“Time’s wasting, princess. We have somewhere to be mighty soon, and I have to think this work will take some doing.”
“What do you need me to erase? How much?”
“Just the last day, and I also need the corresponding incoming and outgoing ledger page for the last day as well,” Fionn said, polishing his fingernails on his tunic.
The move was too forced to be casual, but Stella didn’t have time to puzzle this out and she couldn’t go back on the bargain she’d made even if she wanted to. If she did, word would spread and no onewould bargain for anything with anyone in her family. While that didn’t sound so bad now, she couldn’t imagine a situation where Rosie or Leo needed help and couldn’t get it because of something stupid she’d done. This was her mess, and she’d need to deal with the fallout. It would be easy enough to tell her parents when she saw them. She’d hold the stolen memories in her own mind until she had a chance to comb through them for anything suspicious.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
“Good lass. I knew you would. I know the honorable type when I see them, and I had you pegged on sight. Makes sense. They say your father was the honorable sort, too.”
Stella didn’t like that he brought up her father. It wasn’t a threat—everyone knew who her father was—but there was something about a mercenary referring to him directly that made her feel oddly protective.
“Don’t speak of my family.”
Fionn bowed his head. “I meant nothing by it, princess. Merely paying compliments.”
Stella frowned. Mercenaries were not known to compliment someone for being honorable. The only honor they respected was timely payment. But she had no choice.
The salt crust gritted on the hinges and a bell above her head jingled as she yanked open the door of the harbormaster’s office and walked inside.
“We’re closed,” a gruff voice called out from somewhere behind the tall wooden counter.
A large metal spike on the countertop was crammed full of port entry passes. When Stella leaned over the counter, she glimpsed an older man with gray hair bent over a ledger. He was muttering quietly to himself about something not adding up.
“Excuse me, sir,” she called.
The old man’s head snapped up at the sound of her voice. When he saw her face, he jumped to his feet. “Good evening, Lady McKay. How can I help you?”
Sometimes it was nice to be a familiar face. It instilled trust, evenwhen she didn’t deserve it. Stella put on her best damsel-in-distress voice.
“I’m so sorry to bother you. I was actually wondering if you had a record of the ship that arrived from Novum, the one that was carrying Fionn Silver. As you know, my father likes to be very prepared and, given that I’m competing in the Gauntlet Games, he is trying to figure out how long each competitor has been here to prep.”
It was a terrible lie, but Stella had always understood the weight her parents’ names carried in Olney. She rarely threw them around, but when she did, people were eager to oblige her.
The harbormaster stood from his desk, grabbed the book, and walked to the counter. The wood groaned when he hefted the heavy tome onto it.
He turned back a few pages. “I remember myself. It was two weeks ago, but this book keeps me honest. Let’s see here—” He broke off as he scanned the page.
Memory magic could typically only be used with physical contact. But Stella’s magic was a remnant of her mother’s, unique in that it could work from a distance instead of just by touch.
She pressed gently against the harbormaster’s mind. The man didn’t even flinch. He went right on scanning the page. Stella closed her eyes and searched his mind. Time was difficult to track in another person’s memory, so she needed to try to have him call up something that would serve as a marker.
“I know a bunch of storytellers arrived from Novum yesterday. They’re here to record the story of the end of the festival,” Stella prompted.
Memory magic was an exercise in what to keep and how to organize it. When Stella was little and first learning to wield the magic that was her birthright, her mother had taught her to think of her mind as a giant library full of books. Eventually, the shelves would be full if she tried to save everything. Even magic had its limits. She’d learned to vent the unimportant memories before bed each night, imagining that she was pulling boring books from the shelf and tossing them out of her mind library.
The more important memories stayed tucked away in the back of the library for safekeeping, unless she wanted to pull them out and watch them for the sheer enjoyment of it. The front of her mind held memories that she needed to refer to more frequently—spells, appointments, and healing herbs.
And in a secret room off the side, she kept other people’s memories—moments her mother had shared with her from before she was born, and Rosie’s favorite memories of their childhood. That was where she would store the harbormaster’s memories.
Stella closed her eyes and pressed her magic into him. As he called up the memory of the previous day, the golden threads of his mind connected to that memory flared brighter.
She could see both the vision of the memory and the spiraling tangle of golden threads related to it in her mind’s eye. When someone was actively thinking of a person or memory, their mind naturally connected it with other related memories. That magic could be used to help heal the minds of those who suffered from memory loss. In this case, those same connections would allow her to uproot all the memories that she needed to extract.
She twisted the golden threads into a braid, and then gently tugged. They broke away with ease. Crowded brains were easier to manipulate in this way since they were eager to let go and make space. She tucked them into the secret room in her own mind for safekeeping until she had time to look through them and figure out what Fionn was trying to hide.
Before she finished, she removed the memory of her visit.
