her belly remained tight and crawling with gutwasps—the nervous feeling in the pit of your stomach that the church of Calistria called “the tingle you get ‘fore the trick is all set.” But this was no complex prank or long-planned vengeance that had the wasps doing their thing. It was something, Merisiel forced herself to remember, that she’d brought entirely upon herself.