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“TheCircle’snorms,” Zara said.“Magic is magic—”

“Not when it takes a life!”Pritkin snarled.He’d been looking increasingly unhappy as the witches’ plan unfolded and had apparently reached tilt.

“Oh, please,” Grizzled Topknot said scornfully.“Those we used were dark mages.You’d have killed ‘em yourself if you were there.”

“Killed, yes; butchered and…” his lip curled.“If we become what we fight, what is the point?”

“Not dying?”she said dryly.“Not allowing them to overrun our world like a pack of diseased rats?”

“Yes, and you did so well with that,” Pritkin snapped before I could stop him with a kick under the table.

We needed help, and theirs was the only kind available.Enid was excellent at glamourie, but she couldn’t cover all of us for long, and her power was of the light variety that would set off the wards.We needed the witches’ stash of nasty disguises to have any chance at this.

“So what’s your plan, Your Highness?”Topknot asked Pritkin.“Waltz in the front door?There are hundreds of mages down there, maybe thousands by now, for all I know.”

“That’s just it!”Pritkin’s hand hit the tabletop.“You don’t know anything!You fully admit that none of you has been inside that complex for more than ten years!”

“Which is better than you can boast,” Gray Curls snapped.She had shrewd eyes, the same color as her hair, strikingly set into a nut-brown face.“We didn’t take this step lightly, but there was no other way—”

“Then we need to bloody well find one!”

“How many of these suits are there?”Alphonse asked, frowning.“And how big?I’m a little broad in the shoulder.”

“We are not doing this!”Pritkin snarled.

“’Course we are.Have your little explosion, then suck it up, man.It’s not like we gotta choice.”

“I do not understand,” Æsubrand piped up.His pin-straight silver hair had dried as perfectly as if he’d had access to a salon, making him look like he was slumming with a bunch of street people.But for once, the sneer was absent from his face.

Not that that was likely to last.

“You don’t want to,” Bodil muttered, but she hadn’t joined Pritkin.She hadn’t said no.

“It’s simple,” the young, part-fey witch said, tossing her long lavender hair over her shoulder.“We caught a dark mage—”

“Seven,” Topknot put in.“Had to take ‘em at different times.”

“—killed him, skinned him, and tanned the leather with potions and herbs—”

“The...leather?”Æsubrand repeated blankly.

“—and cured it into a cloak.Which, if done correctly, allows the person wearing the cloak to take on the appearance of another—”

“Skinwalker,” Pritkin said, his lip curling back enough to show teeth.

Æsubrand stared at Purple Hair for a second, then I guessed what she’d said registered.Because he jumped back from the table with a sudden, violent movement and snarled something in a language my translator wouldn’t touch, as the prissy little thing didn’t do profanity.“You’re all cursed!”

“No, we cursedthem,” Topknot said with satisfaction.“Seven of ‘em, like I said, only one of the cloaks didn’t cure quite right, so it has patches where the illusion doesn’t work.We normally didn’t use that one.”

Æsubrand wasn’t listening any longer.He was too busy staring at Bodil.“This doesn’t surprise you.You knew what they meant!”

“Yes.”The beautiful ebony face was carefully expressionless.“We had one such creature invade Nimue’s lands centuries ago.He was discovered by a hunting party who took him for the deer he was pretending to be until they shot him, and the beast began cursing.They brought him back to court, where Nimue stripped him of his magic.He was dispatched shortly thereafter, but she kept the skin as a curiosity.”

“A curiosity!”

“We had never seen such a thing.We do not possess this skill.”

“This abomination!”he spat.“Yet you stand there and say nothing?”