Gabriel shrugged. At his back, Ser Alcaeus was playing a kithara from the ancient world and singing an ancient song in a strange, eerie voice. Because every word he sang was in the true Archaic, the air shimmered with ops and potentia.

Ser Michael slipped under the gate of the bar and found space to lean. Kaitlin, his wife, now so heavily pregnant that she waddled instead of walking, was already snug in one of the inn’s better beds. Behind him, Sauce—Ser Alison—glared at a Hillman until he pushed more strongly against his mates and made room for her slight form to ease by him.

He made a natural, but ill-judged, decision to run his hand over her body as she passed, and found himself wheezing on the hard oak boards. Her paramour, Count Zac, stepped on the fallen Hillman and vaulted over the bar.

The Hillman rose, his face a study in rage, to find Bad Tom’s snout within a hand’s breadth of his own. He flinched.

Tom handed the man—one of his own—a full flagon of ale. “Go drink it off,” he said.

The Keeper glared at the incursion of Albans now encroaching on the smooth delivery of ale. “Didn’t I rent you a private room?” he asked the captain.

“Do you want to hear this tale, or not?” the captain said.

The Keeper grunted.

“So Thorn—” Every man and woman in earshot was aware that the captain or the duke—or whatever tomfool title he went by these days—had just said Thorn’s name three times.

Three hundred Albin leagues north and west, Thorn stood in a late-winter snow shower. He stood on the easternmost point of the island he had made his own, his place of power, and great breakers of the salt-less inner sea slammed against the rock of the island’s coast and rose ten times the height of a man into the air, driven by the strong east wind.

Out in the bay, the ice was breaking.

Thorn had come to this exposed place to prepare a working—a set of workings, a nest of workings—against his target: Ghause, wife of the Earl of Westwall. He felt his name—like the whisper of a moth’s wings in the air close to a man’s face on a hot summer night. But many said his name aloud, in whispers, often enough that he didn’t always pay heed. But in this case, the naming was accompanied by a burst of power that even across the circle of the world made itself felt in the aethereal.

The second calling was softer. But such things run in threes, and no user of the art could ever be so ignorant as to attract his attention and leave the third naming incomplete.

The third use was casual—contemptuous. Thorn’s sticklike, bony hands flinched.