Yes, it is agreed. If you need me while you are away, just call my name and I will stand by your side. We will hunt together.

“If danger threatens, I’ll do so, but I will be far away across the sea. Would it be possible for you to travel such a distance?”

It would be difficult but not impossible, Kratch replied. Some lines extend across the beds of deep seas. They were there before the land sank and was flooded.

The boggart was referring to ley lines, which it used to travel rapidly from place to place. It rubbed against my leg again, and then the purring gradually faded away.

I went back to the house, deciding to leave the gruesome work of collecting up the bloody remains until the morning.

Once the sun was up the following day, I gave Jenny the task of digging a burial pit while I collected what remained of the three Kobalos.

“You get all the fun and I get all the digging!” Jenny complained as I returned to her side.

“Fun, you call it? Collecting fragments of flesh and bone is hardly fun, is it?”

“Don’t be daft—I didn’t mean that. I mean last night. I wanted to go with you; I wanted to share the danger.”

I felt annoyed. I couldn’t imagine any situation in which I’d have called my own master daft. But I took a deep breath and spoke to her calmly.

“If your apprenticeship turns out to be even half as eventful as mine, you’ll have had your fill of danger long before the first year is done and dusted,” I told her. “In this job, you don’t go running toward danger—it comes searching for you!”

Jenny fell silent at that, but she didn’t look happy in her work.

I had already used a mirror to tell Grimalkin what had happened. She arrived as I was adding the final pieces to the bloody pile of remains.

In addition to the body parts, there were pieces of armor, three sabers, and a number of long blades. I had laid these out in a row on the grass.

“They were assassins.” Grimalkin held up one of the heads and inspected it closely. “The single pigtail denotes that. The most powerful brotherhood of Kobalos assassins is called the Shaiksa—they have three pigtails—but they would no doubt have suffered the same fate at the hands of your boggart. Of course, the Shaiksa have great skill with weapons. You would not wish to meet three of them away from the protection of the boggart.”

“Do you think they were sent to kill me?” I asked.

“Not necessarily. I suspect they were sent to reinforce the haizda mage for some other common purpose. No doubt they found its grave and noted that its lair had been entered and searched. It would have been an easy matter to track you back to this house. I would like two of those sabers,” Grimalkin said. “I may have a use for them.”