“She didn’t offer a toast after you specifically said you’d do the job?” Jubilee asked.
“No. We were…invited to converse in a quiet alley and told to meet here.”
“Did she give you anything?” Saeldian asked.
Kell shook his head. “Just the tokens for a few nights’ lodging and meals.”
“And for the baths! Kell loves a hot bath. Oh, and—” Lorzok fished a flat gray rock out of his pouch. “And this stone.”
Kell stared at it. “What?”
Saeldian and Jubilee shared a glance, a nod. Kell reached into his own pouch.
“I don’t have one,” Kell said. “I just have tokens.”
“Are you sure?” Saeldian asked.
“There’s nothing else in here. Look.”
He cupped the bottom of the pouch and poured the contents into his hand—some tokens marked with a bathtub, many more marked with a mug and a fork, shiny new ones stamped with a bed—
Jubilee stretched out a hand to stop him. “Wait.”
—and a flat, rounded gray stone that landed on his fingertips.
Jubilee groaned. “Too late.”
The soft blue-gray stone swelled at his touch. It didn’t look bigger, but it expanded, as if it were taking in a breath. He hadn’t seen it. It hadn’t been there. And as the stone contracted, a soft brushing of magic sank under his skin and into his bones.
He wanted to drop it, but it didn’t matter. He knew what was woven into this kind of stone, which formed with a natural hole in it. Fey magic. Kell remembered it as vividly as the smell ofmoon-bathed starflowers as they hummed in the Feywild’s eternal twilight. It felt like three strings vibrating his senses awake before suddenly weighing him down.
Damn it!He looked up from the stone into Briona’s pale eyes and searched her face—human, bearing the faintest lines at her eyes and beside her mouth, her ears pierced with plain silver hoops, each one holding a silver charm. A hare, ears high, and a hart, with a wide, delicately wrought antler rack. She looked back, and her effort not to smile at a trap cleverly shut made his blood heat up.
He couldn’t punch a Zhentarim. Both of them knew that.
“Just like us.” Saeldian glared at Briona. “You bound them too.”
“What are they talking about?” Kell asked. He knew. But he wanted her to say it.
Briona’s answer was to lift a pendant on a chain. “I needed both of you. And since I suspected you wouldn’t agree, I resorted to indirect methods.”
Another holed gray stone dangled from her fingers. This one was wrapped in fine silver wire that braided around the edges, its surface uneven from a spell smith hammering the braid into a pendant.
Saeldian murmured an obscene complaint. “That’s underhanded.”
Kell closed his eyes and sighed. “Fuck.”
Don’t accept gifts. Not food, not drink, not even a flower.
Lorzok brushed his shoulder as he leaned closer. “Is that—are these vowstones?”
“Indeed they are, Saer Seeker.”
“What are those?” Saeldian asked. “Do you know how they’re made?”
“I do not,” Lorzok said. “But no one on this plane can make them. Where did you get them?”
“I don’t need to tell you that,” Briona said. “But I’ll give you this. I didn’t make them.”
