Tavia cleared her throat and kept her chin high. “Hardly torture,” she said. “We were just softening him up a little.”

“We,” Karam repeated.

She looked around at the couple of dozen buskers who surrounded them in a circle. Karam’s glare was palpable and even though the buskers outnumbered her, they looked hesitant to even meet her gaze.

“Go to bed,” Karam told them. “I have private matters to discuss with your new leader.”

The buskers shuffled a little, perhaps from nerves at whether or not to disobey an order from Creije’s best fighter and probably the most deadly person in camp. But also, Tavia suspected, because they weren’t quite satisfied with how little blood had been spilled tonight.

They were hungry for war and revenge, and Nolan was the right kind of scumbag to take it out on.

“Do as she says,” Tavia told them.

The buskers nodded—a few sighed, some grumbled a little—and then they dispersed, begrudgingly heading back to their beds and to a night filled with dreams instead of death.

Only when they had gone and it was just Tavia, Karam, and the still-bleeding Nolan did Karam speak again.

“I told you to stop being reckless,” she said. “First you go into the city and take on a group of buskers alone and now you bring one straight into our camp to torture? What are you thinking?”

“He had information,” Tavia said. “And I did what was necessary to get it.”

“You sound like Wesley.”

“Maybe it’s about time one of us did.”

“I know that you are frustrated and I am too. I understand that we need to get him back, but this is not the way,” Karam said. “Tavia, you need to—”

Karam stopped, and for a moment, Tavia wondered what could possibly make their new moral compass cut off her rant, but then she felt the air shift. Felt the spark of magic ignite in the wind.

Tavia didn’t recognize the Crafter in front of them, nor the three women who stood behind him, their eyes almost red in the moonlight with the fire of their magic.

“Can we help you?” Tavia asked.

“My name is Lionus,” the man said. “I am a Crafter Liege from the realm of Volo, in the city of Gila. I was asked to come here with my Kin to help your war against Dante Ashwood.”

“Gila,” Tavia repeated, her voice quiet.

It was the city her mother had grown up in.

A city that would have been Tavia’s home in another life.

“Just the four of you?” she said, trying to swallow the heaviness she felt. “Waste of a summons if you ask me.”

“We are a dozen,” Lionus said. “We heard a scuffle on our way into camp. I told the rest of my Kin to scour the forest in search of your leader while we came to help.”