Reynolds heard the buzzing of flies even before he slipped through the shed’s sagging door, and knew at once that Rhea’s goats had finished their days of pulling. They lay bloated and dead in their pen, legs sticking up and the sockets of their eyes squirming with maggots. It was impossible to know when Rhea had last fed and watered them, but Reynolds guessed at least a week, from the smell.

Too busy watching what goes on in that glass ball to bother, he thought. And what’s she wearing that dead snake around her neck for?

“I don’t want to know,” he muttered from behind his pulled-up neckerchief. The only thing he did want right now was to get the hell out of here.

He spied the cart, which was painted black and overlaid with cabalistic designs in gold. It looked like a medicine-show wagon to Reynolds; it also looked a bit like a hearse. He seized it by the handles and dragged it out of the shed as fast as he could. Depape could do the rest, by gods. Hitch his horse to the cart and haul the old woman’s stinking freight to... where? Who knew? Eldred, maybe.

Rhea came tottering out of her hut with the drawstring bag they’d brought the ball in, but she stopped, head cocked, listening, when Reynolds asked his question.

Jonas thought it over, then said: “Seafront to begin, I guess. Yar, that’ll do for her, and this glass bauble as well, I reckon, until the party’s over tomorrow.”

“Aye, Seafront, I’ve never been there,” Rhea said, moving forward again. When she reached Jonas’s horse (which tried to shy away from her), she opened the bag. After a moment’s further consideration, Jonas dropped the ball in. It bulged round at the bottom, making a shape like a teardrop.

Rhea wore a sly smile. “Mayhap we’ll meet Thorin. If so, I might have something to show him in the Good Man’s toy that’d interest him ever so much.”

“If you meet him,” Jonas said, getting down to help hitch Depape’s horse to the black cart, “it’ll be in a place where no magic is needed to see far.”

She looked at him, frowning, and then the sly smile slowly resurfaced. “Why, I b’lieve our Mayor’s met wiv a accident!”

“Could be,” Jonas agreed.

She giggled, and soon the giggle turned into a full-throated cackle. She was still cackling as they drew out of the yard, cackling and sitting in the little black cart with its cabalistic decorations like the Queen of Black Places on her throne.

Chapter VIII

THE ASHES

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