They were waiting for just enough light to fill the streets that the hinnies wouldn’t stumble over anything. Just as real dawn began, and Jicks picked up her reins to urge her mount to move out, someone ran—well, if you could describe a flapping chaos of oversized robe hurrying in the gate as “running”—toward them.

“Wait!” cried the Mage Korlak, breathlessly, as he stumbled to a halt at Jicks’s side. His crow flapped down out of the sky to land on his shoulder. “You’ll need a Mage. Take me with you!”

“I thought your magic was unreliable,” Jicks said, raising her eyebrow.

He blushed. “Better unreliable than nothing,” he retorted.

“And I thought you were terrified of demons,” she pointed out.

“Anybody with any sense is terrified of demons.” He stared at her stubbornly.

She leaned down over her saddle-bow. “All right. I’ll bite. Why do you want to come with us? The real reason.”

He flushed a deep and brilliant crimson. “I . . . can’t tell you.”

Jicks sighed. “And yet, you will. One night over the campfire, you’ll get some wine in you, and you’ll proceed to tell us a long, sad, and hopelessly entangled story about how your master was attacked by Karsite demons, and you didn’t stay to help him, he died, and the demons turned your hair white overnight. Not necessarily in that order. And we’ll sympathize with you, because only a monster wouldn’t, and then when we do encounter the Karsites, you’ll do something stupidly brave to make up for your failure and get killed.”

He had gone from red to white, and his mouth fell open. “I—but I—”

“You aren’t more than thirty. Twenty-five, I’m guessing,” Jicks continued ruthlessly. “I’m a good judge of a lot of things, Korlak, and age is one of them. Telling who the people are who are desperate to redeem themselves is another. Now, how much of that did I get wrong?”

“Only that I didn’t run,” Korlak muttered, looking at his shoes. “I fainted.”

“Well, good, I’m glad we got that over with,” Jicks replied. “Now . . . just how do you think you’ll be useful to us?”

“It’s not so much me,” Korlak replied, looking up again. “It’s this.” And he held up a small, leather-bound book. “It’s his book of spells.”

Jicks sat back in her saddle and nodded slowly. “That’s more like it. I’ll tell you now, from what I know of Mages, that a lot of your unreliability is due to semistarvation. Eat, and you’ll be fine. Study that book for anything specific against demons. All right then. Climb aboard the wagon, Mage Korlak. And keep that bird from crapping on the bedrolls.”