learn to solve their own.”
He turned to Rojer. “Everything set?”
Rojer nodded. “Horses laden and saddled. We can leave when you’re ready.”
It had been over a month since spring melt, and the trees lining the Messenger road to Angiers were green with fresh leaves. Rojer held tightly to Leesha as they rode. He had never been much of a rider and generally mistrusted horses, especially those not hitched to a cart. Fortunately, he was small enough to ride behind Leesha without straining a beast too far. As with everything she turned her mind to, Leesha had mastered riding in short order, and commanded the horse with confidence.
It didn’t help his churning stomach that they were returning to Angiers. When he had left the city with Leesha a year ago, it had been as much to save his own life as to help her get home. He wasn’t eager to return, even alongside his powerful friends, especially when it meant letting the Jongleurs’ Guild know he was still alive.
“Is he overweight?” Leesha asked.
“Hm?” Rojer said.
“Duke Rhinebeck,” Leesha said. “Is he overweight? Does he drink?”
“Yes and yes,” Rojer said. “He looks like he swallowed the whole beer barrel, and it’s not far from the truth.”
Leesha had been asking him questions about the duke all morning, her ever-active mind already working on a diagnosis and potential cure, though she had yet to meet the man. Rojer knew her work was important, but it had been close to ten years since he had lived in the palace. Many of her questions taxed his memory, and he had no idea if his answers were still accurate.
“Does he sometimes have trouble performing abed?” Leesha asked.
“How in the Core would I know?” Rojer snapped. “He wasn’t the boy-buggering type.”
Leesha frowned at him, and Rojer immediately felt ashamed.
“What’s bothering you, Rojer?” she asked. “You’ve been distracted all morning.”
“Nothing,” Rojer said.
“Don’t lie to me,” Leesha said. “You’ve never been good at it.”
“Being on this road again has me thinking about last year, I guess,” Rojer said.
“Bad memories all around,” Leesha agreed, casting her gaze off to the sides of the road. “I keep expecting bandits to leap from the trees.”
“Not with this lot around,” Rojer said, nodding ahead of them to Wonda, who rode a light courser and had her great bow strung and ready in a sheath by her saddle. She sat up straight and alert, eyes sharp within her scarred face.
Behind them, Gared rode a heavy garron, though the giant man made the huge beast look a more normal size by comparison. His huge axe handles jutted up from either shoulder, ready at a moment’s notice. Trained demon hunters both, there was little to fear from mortal foes with them on guard.
But most comforting of all, even in daylight, was the Painted Man. He rode his giant black stallion at the lead of the small column, shunning idle talk, but his presence was a silent reminder that no harm could come to any of them while he was near.
“So is it the road that bothers you, or what lies at its end?” Leesha asked.
Rojer looked at her, wondering how she could just pick thoughts right out of his head.
“What do you mean?” he asked, though he knew full well.
“You never told me how you came to be at my hospit last year, beaten near to death,” Leesha said. “And you never went to the guard over it, or told the Jongleurs’ Guild you were still alive, even after they buried Master Jaycob.”
Rojer thought of Jaycob, Arrick’s former master who had been like a grandfather to him after Arrick died. Jaycob took him in when he had nowhere else to go, and put his own reputation in the hat to start Rojer’s career. The old man paid a heavy price for his kindness, beaten to death for Rojer’s crime.
Rojer tried to speak, but his voice caught, and tears filled his eyes.
“Shhh, shhh,” Leesha whispered, taking his hands and drawing them tighter around her. “we’ll talk about it when you’re ready.” He leaned into her, inhaling the sweet scent of her hair, and he felt himself grow calm again.
They were two days from the city, not far from where the Painted Man had first found Rojer and Leesha on the road, when he turned his horse and rode into the trees.
Leesha kicked her horse ahead, picking her way through the trees until she came alongside the Painted Man. With no natural path to follow, much less one wide enough for two, they had to continually shift and duck to avoid low-hanging limbs. Gared was forced to get down from his horse entirely and walk.
“Where are we going?” Leesha asked.
“To get your grimoires,” the Painted Man replied.
“I thought you said they were in Angiers,” she said.
“The duchy, not the city,” the Painted Man said with a grin.
The path soon widened, but still in a way that seemed natural to the untrained eye. Leesha was an Herb Gatherer, though, and knew plants better than anything.
“You cultivated this,” she said. “You felled trees and widened the path, then hid your work so it doesn’t seem a path at all.”
“I value my privacy,” the Painted Man said.
“It must have taken years!” Leesha said.
The Painted Man shook his head. “My strength has some uses. I can fell a tree almost as fast as Gared, and drag it off easier than a team of horses.”
They followed the secret path deep into the woods until it veered off to the left. Ignoring the clear path, the Painted Man turned right, and again plunged into the trees. The others followed, and when they pushed through the branches they gasped as one.
There, hidden in a hollow, was a stone wall, so covered in ivy and moss that it had been invisible until they were upon it.
“I can’t believe this is just sitting here, so close to the road,” Rojer said.
“There are hundreds of ruins like this in the forest,” the Painted Man said. “The trees reclaimed land quickly after the Return. A few are common Messenger stops, but others, like this one, have gone unnoticed for centuries.”
They followed the wall to a gate, ancient and rusted shut. The Painted Man took a key from his robes and inserted it in the lock, which turned with a smooth oiled click. The gates opened silently.
Inside was a stable that seemed collapsed from the front, but the rear half of the structure was intact and clear, with a large covered cart and more than enough space for the four horses.
“Miraculous that half the stable should survive the years so well, and the other half not,” Leesha noted with a grin, lifting some ivy out of the way to reveal fresh wards on the stable’s walls. The Painted Man said nothing as they brushed down the horses.
Like the rest of the compound, the main house was in ruins, the roof caved and looking decidedly unsafe. The Painted Man led them around the back to a servant’s house, still quite large by the standards of anyone raised in the hamlets. The place was half collapsed, like the stable, but the door the Painted Man led them through was heavy, thick, and locked.
The door opened into one great room, restored to function as a workshop. Warding equipment lay on every surface, along with sealed jars of ink and paint, various half-finished projects, and piles of materials.
There was a small cupboard by the fireplace. Leesha opened it to find one cup and one plate, one bowl and one spoon. A knife was stuck in a small cutting board by the cold pot hanging in the hearth.
“So cold,” Leesha whispered. “So lonely.”
“He doesn’t even have a bed,” Rojer murmured. “He must sleep on the floor.”
“I used to think I was alone, living in Bruna’s hut,” Leesha said, “but this…”
“Over here,” the Painted Man said, moving to a corner of the room with a large bookshelf. That got Leesha’s attention immediately, and she headed over.
“Are those the grimoires?” she asked, unable to keep the eagerness from her voice.
The Painted Man glanced at the shelf and shook his head. “Those are nothing,” he said. “Common wards and
