“In a sense,” Relos Var answered. “He used the stone while walking and stepped off a balcony. Took the duchess two weeks to find the stone in all the snow drifts.” He stood up from his seat and walked to the door. “That should be enough to get you started.”

“Wait, that’s it?” Brother Qown fought panic. “That’s all the instruction you’re going to give me?”

Relos Var paused at the door. “I’ve known you since you were a boy, Qown. You’ve always learned best when I let you figure things out for yourself. I’ll check in on you later to see how you’re coming along.”

Var had been clever not to explain how the stone worked. By forcing Qown to research the stone’s abilities for himself, Relos Var had ensured Qown wouldn’t have time to think about his situation. Qown latched onto that life raft with the enthusiasm of a man who had never been able to resist solving a mystery.

Worldhearth did indeed focus on fire, as Relos Var had explained. Clairvoyance played a part too, since Brother Qown could focus the stone on a fire he had seen before, say, a hanging brazier in the Temple of Khored in Atrine. But he couldn’t start with the hearth fires inside the Atrine palace, which he had never seen. However, once he had the hanging brazier in his sights, he could goat-leap to a nearby fire, and then the next, and the next, shifting directions as appropriate. He managed to find a candelabra in the dining room and from there make his way to an oven in the duke’s palace in Atrine.

Doing so, however, took him almost an entire day. When he tore himself away from the stone, his body was in total rebellion: hungry, thirsty, and in desperate need of a bathroom. Which he had known on some level; he’d just been too caught up in solving the problem to care.

The challenge proved to be discerning his scrying location quickly enough to jump to the next fire. He had no idea how, but if he wanted to find people within a reasonable time, he needed to become efficient at scanning for them.

When he next returned to practicing his scrying with Worldhearth, however, he saw something that made him stop cold.

Ninavis.

The former bandit leader sat next to a small coal brazier inside an azhock, warming her hands. She wore a hooded cloak and kept glancing over her shoulder at the soldiers.