Smoke and Memories (The Dark Sorcerer #3) - D.K. Holmberg Page 0,30

eye, and she suspected that most of those drawings were meant to provide enchantments into the shield itself. As far as she could tell, the shield carried multiple different enchantments, multiple different layers of power.

She took the shield and held it, tracing her fingers around it. She could feel the energy within it, though she wasn’t able to determine anything else about it.

“Be careful with that,” Telluminder said. He hopped off his stool and tottered around the counter. Telluminder was short, barely coming up to her waist, and had flowing gray hair, a wide head, and an impossibly small body. He reached for the shield, plucked it from Jayna’s hand, and slipped it back onto the shelf. “Unless you know what you’re doing with it, I would advise you to leave it well enough alone.”

“I was just having a look.”

“You can have a look without touching.” He glanced over to Eva. “Is she like this wherever she goes?”

“Most of the time,” Eva said. She leaned on the counter and just watched Jayna, not helping.

“What is it?” Jayna asked.

“As I’m sure even you can determine, it is an enchantment.”

Jayna crouched down, leaning forward and looking at the shield. “It’s a different kind of enchantment than I’ve seen before. I haven’t seen too many with multiple layers of enchantment upon them.”

She wasn’t even sure that such a thing could have been done, but the detail on the shield was not nearly as exquisite as she would’ve expected from a sorcerer, who would’ve been the only one she thought capable of placing an enchantment like that. That suggested this had stemmed from a dular, but what dular could place that kind of power on a shield?

“Obviously, you haven’t the necessary experience for such things,” he snapped at her.

Jayna chuckled. “Obviously.”

“Are you mocking me now?” He looked over to Eva. “Is she mocking me?”

“Probably,” Eva said.

Jayna just shook her head. “I’m not mocking. I’m trying to understand your shield. Don’t you want others to know just what you have available at your shop?”

“I want others to leave my items alone unless they have the proper understanding of how to handle them.”

“But I know how to handle an enchantment,” Jayna said.

“You think you do,” he said, shaking his head. “That would be your first mistake, now wouldn’t it?”

Jayna started to laugh. She didn’t remember Telluminder being quite like this the last time she had been here. A little stubborn, maybe, but now he was expressing a clear irritability with her.

“Have I done anything to upset you?”

“Oh, no. The great Jayna Aguelon has done nothing.”

Jayna straightened and looked down at Telluminder. “We just came here to talk. I didn’t come here to cause trouble. And I certainly haven’t come to the city to cause trouble.”

“But trouble seems to follow you regardless of what you intend, doesn’t it?”

Jayna couldn’t even refute that. “Maybe we got off on the wrong foot.”

He looked down at his feet. “My feet are fine.”

“Maybe I said something that upset you.”

She glanced over to Eva, who rested on the counter, eyes closed, a bit of faint smoke trailing around her face. It was almost as if the energy around her continued to flow, swirling, as if she were trying to call upon the power within her but not wanting to be seen drawing on that energy. Jayna thought the two of them would have worked better together when it came to getting information from Telluminder, but seeing Eva like this left her thinking that maybe she wasn’t going to be an ally in her search for information.

Telluminder hadn’t responded to her last statement, so Jayna pressed on. “I suppose you don’t need the money, then.”

Telluminder straightened and frowned at her. “Money?”

“I was in the market for some different enchantments.” She shrugged, glancing over to Eva for a moment before turning her attention back to Telluminder. “But there are other shops like yours I could get them from. I don’t need to waste my time here.” She started to turn, then Telluminder grabbed her arm, turning her back to face him.

“We don’t need to be too hasty,” he said.

“We don’t,” Jayna said.

“Perhaps I let the rumors about you influence my opinion a little bit more than I should have,” he said.

“What exactly were the rumors about me?”

“Why, the rumors say that Jayna Aguelon has decided to rule the city.”

Jayna started to smile, and she glanced over to Eva again, but she remained motionless. When she turned her attention back to Telluminder, she shook her