Smoke and Memories (The Dark Sorcerer #3) - D.K. Holmberg Page 0,22

magic users, but not all within the Society particularly cared to do so. Many simply overlooked it.

“And if you can’t stop this magic?” Topher asked.

“That’s not an option,” Jayna said.

“Why doesn’t he get involved?”

Jayna shook her head. “He has me to help him.”

Eva started to laugh. “You’re asking the same questions I asked,” she said, glancing from Jayna to Topher. “And she still struggles to answer them, the same way she struggled answering me.”

“I’m not struggling to answer them,” she said. “It’s just that there aren’t any easy answers.”

“There’s an answer you haven’t even considered before.”

“And what is that?”

“He doesn’t want you to know the truth.”

She just shrugged. “I don’t think Ceran is keeping relevant things from me to get me hurt.”

From what he had said, the only things he had been keeping from her were things she wouldn’t be able to deal with—at least, not yet—and she believed it. She believed she simply wasn’t ready for certain information.

When she had faced Gabranth and the Celebrants of Asymorn, Jayna wasn’t entirely sure she was ready for them. She knew there was a dark magic in the city, but at the time, she had been working to try to remove other sorts of darkness, not that of sorcerers.

“Well, if there’s anything I can do . . .”

She looked over to Topher, and she nodded while smiling at him. “Thank you.” She looked around. “I think we’re going to need to start digging,” she said to Eva.

“Digging?”

“You have resources within the city. It’s time for us to take advantage of them. We need to figure out what those resources know about the Celebrants of Asymorn and the Order of Norej. Once we figure that out, then we can start digging into whatever we can find out about Sarenoth. Decide where we’ll start, and I’ll come with you.”

“You’ll be opening yourself up to a different type of question,” Eva said.

“What kind of question might that be?”

“The kind that asks why you’re looking into dark magic. You might be perceived as somebody interested in it. So far, you’ve done your best to avoid that perception.”

“That doesn’t mean I’ve avoided it altogether. Unfortunately, it seems that everything I’ve done, everything I’ve tried to do, keeps bringing me back around to needing to understand and uncover who these twelve followers of Sarenoth are, and who Sarenoth himself is.”

There was something else though: the troubling belief that maybe there was something more she still didn’t know, that there might be something else taking place, some other bit of magic beyond what she had uncovered so far.

She didn’t know how much of that Ceran understood. It might be that he truly didn’t know anything more than what he had already revealed.

“It might be dangerous,” Eva said.

“Have we done anything in the city that’s not?”

Eva leaned back, resting her head on the chair, and closing her eyes as she faced the fire. “Perhaps not.”

Jayna got to her feet, smiled at Topher, and headed back to her room. She stared at the broken remnants of the wall. It was held in place with surges of magic, but maybe it was time for her to figure out some way of holding it more securely, ensuring the wall itself never fell.

She grabbed one of the spellbooks Char had given her and started flipping through the pages, looking for something that could be useful to solidify the stone. All she needed was a way of holding it more securely. This was something she had put off, much like she had put off trying to better understand what she could learn about Norej and Asymorn. Both of them worried her, as did her concern that even if she were to find answers, they wouldn’t be useful to her without Ceran to help.

She found a spell that might work. She read through it, then read through it again, trying to keep it fixed in her mind. Sorcery was more complicated than the kind of magic she used through her Toral ring.

Still, as she settled in to begin, she couldn’t shake the memory of the attack on the street earlier.

Char had been targeted by dark magic, used to agitate the crowd. Now there was a dead dark sorcerer surrounded by smoke. Something was going on in the city, and this time it seemed to be more than just dark magic.

She traced a pattern out along the floor, repeating it the entire length of the wall. It was a very different pattern than what she had used