When they finally got to her table, they stood there for a moment, shuffling their feet, uncertain of how to begin, and it occurred to her that they were acting—socially—much younger than their real ages. They seemed to have no idea about how to open a conversation with a stranger, especially a girl. So she made the first move.

“There’s plenty of room, sit down,” she said, in her friendliest tones. “I always like company over meals.” All three of them looked a little startled, then enormously pleased, and took seats around her, two on her left and one on her right.

“I’m Emmit, he’s Rudi, and this is Brice,” said the boy on her right. “Uh, hello!”

“Brice—you’re the boy Remp punched in the stomach!” she said to the third, who had probably incurred Dudley’s wrath because he was a good deal handsomer than the bully, if a lot smaller. Brice started.

“How—”

“Dudley confessed under Truth Spell,” she said, trying not to sound smug although “smug” was certainly how she felt. “It’s one of the reasons he got expelled.”

This, of course, was an immediate icebreaker, and she cheerfully detailed the entire experience. After all, no one had sworn her to secrecy. Unfortunately for their curiosity, once they got over gloating over Dudley’s downfall, she couldn’t actually answer a lot of their questions, which were about “how the Truth Spell works.” She could describe the mechanics—the blue glow that hung about the person being questioned, the Coercive and non-Coercive spells, and why some Heralds could set one and not the other, and she could describe what it felt like to try and lie under the Coercive version, but that was all. They wanted to know what made it work, and why, and all she could do was say, “My Gift doesn’t work like that, so I don’t know.”

“Pity,” Brice sighed at last. “If you could just construct a mechanical apparatus to set it, you could have one in every village and not need to wait for a Herald.”

“But even innocent people don’t care for having it set on them,” Abi pointed out. “Coercive makes you blurt out all kinds of things that are related to what you’re guilty of, but maybe not directly. That can be awkward. I mean, look how Dudley blabbed about Brice, and about how he likes to grab girls and get away with it.”

“And people like my village headman would use it just because he could,” said Emmit. “At least in the Heralds’ hands we know people aren’t going to abuse it.”

“Not on purpose anyway,” Abi pointed out. “But embarrassing things do slip out without anyone intending them to.”