She smiled mirthlessly. “Like worm-ridden fruit, are they?”

Han snickered, and Jadren sputtered in outrage a moment before opening his mouth to retort.

“Enough,” Gabriel inserted sharply. He already begrudged every rest they took, feeling Nic’s time ticking away. “We’re supposed to be a team.”

Jadren muttered something darkly, but Gabriel let it go. “Alise, how are you holding up?”

The young wizard had collapsed against a tree trunk, legs splayed, holding an orange without seeming to register she did. Han went to her, setting the orange aside and taking her hands. “Alise, sweetheart,” he said gently. “You need to take some magic.”

“I don’t want to drain you,” she replied, tugging her hands away. “Lord Phel will need you soon.”

“It won’t do us any good to spare Han and Selly only to have your father catch us out here in the woods,” Gabriel said, not for the first time. He’d tried using a shield of reflective moon magic, but it was difficult to cover the entire group, particularly when they were moving. They’d gone back to having Alise combat any questing spirits, of which there were plenty. She was sure either Lord Elal himself was in the vicinity—which seemed like an unlikely coincidence to them all—or one of his protégés.

Though, why would Lord Elal have sent one of his best wizard minions to Sammael? Gabriel couldn’t shake the creeping certainty that Elal was behind all of this, just as his Elal ancestors had been behind the fall of House Phel.

“Take the magic, Alise,” he ordered, just in case he hadn’t been clear. She frowned but complied.

“At least we have plenty of water,” Jadren noted, passing around the ever-replenishing flask.

“Too bad we only have my brother’s prototype,” Selly replied, taking another jab at the El-Adrel wizard. “It would be good to have more, in case we get separated.”

“I’ve been busy,” Jadren snarled, defending himself. “And I didn’t have access to Lord Phel’s half of the magic for the better part of a week, if you’ll recall.”

Gabriel walked down the road to get out of earshot, needing some peace and quiet to brood. The track they followed should lead to House Sammael via a back route, according to Alise’s spies, but it was overgrown with disuse, meandering through the countryside and seeming to be going nowhere. Gabriel chafed at the slow progress, his thoughts turning down dark, twisted corridors of vengeance should they arrive too late to save Nic. Whatever plan they were trying to bend her to, she wouldn’t cooperate. He knew her that well. She’d break first, and that was what worried him most.

Realizing that he was stalking furiously along, he made himself slow and take a few deep breaths, grounding himself again by studying the huge old trees of the forest. They’d thinned in this area, opening onto a barren meadow. Real spring had not yet made it this far north, though the land had freed itself from winter. Across the meadow, on a crag above, rose an unsettling edifice that could only be House Sammael.