“Keep looking into it,” she said to Topher.
“Why? What do you think we’ll find?”
She shook her head. “I really don’t know. Whatever is there is important, but I don’t know why.”
“Is it always like that with you?”
“Like what?”
“Like you know something is important but you don’t know why?”
She looked over to Eva, seeing her resting back against the chair, eyes closed, the fire crackling in front of her and radiating heat. “Sometimes.”
13
The surge of the ring caught her attention.
It was a new day and Jayna had been on the outskirts of the city practicing spells again, hoping to gain a better understanding of her spellbooks. It was a way of trying to clear her mind. Eva was looking for more information and Topher had gone off to question the dular, which left Jayna feeling adrift.
She could have gone with either of them, but she felt her time would be better spent working in the spellbooks while looking for something that could generate a smoke spell that would appear like Ashara magic, but she hadn’t yet found anything.
When the ring began to constrict, she thought perhaps it was a dark creature. It hadn’t been one when she had felt it the last time though, so she wasn’t exactly sure if that was it, but the tension in the ring persisted, constricting more and more.
Not a dark creature.
A dark sorcerer.
She hurriedly wiped away the spell she had been tracing out on the ground, tucked the spellbook into her pack, and paused. She was near some of the old El’aras ruins, close enough to the forest that she could use it to absorb the power of sorcery she was drawing upon and diffuse it enough so that the Society wouldn’t detect it.
Where was the power coming from?
She couldn’t tell.
She continued following the steady constriction she detected. It had to be somewhere nearby.
It brought her back into the city. She wove past a row of shops, all of them tucked into old El’aras structures, and headed past a small plaza where she detected a hint of smoke drifting. She paused for a moment. As she stared at the smoke, she couldn’t tell if it was an enchantment like she had seen in Raollet’s shop, or simply chimney smoke.
A shout in the distance caught her attention.
She tore her gaze away.
Now wasn’t the time for her to be worrying about smoke coming from a single building.
She focused on the tightness she detected in her ring.
Dark magic.
Jayna began to call upon the power within the Toral ring. Cold crept into her finger, then up her wrist and all the way up her arm. The power within the ring was considerable, and it surged far faster than it had when she had first been gifted the ring. That was partly because of the additional power Ceran had granted her when she had needed to take on the Order of Norej, but it was also because of the bloodstone that had augmented the Toral ring.
Holding on to that power, she ignored the darkness she detected at the edge of her awareness, focusing instead on the power within the ring, wanting that to guide her. If there was a dark sorcerer here, she needed to be prepared for it. Her own sorcery spells might be effective—she had seen how they could be used against different dark sorcerers—but she also knew that the Toral ring would be much more effective.
She could feel something deeper in the city.
She hurried forward, and as she made her way into the city, she realized something else.
The streets in the city’s periphery were mostly empty—not completely, as there was an occasional person poking their head out of a window or standing in a doorway—but for the most part, no one was out walking.
Her heart started to hammer again.
The last time she had felt dark magic had been in the crowd.
Jayna hurried forward again.
And then she saw it.
She was near the center of the city. In the distance, she could almost imagine the dular manor homes of the ruling families. A crowd had started to form. It was late in the day, near dusk—not a time she would’ve expected there to be a crowd like this. Why now?
And why here?
As she moved along the street, the crowd surged ahead of her.
Jayna jogged and began to join them, but she didn’t feel any other power, only the constriction of the ring on her finger.
If she could figure out who was driving the crowd, maybe she could understand the magic that was involved and come up with some way to counter it.
Immediately she focused on Char. He knew how to do this.
There was a sense of him in the back of her mind, an awareness she had through the linking spell that joined them. She tried to pluck it, pulling on that connection, but she couldn’t tell if he recognized what she did. If he was aware of it, there might not be anything he could do anyway.
He had used a healing sort of spell on the crowd before, though Jayna wasn’t sure if she had enough understanding of that kind of magic to do something similar.
Then she found the crowd gathering.
She forced her way forward, feeling the agitation. Someone near her shouted, then somebody else threw something. There came a flash of fire, a rumble, and a strange trembling on the ground. Enchantments.
Then she saw a maroon-robed figure lying motionless on the ground. She only caught glimpses of it, but panic began to set in.
She tested for her connection to Char, and was thankful it wasn’t him. He was still too far away.
But there was a sorcerer down.
She forced her way forward, preparing several different spells, and found that it wasn’t just one sorcerer—there were several.
She saw three maroon robes. Dular pressed ahead, and the steady rumbling of power was almost too much. Jayna began to focus on her own power, anger building within her, when a hand grabbed her and jerked her backward.
She spun, immediately raising her Toral ring, then lowered it.
“What are you doing here, Matthew?”
Matthew’s eyes were wide. “We need to get you out of here, Jayna. Can’t you see what’s going on?”
“I saw,” she said.
There was the continued, steady feeling of tension around her. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it was starting to act against her. The dark magic was affecting her. Was it because she held on to the energy through her Toral ring, or would it have been worse if she hadn’t?
“Come on,” Matthew said, dragging her.
“I can’t.”
“You cannot stay here.”
He dragged her, and though she wanted to fight, he made a certain sort of sense. The sorcerers who were down were beyond her ability to help. The dular were too numerous, and it was entirely possible that there was too much power from them for her to be able to do anything.
She focused again.
Could she really leave the sorcerers behind?
There came an explosion of sound followed by a gust of wind, and a burst of power slammed into her. It came from where the sorcerers were lying motionless.
Matthew jerked on her again, dragging her.
“You don’t want to be there. You don’t want to see it.”
“See what?”
Matthew’s eyes practically begged for her to come with him.
She followed him, weaving against the crowd. When they neared its edge, he nodded back the way they had come. “Do you think that’s the first time this has happened?”