After following the street over several rises, she came to the place that was set back beside a two-story stone building. There was a forked plum tree in the front of the little porch. At the side of the small place she could see down the narrow passageway between the buildings that the back was heavily shaded by oaks. She also saw the corner of a shed along with wood scraps and odd bits of metal neatly laid out beside it.

On the porch, in under a low overhang, Magda tucked her small bundle under an arm and knocked firmly on the simple plank door. After a moment, she heard someone coming through the house from the back. He stopped on the other side of the door.

“What is it?” he asked without opening the door.

“Are you Wizard Merritt?”

“I’m sorry but I can’t see anyone right now,” he said from the other side.

“This is important.”

“I told you, I can’t see anyone now. I’m busy working. Please be on your way.”

She could hear the footsteps heading away from the door toward the back of the house.

Chapter 44

“Please, I need to see you,” Magda called to the door. “I come with news of Isidore.”

She heard his distant footsteps pause.

As she waited in silence, Magda wasn’t sure if he would come back and open the door or not. She wiped away a bead of sweat trickling down her temple as she idly watched a lacewing hunting for aphids on the lush green leaves and stems of a vine climbing one of the posts holding up the overhanging roof of the porch. At last she heard his footsteps returning.

The door opened enough that Magda could see that he was as imposing a figure as Isidore had said. After all Magda had heard about him—from Baraccus, from the men down in the Keep, from wizards she knew, and from Isidore—she found it was a somewhat strange feeling to finally see him in the flesh. After all the things said about him, he wasn’t exactly what she had pictured.

He was somehow more.

He was tall, and without a shirt it was plain to see that he was handsomely built. He was a good deal younger than Baraccus. In fact, he didn’t look much older than her—maybe a couple of years at most.

Magda had seen hundreds of wizards. The Keep was full of them. Merritt, especially without a shirt, didn’t look at all like her idea of what a wizard looked like.

His skin glistened with sweat and grimy smudges. There were a few streaks of soot on his face behind stray, wavy locks of light brown hair that was struck through with a lighter, sun-bleached, blondish brown. Disheveled as it was, it added to his rugged looks.

Somehow, impossibly, the sweat and the soot made him look all the better.