Tavia ran toward them, reaching into her pocket and flinging out the first charm she thought would be of any use. It was a simple wind charm, but it sent them flying backward onto the ground with a loud crash.

“Are you okay?” Tavia asked Bastian, her eyes quickly scanning him for any wounds.

Bastian nodded and let out a shaken breath. “You have strong magic.”

“I wish I could take credit, but I stole most of it.”

Bastian laughed and put a hand on her shoulder. “Thank you,” he said.

“Nice trick,” Nolan said, dusting himself off. “But it’ll be your last.”

In front of him like a barrier, five thugs looked at her like hungry beasts.

“At least you get to go out with a bang,” Nolan said. “Creije’s best busker defeated by Rishiya’s best. It’s kind of poetic.”

“Read better poetry,” Tavia said.

Nolan ignored her and from his pocket he pulled out a small round object that looked a little like a fortune orb, save for the fact that it was not made of glass—or the watery kind of magic that looked like glass—but instead from some kind of stone.

It was bright blue, with pinpoints of white freckled around the polished smooth surface. It looked old and dangerous the way most magic often did, and perched atop its perfectly rounded tip was a thin fuse.

“What’s that?” Tavia asked.

Nolan twirled it in his hand like a prize. “I call it a Star Egg,” he said. “You stole a bunch of them from me back in Rishiya. Or don’t you remember?”

Tavia remembered.

“Luckily, I had a couple in my private stash,” he said. “But I’ll be looking to get back everything you took from me soon enough.”

A lot of the magic Tavia had stolen was already distributed among the buskers, but the rest—the things kept aside for training, or the few rare cases where she couldn’t figure out the nature of the charm—had been cataloged and stored for safekeeping.

She was glad Nolan hadn’t found that store and reclaimed his mysterious treasures yet.

“Want to see what it does?” Nolan asked.

She really didn’t.

Tavia flung out a charm and the marble beelined for the buskers trying to protect Nolan. It burst into a hundred tiny insects that swarmed around three of them, biting and stinging without relent.

They yelled, waving their hands through the air to keep the creatures at bay. But by the time they parted to let Tavia get to Nolan, it was too late.

He had pulled a lighter from his pocket and lit the fuse of the Star Egg.

Nolan took a worrying step back and said nothing before throwing a shield over himself.