It didn’t matter that we’d said no. I never came to really know Richard back when I was his apprentice—I don’t think anyone did—but there were some things about him of which I was certain. One was that he was very, very patient. And another was that when he wanted something, he took it. In my mind, ever since that April, a clock had been ticking. I didn’t know how much time was left on it, but I knew that sooner or later it would run out.

One mage who hadn’t been sceptical was Talisid. He’d believed the rumours of Richard’s return even before I had, and in the months since then, he’d begun approaching me more often, asking for my help with operations. Surveillance, reconnaissance, even some covert insertions, all with the same ultimate goal: finding out what Richard was doing, and how to stop him.

Things were easy at first. We discovered that Richard had returned to his old base of operations, the mansion in Wales. Once he’d set up again, he started to receive visitors in increasing numbers. All were Dark mages. We couldn’t get close enough to risk actually eavesdropping on one of the meetings, but we were able to discover that Richard was trying to build a coalition, uniting as many Dark mages as he could. At the same time, another Dark mage named Morden was making a push to get Dark mages admitted to the Light Council. From several pieces of information that we’d uncovered, we were sure that the two of them were working together. Morden was the public face, dealing with the mages on the Light side of the fence, while Richard kept the Dark mages in line. A few Dark mages had spoken out against Morden’s proposal; all had disappeared without a trace shortly afterwards.

But since October, our investigations had become harder. We’d taken all the low-hanging fruit, and the closer we drew to Richard’s real secrets, the more we risked revealing ourselves. Talisid started sending us further afield, chasing rumours with no guarantee of safety or success. Some of the leads we pursued turned out to have nothing to do with Richard at all, while others turned out to be dangerous.

The mission we’d just returned from had been the second kind. Talisid had sent us to Idlib, a contested city within Syria. He’d told us that there was a lightly guarded warehouse in the eastern district containing a shipment of goods intended for Richard’s mansion. Talisid had been right about where the goods were headed. He hadn’t been right about much else.

“How did it go?” I repeated. “Badly.”

“Is everyone—?”

“Alive, yes,” I said. “Healthy, no. We need to have a talk about your definition of ‘lightly guarded.’”

“The militia—”

“The militia weren’t the problem,” I said. “Although there were a lot more of them than you said there would be. The problem was the ice elemental.”

“What kind?”

“The kind that’s seven feet tall, made of solid ice, and can freeze things from thirty feet away. I didn’t stick around to classify it.”