When Tilly saw Magda staring at carts piled high with bloody bandages parked haphazardly along one wall, she leaned closer and whispered, “Down here, in the matters these people deal in, errors are costly. Even worse, they are frequently punished by death.”

Magda didn’t have to ask what Tilly was talking about. She had escorted Baraccus to the place several times when he needed to speak with some of his wizards working on weapons for the war effort.

They were entering the area of the Keep where some of those weapons were created out of people.

While she understood the need, she was still appalled by the very idea of using magic to alter a person’s nature, to change who they were—in some cases to something no longer even human. She found the practice of changing people in such ways to be beyond abhorrent.

Chapter 20

“Over there.” Tilly gestured to an entryway, set back into the shadows, some distance down on the far side of the vast chamber. “We must go down that way.”

Magda nodded. She knew of the place, of course, though she had never had reason to go down there before. She pressed a hand against the pang of anxiety tightening in her stomach.

As they made their way along and diagonally across the chamber, she tried as best she could to keep her face concealed by the cowl of her cloak. She wasn’t going to go out of her way to prevent people from recognizing her, but she wasn’t going to deliberately let people know she was there if she didn’t have to. The echo of her every footstep, though, whispered through the cavernous room, as if to betray her.

Glancing out from the edge of the hood of her cloak, Magda saw gifted people she recognized. Even though she was doing nothing wrong, she didn’t want to stop to talk with them or have to explain her purpose. It was nobody’s business. She kept the hood pulled forward.

Baraccus had often told her that if she was doing something important, she shouldn’t tell people anything they didn’t need to know. He lived his life by that rule. In fact, he often wouldn’t even tell Magda about things he thought she didn’t need to know.

Like why he had killed himself.

She was certain that what Baraccus had done was not the simple suicide it had appeared to be to those who didn’t know him as well as she did. Magda knew that it was more complicated than that. Suicide was simply not consistent with his character, so she knew that there must be more to it, that there must be a larger purpose to it. She also knew that for Baraccus to sacrifice his life, that purpose had to have been vitally important.