“No, I’m just fixing my hair. Of course it’s unlocked.” She dropped her voice. “Now, move as silently as you can in there, but don’t tiptoe or skulk around. If someone sees you skulking, it’ll be far worse than if you act like you belong.”

She laid her ear to the door for a moment. Then she eased it open and stepped through.

I followed her into a dull, bare corridor. A few oil lamps burned in sconces on the lefthand wall; round mirrors on the righthand wall doubled the light. Zaira pulled the door softly shut behind us. She started forward, her feet making no sound.

Something about the mirrors bothered me. Round, like eyes …

“Wait,” I hissed, snagging a handful of Zaira’s hair.

She spun and glared at me, but I pointed to the mirrors. Runes circled them, carved into the wooden frames. Artifice runes.

Zaira shook her head, stepping back to my side. “I don’t know anything about magical protections,” she whispered. “No one was rich enough to have those in the Tallows.”

I squinted at the runes. It was dim enough they were hard to make out. “We can’t block the light. If we interrupt the path of the light and it fails to strike the mirror, we set off a trap.”

“What happens then?”

“I don’t know. Let’s not find out.” I bent double, keeping well below the mirrors, and made my way down the corridor. Zaira followed.

The door at the end of the corridor was new, the wood raw and unfinished save for another runic circle daubed on with black paint.

“What’s this all about?” Zaira asked nervously.

I considered the runes. “The door won’t open unless you press the key to the circle.”

Zaira sighed. “Curse it. That’s why the lock was so easy.”

I bit my lip, mentally tracing the lines of the circle. I muttered the runes under my breath.

“Can you do something about it?” Zaira asked. “Is there a trick to it, like with the mirrors?”

“Maybe.”

I will open only with the key, the runes said. But the spell had been slapped up in a hurry and without much thought. I suspected an untrained artificer, without enough power for the mage mark. They’d drawn the circle too large; the runes straggled loosely around it. My teachers would never have allowed slipshod work like this.

With an artifice circle, the runes dictated the rules of the magic, just as the golden wire and beads on Zaira’s jess defined the laws of the spell that bound us together. But with a circle this weak and sloppy, those rules could be rewritten.

“Do you have any ink, or charcoal?” I asked Zaira.

“Why would I carry that around?”

“Because it’s useful.” I glanced around the corridor, but didn’t see anything I could write with. “I suppose I’ll have to use blood.”