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But for what?I thought and took another drink.

“Here,” my resident nursemaid said, handing over some beef jerky he brought out of a pocket in his pirate pants.“Took it off a mage,” he said with a shrug when I tried to raise an eyebrow at him and, as usual, raised both.

I took a piece, thankful for Alphone’s snacking habit, and he passed around the rest.We sat there munching quietly, with everybody seemingly content to let me lead.Yeah, because I’d been doing that so well.

“We’re still alive,” Bodil said quietly, reading my thoughts.

I decided I didn’t care for once.She could have them, what little there was.Which wasn’t much because I had no idea what was going on.

And desperately did not want to.

But what I didn’t know could kill us, so after a while, I poked the sadhu, who was sitting a little further down the hill, with my toe.“What?”I asked him and got a dark-eyed glance over his bony shoulder.

“You won’t like it,” he warned me.

“Yeah.I already figured that.”

And then he told me.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Twenty minutes later, we were watching a new war mage sniffing about.But unlike the others, who hadn’t gotten any better at ignoring distractions, this one was coming steadily closer.Zara narrowed her eyes as he slipped past two and then three different redirects, barely pausing at the last, and then just stayed in place, his head thrown back to silver his face with moonlight, listening.

We all stayed quiet; I don’t know why, as it was Pritkin, and I was going to have to talk to him sooner or later.But if this little reprieve was designed to give me a chance to recover and gather my thoughts, it had failed utterly.After what the sadhu had said, my brain had mostly shut down and was doing the equivalent of sitting on a sofa, mindlessly watching a sitcom while eating mint chocolate chip, and my God, I could go for some mint chocolate chip!

So I didn’t have a plan and wasn’t up to making one.Or to telling him what I obviously needed to tell him, which he wasn’t going to like.Or to discussing what the hell had happened back there.

I wasn’t up to anything, so I dully watched Pritkin wait, I guessed for me to call him over.And when I didn’t, he surprised me by starting to sing.His nice, low tenor, kept quiet so as not to attract the attention of the other mages prowling the area, had the feys’ heads jerking up and the witches stiffening.

I knew why when the desert wind started to jive with the tune he was playing on the surrounding landscape.It sounded like he’d made it into his own little orchestra, with the shush-shushings of sand setting a rhythm like brushes on cymbals, the local frogs chiming in like a chorus singing backup, and a few distant howls, maybe wolves or coyotes, giving some variation on the theme.And then the wind itself decided to wail a haunting solo because Pritkin’s voice had suddenly stopped.

He was coming, following the stirrings of sand that formed in front of his feet, making a path straight to us.The desert was pimping us out, and it seemed to like Pritkin better than the witches, as it was ignoring their attempts to shore up the spell.And the fey didn’t help them, why I had no idea, but instead, they were just sitting there until Bodil abruptly stood up.

“Let us give them some space,” she said, walking off.

The fey followed her, even Enid, after a pause, who had stuck to me like glue until now, although she looked back once, biting her lip.The witches were a harder sell, staying put like resentful rocks with no intention of budging.And the sadhu stuck out his chin mutinously.

“No one commands me but the goddess,” he said, and his followers quickly arrayed themselves like a wall in front of us.

That left me looking at Pritkin, who stepped past the witches’ wards a moment later, through a lattice of old bones.He stopped, and we stared at each other for a heartbeat, then two, while the zombies rattled menacingly.Then he cocked an eyebrow in that way I hate because I can’t do it, and I sighed and womaned up.

“It’s fine,” I told the sadhu, although my voice didn’t sound like it agreed.“We need to talk.”

“You can talk with us here,” Topknot snapped, although I hadn’t asked her.“He’s been plotting with the rest of ‘em.You know what he wants!”

“Yeah.I know.Give us a minute, will you?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Gray Curls told me as they got up.“Dying for no reason won’t help us!”

Yeah, I thought.

But neither would sitting here.

“We’ll be nearby if you need us,” Zara said and led the others away.

That left the sadhu, who still hadn’t budged.If anything, his line of skeletal followers had gotten more aggressive, crowding Pritkin as if determined to bear him away into the sands.I sighed again and touched the holy man’s withered shoulder, and he turned and bowed low, his forehead hitting the dirt again.

“He’s a friend,” I said.