After a successful quest was complete, Dewin usually expected that she and Tarian would take a few others, but always drifting back toward Rhaedr Coch, the principal fortress of the Silver Shields.

This time, somehow, that hadn’t happened; instead they found themselves drawn to Cyfalaf, the ducal seat, a compact city surrounded by well-ordered farmland with the ducal palace stationed near the western gate of the city itself. It was true that they would likely make better money in Cyfalaf than in the townships near Rhaedr Coch, but they were coming up toward winter, where travel required the rental of stagecoaches, and so any quest was much more expensive, and impossible if the route would take you far from the common roads.

Tarian usually spent the winter in the fortress courtyard, doing calisthenics and testing herself not only with her sword but with any other weapons the Silver Shields would let her master. For years now she’d been working toward being a sharp enough shot with a flamelock pistol that she would be issued with one. Her apparent lack of interest was surprising.

The true frustration was that Sir Swynol and Consuriwr turned out to be closer than Dewin had imagined. She had assumed they were simply colleagues, the heir and the lord’s advisor, but the more exposure she had to the pair of them, the stronger the impression that Consuriwr worked most closely with Swynol. And as Swynol and Tarian seemed to be around one another a lot of the time, Dewin was often with Consuriwr.

“I wanted to show you something from my studies with the torcs,” he told her at one point. “I think I’ve had a breakthrough.”

She turned her nose up at him, of course, but her curiosity had certainly been well and truly piqued. Consuriwr had been quite right to say that mages trained by adventuring had a better sense for the general nature of a magic item, but understanding everything its enchantments might do required a long-term study most of them didn’t have either the time or the facilities to carry out.

Dewin allowed that she might find some interest in that and accompanied him into his study, a room that should have been spacious and likely would have been were it not for the sheer number of items packed into it, along with the amount of furniture introduced to contain them. The big oak writing desk that he clearly spent the majority of his time at held three of the torcs, a small bowl containing some ash, several scrollcases, three inkwells in different colours, a small selection of gemstones that, to Dewin’s eyes, glowed with mystic energy, and a handful of silver coins.

“Clearly you’re busy,” she said doubtfully, and Consuriwr chuckled. “I have a half-dozen or more projects at any given time,” he said. “Usually one of them is urgent, and the others move at the pace I choose. It’s not so difficult.”

“It’s disorganised,” she retorted. “You couldn’t get away with that out travelling.”

“No? Well, I suppose not. You’d have to choose one project and bring it with you.” He glanced over at a different desk, on which a collection of expensive glassware sat, gathering dust unused. “And not anything alchemical, at that.”

“I don’t make much of a study of alchemy,” Dewin conceded, taking her seat in his chair at the heavy writing desk. “I know the herbs where, if I boil them in a kettle over the fire, I can start a body healing, and I know the infusions to add for potions to enhance the strength of Tarian’s sword-arm. Beyond that I have no need to know more.” She shrugged, picking up the sheet of paper that Consuriwr had been writing on. “Let’s see here.”

She did not read in silence, for she had regularly to interrupt herself and turn to Consuriwr to check what he meant by a particular bit of shorthand, but she assimilated his notes quickly. “Several spells, then,” she said at length, “interwoven together, but clearly all cast at the same time. And you think the same time for each of the torcs? Not one at a time?”

“I think it was all one job, yes,” Consuriwr said. “I conclude that an archmage was involved.”

“Strange to think of an archmage’s work becoming hand-me-downs used so little they could be stolen without anyone noticing at first,” Dewin said, and Consuriwr nodded his agreement.

“But it does happen,” he said. “I should think a significant percentage of the ancient treasures you and your friend reclaim will be locked in a different chest within a decade of their rediscovery.”

“To spend so much on buying them from us and not to use them seems sinful,” Dewin said.

“The very wealthy see it differently,” came the answer. “I talk to them regularly. I’ve seen the difference.”

Dewin shrugged. “Some of these spells look a bit…”

“Forbidden?”

She laughed shortly and nodded. “Real early Erithnian stuff.” This was one of the more oblique ways that wizards of this era used for discussing the magic of the mind, with the founding of the Erithnian empire being at the heart of the second Age of Enchantment.

“Yes,” the court mage replied, “although they’re older, I think. Something about the design of one of these spells puts me in mind of elven spell design, and certainly an archmage working on such things makes me think these are truly ancient.”

Dewin nodded. “What was the breakthrough?”

“Oh, yes.” He tapped at a point in his workings where his shorthand mapped out a series of signifiers within a spell. “This. It’s very elegant targeting, I think.”

Dewin looked over that section again thoughtfully. “I’d call it showy,” she said at last.

“How so?”

“Well, I can see no benefit to it. You could simply target the bearer of the torc instead, rather than bother with all this complicated preconditional nonsense.”

“Nonsense?”

“Wouldn’t you say?”

“Hm.” Consuriwr smiled softly. “I suppose it won’t surprise you to hear that I do disagree, but I think we can test this, between us. I would expect you’ve developed some excellent wards, given your profession?”

“We have the same profession,” Dewin retorted, feeling somewhat stung. The court mage nodded, waving a hand airily.

“Given the way we work, then,” he said.

Dewin reminded herself how much of the money she and Tarian had earned the past several months had come from this man’s friend and didn’t chase the implication. Instead she said “Yes, I think I’ve worked up some good defences.”

“If I cast a spell on you with traditional targeting, it should fail, yes?”

She considered where this was leading, but a ritualist like Consuriwr tended to stick to rituals because they didn’t have the power to punch through with a spell cast in a moment. “Short of you draining one of your gems here to throw the power at me, yes.”

“I think the torcs were designed like that to get around wards.”

Dewin sat back, smiling lopsidedly. “That’s not how anything works.”

“But over time, it might be.”

She shook her head. “There’s nothing in what you’ve written here which supports that claim.”

“Well.” He obviously had no idea how to continue the conversation since she’d so flatly denied his insight. She decided to throw him something.

“It’s almost certainly an archmage just doing something showy,” she said. “But if you could copy it, I dare say that would be something to boast about.”

“I’m confident I can duplicate it,” he told her. “But I don’t do complex things just to say I can.”

Dewin glanced over her shoulder at him and smiled. “That’s a first in my experience.”

“Pardon me?”

“Doing complicated things just to say you can. Isn’t that how stay-at-home wizards find things to boast about?”

“Ah.” He smiled thinly. “Not exactly.”

Dewin reached out and picked up a torc, weighing it thoughtfully in one hand. She’d been far more familiar with them a few months ago, when she and Tarian had recovered them, but few things stayed fresh in her mind. Looking around the study, she asked “How do you find anything in here?”

“I know where it all is,” Consuriwr replied. “Although, yes, sometimes it can take a few minutes to unearth something.”

“I’d hate to be hired to retrieve something from here,” she added with a grin. “Your security’s pretty good but the biggest problem would be finding what I was after buried under seven research projects you’re not really concentrating on any of.”

“Hm.” He smiled. “I assure you, the organisation of my study is perfectly adequate to the task.”

“If you say so.“

“I was wondering, though, whether you’d care to make a wager.”

“On what?”

“On what we said earlier. Spells and wards, and that particular means of directing a spell’s energy.”

“What kind of wager?”

“Well, for me this is a chance for me to test a theory. But I know there will have to be something offered for you, or why agree to it?” Consuriwr smiled. “I propose to cast something beneficial on you, but with you resisting it nonetheless. If it reaches you over the next month or so, I win the wager; if not, you do.”

“And what are the stakes?”

“The main thing I want is proof that my theory is correct. Let’s say that if I win, you will do some little task for me. What if you win?”

Dewin took her time to consider this. “Some item or other that may be useful to me,” she said. “You’ll have to put this place to rights so I can check more easily, of course.”

“Very well,” he nodded.

*

Two months had passed, and Dewin was pretty sure that Consuriwr had lost his wager. She hadn’t noticed anything she could put down to the spell he’d put on her, not while they wintered in the town nearest the Ducal estate, not when she and Tarian had ridden out again - Tarian still insisting on better rooms and pricier victuals - nor when they’d stumbled over the nest of mindeaters being catered to by the innkeeper in the small coaching inn they’d stayed at the night before.

She had responded, so far as she could tell, only with her usual quickness, had not noticed anything she judged she might have overlooked before, had drawn only on the mystic power she was used to relying on.

Admittedly that had still been enough to set the nest - and the inn - ablaze and keep their minds from being devoured, but she’d spent a good chunk of the morning sending out phantom pigeons, illusions with just enough reality to them that the messages strapped to their ankles wouldn’t fall away until they’d reached their destinations. Who knew how many of those things were loose in the duchy now?

“Some problems you need a regiment to solve,” she said softly.

“Hmm?” Tarian looked across from her horse and smiled. “Oh, the mindeaters? I was actually thinking I might invite the Silver Shields into it.”

“Aye, there’s a good idea in that,” Dewin acknowledged. “It’ll earn them some money, and it’ll be another good mark against your name with them.”

Tarian nodded. “It’s not something the two of us could do, though,” she agreed. “Or even the three of us.”

Dewin let that one sit for a while. Swynol and Tarian had floated the idea that he might join them occasionally, with Swynol pointing out that he’d acquitted himself well in rescuing her. “A cavalry charge is supposed to be my place, but it’s not where my talents lie,” he’d said. “Give me a dagger and some shadows and I can get something useful done.”

Dewin hadn’t been as keen. She knew Tarian, knew her responses and her reactions. She could predict where the paladin would be over the next few seconds. There were so many adventurers who complained about mages catching them with tossed fireballs or lightning sprays, and it just wasn’t a problem she and Tarian had had - or the others, when they’d still been a four-person deal.

She didn’t have the same read on Swynol, and the more he leaned into stealth, the harder it would be to develop.

All of which said nothing about the proportional amount of trouble catching a teammate caused when they were nobility compared against when they weren’t…

“Perhaps we should find an easy job to test him on,” Dewin said, and Tarian just looked at her cynically. Their eyes met, and both of them laughed.

“I think he’s more capable than you imagine,” Tarian answered.

“That’s as maybe,” Dewin said. “He’s still nobility. You know he’ll try calling the shots, and are you going to be happy to tell him no in the heat of crisis?”

Tarian said nothing. Dewin thought that was the matter settled, but then, her eyes were back on the path ahead, and she didn’t see the flush on Tarian’s cheeks.

*

“Why not spend the day at court?” Swynol had asked, and Tarian, casting about for an excuse, had found herself agreeing even as a dozen or more answers presented themselves.

It had started out as a frustrating morning, even with the potential to pick up another job before the day was out, but somewhere after the first hour it seemed like her adventuring instincts had awoken, just pointed at a different kind of battle; there was a cut and thrust to the words of many courtiers, a parry hidden as a putdown, and enough cutting language the metaphor almost threatened to become real. It wasn’t about reaching the right conclusion, it was just about making sure that others come to one that was best for an individual’s aims.

Swynol had suggested it as a counterpart to the quest he’d accompanied them on, a month or more ago in the early spring, and now she’d seen the combat beneath the conversation, it almost felt like a fair exchange. She could feel her blood rising with the competition.

Swynol seemed to be a great hit with the younger women of the Court, Tarian noticed. Even some of the married women were… Well, it looked like flirting, if flirting had to follow a much stricter set of rules than she was used to dealing with. She started to pick up the hints when, a half hour after the Lady Jenhyfr commented that “for truly, Sir Swynol, the time has come for a sharp eye looking out for the Duchy, not a strong swordarm”, Mademoiselle Cira told him “the time of a strong swordarm like your father is fast passing, Sir Swynol, and we shall have cause in the years to come to be thankful that you have sharp eyes for the currents of the future.”

Tarian felt a sudden urge to step up and kiss him in front of all of them, to take action to claim him. She was wise enough to know it would mean consternation, perhaps even scandal, but all the same, she wanted to.

“Vixens, aren’t they?” asked another of the women of court, this one a little older, who had come up from behind to stand at Tarian’s side watching the others press around the heir to the Duchy. In her hand she held a golden goblet, and her dark hair was unconstrained, tresses falling past her shoulders.

Tarian sized her up in moments, assessed the possibility she could attempt to sabotage Tarian’s own suit and dismissed it on the same fine-tuned instincts that allowed her to read court as a battle. “Jackals,” she corrected. “Vixens hunt. These just prowl and scavenge.”

The other woman laughed. “You are certainly not of their ilk,” she said. “I see you have come prepared to wound.”

Tarian smiled her satisfaction. It was, she firmly believed, good to be recognised.

“Tell me, dear,” the other woman went on, “how did you achieve this wonderful effect to your hair?”

Surprised, Tarian shrugged her braid forward over her shoulder and slide a hand beneath to lift it.

Her raven-black hair was shot through with shining gold. She stared at it in silence for so long that the other tired of her quiet, and moved on.

*

There had, briefly, been a problem with a marauding band of orcs, which had been solved by the diligent application of themselves to the problem. As they rode back, Tarian looked patiently at Dewin, waiting, and the mage at last sighed and said aloud “I’ll give you this, Swynol, you know how to pick your moment.”

He gave vent to a guffaw of satisfaction. “I don’t think the warpriest knew I was there,” he said.

“I certainly didn’t,” Dewin told him. “It’s a good thing I didn’t choose that moment to try and catch it with a fireball.”

“There was a much bigger concentration of them trying to get at Tarian,” he pointed out. “I was tolerably sure your attention would be elsewhere for long enough that I could get in and out.”

“Hm.”

“You don’t think I wouldn’t pass on your concerns?” Tarian asked archly, and Dewin was left without a response.

That night, in the coaching in, Dewin slept in the open hall as she had been accustomed to before, which certainly brought down her costs. Tarian did not rejoin her, but took a room with Swynol, as had now become her habit.

Dewin rested near the wall, where she would usually find more peace through not being surrounded, and expected to drop off swiftly, her arms and legs still aching a little from the exertions of the day. But something was keeping her awake, a steady, slow percussion she at first took to be war drums or the sound of some giant ritual.

With time it resolved more clearly in her mind, and she sighed, rolling her eyes, and rolled over to try to sleep in spite of it. It was no threat; the steady thumping was the headboard of a wooden bed against the stone wall, a strange echo sounding almost hollow.

Tarian was enjoying herself again with her conquest, she concluded, and she was sure her friend was the source of the sound. She had the power in her thighs to move the heavy wooden furnishings with each thrust of her hips.

The other two adventurers were enjoying each other well beyond the point where Dewin had finally succumbed to sleep.

*

The news was surely out throughout the duchy, Tarian thought, but at court it was still not correct for her and Swynol to acknowledge the pleasure they were taking in one another. It was frustrating to see so many of the female courtiers continuing to make eyes at a man she now couldn’t deny she was falling for.

What she did deny was that it was anything more than Swynol she was falling for. She bristled every time Dewin rolled her eyes while they traveled, flinched when Annalora, the squire the Silver Shields had assigned her at court in mark of her growing status, expressed surprise at the new dresses she had had made for court and scandalised amazement at what they had cost, and she did her best to ignore that the reason these exclamations hit home as powerfully as they did was because there was truth to them.

“Congratulations, of a sort,” the dark-haired woman murmured to her the next time they found themselves side by side at court. Tarian gave her a quick smile.

“So you’ve heard. I was beginning to think nobody had.”

“Oh, they’ve all heard, my dear,” she said, taking a sip from her goblet. “You should have heard them while you were away, when the news filtered back. Every morsel was dissected before it was consumed, gone over several times as they speculated on why Swynol might have chosen you.”

Tarian’s upper lip briefly pulled back in the makings of a snarl, but she caught herself and forced her expression into something at once more placid and implacable.

“The general consensus,” the woman continued, “is that you’ve clearly been chosen for pure animal indulgence.” This was not offered as condemnation, either of Tarian or of the others; it was presented as if it would be a source of amusement. “They assume you will be a mistress, not a wife.”

Tarian made a noise at the back of her throat that she was far from proud of. “We will see about that,” she said.

“Swynol will make his decision in due time, I’m sure,” came the answer. “If his father were going to decide, I’m sure he would have a year or more ago, when there was that business with the cutpurse.”

Ah. Tarian half-smiled. “I knew he’d had training,” she confirmed. It was foolish that this made her feel exultant. She did, all the same.

“Yes. She was, of course, totally unsuitable. I think he knew that too. It may have been the attraction.”

One particular woman raised her voice enough for it to carry back toward them. “Of course, Swynol, your dear father will be tired by now. I’m sure he will want you to take more of a hand in the running of the duchy this year. Is it really wise to be gallivanting around without the security of the duchy guard?”

Tarian had to pull back against the impulse to wade straight into that conversation and see whether the woman would learn her place.

“I haven’t the weapons for this,” she said softly.

“I know, dear,” said the dark haired woman. “I’ve been waiting to see if you realised.”

“...Who are you?”

She smiled beatifically. “Rhian, Countess of Borthladd, although that’s really something of a courtesy title. In terms that matter to you, I’m Swynol’s aunt, dear. I think we have a lot to talk about.”

*

That same afternoon, Dewin had decided it was time to cash in on her bet with Consuriwr. She therefore took herself along to the court, but rather than attend the main proceedings, once a liveried servant familiar with her had admitted her, she took herself off to the court mage’s study, letting herself in.

It was remarkable to Dewin how little consideration was given by the courtly nobility and their hangers-on to locking their rooms. There was nominally a garret room at the Eighth Tower that was hers by right; she kept it locked, warded, and also left nothing of value there. Competition within her order was fierce. Nobody attached to the court seemed to believe security was needed once you were within the guards.

The trouble with that was that they were probably right.

Consuriwr wasn’t in, so she settled down at his desk to wait for him. She took up his writings to pass the time, delving back into his notes and examinations. It seemed that as well as working on the method of targeting a spell he’d discovered through the torc, he had recently been working on developing multiple spells of desire, again drawing from the torc’s enchantments and the ways they had apparently steered the thoughts of their wearers.

This was deeply forbidden which made it, needless to say, delicious blackmail material. She smiled to herself, reading up more detail on the spells as Consuriwr intended them to work. One of them was an enchantment laid on inanimate objects - Dewin suspected these might be potions, ointments, or similar - which would be applied to the ultimate target, allowing the magic to seep in.

It was a slower process than to ensorcel a living person, but it would be far less likely to be noticed and the knowing ward of a mage - or even the unconscious resistance by will of a person - would be bypassed. Potions, poisons, lotions and philtres - the methods by which wizards had for centuries solved the problem Consuriwr thought the torcs defeated by some other route.

The other used Consuriwr’s reconstruction of the other process, and as Dewin read the breakdown of the spell she found herself thinking that it did, actually, seem more plausible to her than it had done when they first made their bet. If it wasn’t for the fact he hadn’t been able to affect her with whatever spell he’d chosen, she might have found it plausible.

The spell itself was interesting, in that Dewin rarely got the chance to study spell construction of this style. The various councils of mages who had, five hundred years earlier, ended the second Age of Enchantment by outlawing the use of these spells had not been foolish enough to leave the methods lying around for them to be learned again.

It looked subtle, but inexorable. Something that would work away on its target in the background for day on day, perhaps week on week. Through the process, the victim might never notice that their opinions were changing, and if they did, they probably think they’d just changed their mind. The way they looked on the caster would change, little by little, and since they saw him in a different light, it would make sense to them that they’d started to do so for sensible reasons.

Dewin was impressed. She wouldn’t have thought Consuriwr had the courage to try something like this, nor the intelligence to put it all together. He was clearly much more than the arrogant fool she’d always thought him.

She found herself thinking that it was a real shame that the spell didn’t work. It almost deserved to, with the effort he’d put in. If she was reading this correctly, it should be impossible for the victim to disobey an instruction from the caster…

The door opened and Consuriwr stepped into his room. Dewin had expected him to bristle at her presence, but her just smiled a slow, lopsided smile.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked.

“I’ve come to collect.”

“Collect?”

“We had a wager. I’m sure you recall.”

“Ah yes. But I won.”

“I think you’ll find you did not,” she retorted hotly.

“Put my work down,” Consuriwr said, and there was something of finality to his tone; it was firmer than before, and while it couldn’t have been called cruel, there was a weight of threat to it.

Dewin set down his scroll. Only after her fingers had released it did the three or four one-liners she could have denied him with occur to her, as if some blockage in her thoughts had delayed them until they were just out of date.

“Stand up,” he told her, and she complied obediently, eyes opening wide as she looked back at him. Consuriwr had never given her any indication of his dominance before, she thought; he had shown his arrogance and his belief in his own superiority, but there had been nothing there to back it up.

Now they both knew, without either needing to say, who was in control in this moment. He looked her up and down, smirking slightly. “I don’t believe the robe suits you,” he said, and Dewin had to bite back an offer to change her style entirely, not least because she had no other clothing with her. “Take it off.”

Dewin fumbled her way out of dozens of pendants, warding bags, and trinkets, as well as the often-ignored belt with its dagger in a scabbard, in hasty obedience before she could draw the heavy robes up over her head.

This is silly, she thought. I have my dignity to protect. But it did not stop her from removing the robe and casting it aside, standing mostly revealed in a trim cotton shift tightened at the back, which gave her a little comfort under the robe and offered support to her full breasts, or at least which did so when her chest was not heaving with excitement and outrage.

She stood in front of Consuriwr as fully on display as any blushing bride returning to the bedchamber after shedding her corsets.

“Turn around, slowly,” he told her, and she complied, blushing furiously as she did so, revolving on the spot. Her fists clenched as she lifted her arms from her sides in high emotion, but she would not have liked to admit what that emotion was.

“I was sure there had to be something good hiding under all that dirty material,” he said. “But frankly you’ve surprised me. How is your fire magic?”

“I’m quite proud of it,” Dewin said, keeping her voice from cracking only with effort.

“How strong is your ward?”

“Thousand Stars,” she breathed as the copper finally dropped, “you’ve enchanted me.” And then, because enchantment required obedience, she added, “Sturdy today. Near unbreakable on days I expect trouble.”

“Burn that drapery off you,” he instructed. Dewin, aware that a man she admired now had total control over her, offered a token resistance, mostly out of curiosity as to whether she could, but her arms lifted and curved around in front of her, her palms turning inward toward herself, and as she focused her intent flame burst forth from her fingertips, roaring toward her.

Dewin reined her ward back into the very edge of her skin, a skill she had developed over time only, so that the fire could engulf the cheap white cotton she wore, which went up in flames while her magic kept her skin safe. If her control wavered, she knew, she would burn; she would not be able to intervene.

But if her control wavered, she would be letting Consuriwr down, and she did not want to let him down. It was as shameful a thing as she could think of.

He was watching her body intently as more of it was revealed and she could see in his expression the delight as the flames unveiled and illuminated her curves. “You were right,” he said. “You’re enchanted. Like a talisman.”

“Or like the forbidden magic.” It was forbidden, of course, because it treated people as talismans or other items, but that didn’t seem so important at that point.

“Yes. But you won’t be reporting me, will you?”

And lose this clarity of purpose? “No.”

“Good.” The last burning embers of her shift fell from her body and she let the fire spell she had conjured go, wisps of smoke briefly wreathing her in darkness. He stepped in close, putting his hand on her chest, warmed than usual from the aftereffects of her spell, possessively. He put his other hand to her cheek and tilted her head back to meet his in a kiss. “I have plenty for you to be doing,” he told her, “but we’ll start with you on the desk, not under it.”

His hands cupped her buttocks and he turned slightly, putting the small of her back against the desk sill. Then, with a sudden two-handed tug of her bare rear, he tilted her backward, her spine landing with a slap against the leather lining of the desk as she looked back up at him.

His doublet unbuttoned, he had his cock out of his breeches in moments, and it was from that moment just a trifle for him to be inside her.