him. That should have kept him safe.
“I don’t know. They don’t really like to talk about it.”
“They?”
“The seven. You know they’re particular about what they share.”
“I don’t. I’m not connected to that part of Nelar. That’s why we have you, Topher.”
He grinned at her. “You do have me for that. That’s great. And well, I don’t know if I can tell you a whole lot more than that, just that Rosal is leading the family now.”
Jayna leaned back in the chair, frowning. It surprised her that Rosal would be leading his family. He had never struck her as particularly skilled. He was pretty, sure, but not all that talented without using the bloodstone. That said, he certainly could be charismatic—she saw that when he spoke at the market, working on selling the bloodstone enchantments. He could be compelling, but for him to lead one of the great houses within the city . . .
It just didn’t fit.
If her plan to go to Char for help didn’t pan out, she could always go to Rosal for information. Whether he’d answer her was a different matter, however.
“Keep looking into it,” she said to Topher.
“Why? What do you think we’ll find?”
She shook her head. “I really don’t know. Whatever is there is important, but I don’t know why.”
“Is it always like that with you?”
“Like what?”
“Like you know something is important but you don’t know why?”
She looked over to Eva, seeing her resting back against the chair, eyes closed, the fire crackling in front of her and radiating heat. “Sometimes.”
13
The surge of the ring caught her attention.
It was a new day and Jayna had been on the outskirts of the city practicing spells again, hoping to gain a better understanding of her spellbooks. It was a way of trying to clear her mind. Eva was looking for more information and Topher had gone off to question the dular, which left Jayna feeling adrift.
She could have gone with either of them, but she felt her time would be better spent working in the spellbooks while looking for something that could generate a smoke spell that would appear like Ashara magic, but she hadn’t yet found anything.
When the ring began to constrict, she thought perhaps it was a dark creature. It hadn’t been one when she had felt it the last time though, so she wasn’t exactly sure if that was it, but the tension in the ring persisted, constricting more and more.
Not a dark creature.
A dark sorcerer.
She hurriedly wiped away the spell she had been tracing out on the ground, tucked the spellbook into her pack, and paused. She was near some of the old El’aras ruins, close enough to the forest that she could use it to absorb the power of sorcery she was drawing upon and diffuse it enough so that the Society wouldn’t detect it.
Where was the power coming from?
She couldn’t tell.
She continued following the steady constriction she detected. It had to be somewhere nearby.
It brought her back into the city. She wove past a row of shops, all of them tucked into old El’aras structures, and headed past a small plaza where she detected a hint of smoke drifting. She paused for a moment. As she stared at the smoke, she couldn’t tell if it was an enchantment like she had seen in Raollet’s shop, or simply chimney smoke.
A shout in the distance caught her attention.
She tore her gaze away.
Now wasn’t the time for her to be worrying about smoke coming from a single building.
She focused on the tightness she detected in her ring.
Dark magic.
Jayna began to call upon the power within the Toral ring. Cold crept into her finger, then up her wrist and all the way up her arm. The power within the ring was considerable, and it surged far faster than it had when she had first been gifted the ring. That was partly because of the additional power Ceran had granted her when she had needed to take on the Order of Norej, but it was also because of the bloodstone that had augmented the Toral ring.
Holding on to that power, she ignored the darkness she detected at the edge of her awareness, focusing instead on the power within the ring, wanting that to guide her. If there was a dark sorcerer here, she needed to be prepared for it. Her own sorcery spells might be effective—she had seen how they could be used against different dark sorcerers—but she also knew that the Toral ring would be