Quenten, and Kero had a feeling she wasn’t going to like what he was about to say the moment he came fully into the light from her lantern. He was haggard and nervous, two states she’d never seen Quenten in—and the mages had been conspicuous by their absence since they’d crossed the Comb. There was something up, and whatever it was, it was coming to her now because they couldn’t handle it themselves.

“Captain,” said Quenten, and his voice cracked on the second syllable. She waited for him to try again. “Captain,” he repeated, with a little more success this time. “We have a problem....”

Gods. Need, and now the mages?

“I’d already gathered that, Quenten, since you look like a day-old corpse, and I haven’t seen so much as a mage’s sleeve for a fortnight. Is it just you, or do all the mages look like you?”

“All of us,” Quenten replied unhappily. “We’d like permission to turn back, Captain. It isn’t you, or the Company, or the job. We think it’s Valdemar itself. There’s something strange going on here, and it’s driving us mad.”

He waited for a moment, obviously to see if she believed him. She just nodded. “Go on,” she told him, figuring she was about to have her little puzzle of mages and Valdemar solved, at least in part.

“I remembered what you told me, about how the Heralds seemed surprised by magic, and you never heard of a mage up in Valdemar. I thought maybe it was coincidence or something.” His hands twisted the hem of his sleeve nervously. “Well, it isn’t. The moment we got across the border, we all felt something.”

“What?” she asked, impatiently. “What is it? If there’s something around that’s costing me the use of my mages, I want to know about it.”

Quenten ground his teeth in frustration. “I don’t know, ” he said, around a clenched jaw. “I really don’t know! It was like there was somebody watching us, all the time. At first, it was just an annoyance; we figured there was just some Talented youngling out there, thinking he could spy on us. But we never caught anybody, and after a while, it started getting on our nerves. It was like having somebody staring, staring right at you, all the time. It goes on day and night, waking and sleeping, and it’s like nothing any of us have ever seen or heard of before. We couldn’t get rid of it, we couldn’t shield against it, and its been getting worse every day. I can’t even sleep anymore. Please, Captain, give us permission to go back. We’ll wait for you at winter quarters.”