How does Dancer know what wizard flame looks like? Han wondered. Or is he just bluffing?

The boy with the falcon signet glanced at the others, as if debating whether to respond. Getting no help from his friends, he turned back to Dancer. “I’m Micah Bayar, of Aerie House,” he said, as if his very name would put them on their knees. “We’re here on the queen’s orders. Queen Marianna and the Princesses Raisa and Mellony are hunting in the Vale below. We’re driving the deer down to meet them.”

“The queen ordered you to set fire to the mountain so she could have a good day’s hunting?” Dancer shook his head in disbelief.

“I said so, didn’t I?” Something in the wizard’s expression told Han he wasn’t being exactly truthful.

“The deer don’t belong to the queen,” Han said. “We’ve as much right to hunt them as she does.”

“Anyway, you’re underage,” Dancer said. “You’re not allowed to use magic. Nor carry an amulet.” He pointed to the jewel at Bayar’s neck.

How does Dancer know that? Han thought. He himself knew nothing of wizards’ rules.

Dancer must’ve struck a nerve, because Bayar glared at him. “That’s wizard business,” the charmcaster said. “And no concern of yours.”

“Well, Micah Jinxflinger,” Dancer said, now resorting to the clan insult for wizards, “if Queen Marianna wants to hunt deer in summer, she can come up into the high country after them. As she always has.”

Bayar raised black eyebrows. “Where she can sleep on a dirt floor shoulder to shoulder with a dozen filthy kinsmen and go a week without a hot bath and come home stinking of wood smoke and sweat with a case of the night itches?” He snorted with laughter, and his friends followed suit. “I don’t blame her for preferring the accommodations in the Vale.”

He doesn’t know anything, Han thought, recalling the cozy lodges with their sleeping benches, the songs and stories told around the fire, the shared feasts from the common pot. So many nights he’d fallen asleep under furs and clan-made blankets with the thread of the old songs winding through his dreams. Han wasn’t clan, but he often wished he was. It was the one place he’d ever felt at home. The one place he didn’t feel like he was clinging on by his fingernails.

“Princess Raisa was fostered at Demonai Camp for three years,” Dancer said, his chin thrust out stubbornly.

“The princess’s clan-bred father has some archaic ideas,” Bayar replied, and his companions laughed again. “Me, I wouldn’t want to marry a girl who’d spent time in the camps. I’d be afraid she’d been ruined.”

Suddenly Dancer’s knife was in his hand. “Repeat that, jinxflinger?” Dancer said, his voice cold as the Dyrnnewater.