"That wish changed my life," Rook admitted, something almost like satisfaction in it. "Perfectly clear speech. 100% worth the wish. And while we're handing out the practical version of events rather than the flattering one: anyone within about thirty-seven feet of me gets the same courtesy, whether they asked for it or not. Whenever someone speaks to me and whenever I speak to them, the speech is magically translated translated into one's own language in real-time. It runs the whole time I'm active. I don't turn it off, and I can't turn it up. Professional courtesy of the position."
"Handy," Jeff said.
"Occasionally," Rook said, "it's the only interesting part of the job."
They found the town by evening, which was less a discovery than a surrender — the mirrored maze of the forest kept redirecting them toward it with the polite insistence of a mall cop, and eventually Jeff decided that fighting a labyrinth's opinion about where he should be standing was a losing use of an already exhausting day. Rook rode the last mile perched on Corwin's pauldron, silent, watching the treeline with the specific attentiveness of something that had learned, across several centuries, exactly how often trouble waited at the edge of a forest for people who assumed they were done for the day.
The town called itself Emberglass, according to a sign made of what looked like fused glass shards, their auras still faintly luminous, also luminous from whatever crystal had been ground down to make it. It was smaller than Jeff expected and busier than made sense for its size — stalls selling shard-cut jewelry that pulsed faintly when touched, a blacksmith reforging a blade that occasionally flickered translucent for no reason anyone bothered explaining, two kids racing each other on legs that weren't the legs they were born with, laughing in a way that suggested the new legs were, frankly, an upgrade.
Corwin, limping between them with his axe now serving as a cane, eyed the crowd like a man auditing a competitor's business. "This is one of those communities that grows up around a cluster of wish-granter-summoning objects. People migrate here because the odds are better. Somebody finds three wish-granters in a week, word spreads, suddenly you've got a town." He said it with the weary contempt of a man who considered wishing beneath him, which struck Jeff as rich coming from someone who fought dragons with a lightning axe for a hobby and no visible retirement plan.
"You say that like you didn't grind your entire kit out of wishes."
"That's different. I earned mine through struggle and sacrifice."
"How many different wish-granters did it take?"
"...We don't need to relitigate wishes."
"For the record," Rook said, from the pauldron, without opening his eyes, "it was several. He's told me about several. Unprompted. Several times."
Alicia, ignoring all three of them with the practiced ease of a woman who'd been married into this exact dynamic, had already drifted toward a stall where an older woman was laying out shards sorted by color with the reverence of someone arranging a wedding cake. "These are healing-crystal cuts," Alicia said, delighted, holding one up so the low sun came through it pale gold — and threw a matching gold across the very light tan of her own arm, a shade she liked to credit to a Cuban grandfather who'd spent sixty years insisting he had "fisherman's blood" like that was a documented ethnicity, and a Havana-born mother who barely tanned at all no matter how long she stood in the sun. "Real ones. Look at the veining."
"Freshest batch in three months," the woman said. "Crystal cluster two valleys over finally cycled out and reset. Testing a cluster's crystal yourself, before you know what it does, can sometimes trigger its aura to turn a part of you extremely heavy." She said this with the specific flatness of someone reciting a lesson she'd learned the hard way and intended to spare exactly one stranger from repeating.
Jeff bought four shards, mostly because Alicia gave him a look that communicated, without a single word, that they were leaving with four shards whether he participated in the transaction or not. He was getting good at reading that look. It had saved him from at least one bad decision a week since they'd married. He scrubbed a hand back over his dark cornrows while he waited, dislodging a small cascade of canyon grit — the rows sat tight and even, and stopped a clean couple of inches short of his shoulders, not dropping past mid-neck. 6ft and slender with cornrows, he never changed that about himself — height from his Georgia-raised father's side, slenderness from his Chilean mother's side.
It was while they were haggling — well, while Alicia was haggling and Jeff was providing color commentary nobody asked for — that he noticed the reading room.
It sat at the town's center, open on all sides, roofed but wall-less, shelves built into the support posts. A dozen people sat inside on cushions that had clearly been replaced more than once, reading. Not idly. Studying. A kid no older than ten had a page open and was mouthing the words with the concentration of someone memorizing scripture.
"Every room has one of those," Alicia murmured, following his gaze. "Every house, every building. It's in Eric's rules. Reading material disclosing plenty of rules. I think that kid's read the same page eleven times and isn't going to stop until it makes sense, and I think eventually it's going to make sense."
"Somebody should tell him some of it isn't for kids," Corwin said.
"Somebody should tell you that too," Rook said, "and yet."
They were three streets deeper into Emberglass, following a rumor about a map dealer, when Jeff started messing with his ring.
"My ring is so weird."
"Your ring's always been weird."
"Weirder than weird. Weird-weird." Jeff flexed his hand, and the ring on his finger sat there being smugly cryptic the way it always did, offering exactly zero additional context.
Corwin, several paces ahead and clearly done pretending he wasn't eavesdropping, stopped walking. Rook lifted his head off the pauldron a half-second before Corwin spoke, which Jeff noticed and filed away.
"There's someone doing something weird near here," Corwin said.
Jeff and Alicia both turned. "Where?"
"There," Corwin said, pointing his axe toward an alley between a shuttered forge and a dye shop that smelled aggressively of crushed flowers. "That man is having a conversation with absolutely nobody, and he's using the specific hand gestures people use when a translated conversation is running a beat behind."
He was right. A man stood in the alley's shadow, gesturing animatedly at empty air, occasionally pausing as if listening, his lips moving a half-second before sound would've caught up if there'd been any.
"Translated conversation," Jeff repeated slowly, and looked at Rook.
"I'm thirty-one feet away," Rook said, already doing the math out loud, wings half-lifting off the pauldron. "He's well within range. Whatever he's saying, whatever's answering him, it's coming through clean on both ends — which means somewhere in that alley there's something else nearby that qualifies as a listener. Or a wish-granter of its own. I'd need to be closer to tell you which, and I'd genuinely rather not be."
"He's talking to somebody, maybe," Alicia said slowly.
"Unless he's talking to something, maybe," Jeff said.
The man in the alley finished his conversation, nodded once at the empty air like he was thanking someone for their time, and turned to leave — and stopped dead when he saw the three of them watching him. Four, if the bird counted, and the way the man's eyes flicked to Rook and lingered a half-second too long suggested he counted.
For a moment nobody moved. Somewhere behind them, the town went on being a town, oblivious — a child laughing, a hammer striking hot metal, the low murmur of people reading rules they didn't yet know were the walls of their world.
The man's expression didn't do anything dramatic. He didn't flinch or bolt or reach for a weapon. He just looked, very briefly, like someone who'd been caught doing something he'd assumed no one nearby would ever be equipped to notice — and then, worse, like someone recalculating, in real time, exactly how much that assumption was about to cost him.
Then he smiled, pleasant as a shopkeeper, and the smile didn't reach anywhere near his eyes.
He turned and walked deeper into the alley — not running, not even hurrying, just a man keeping an appointment he had no intention of missing — and by the time Jeff's legs remembered they were allowed to move, the alley bent, and the man was already gone around the corner of it, unhurried the entire way, like he'd known exactly how many seconds of shock he had to work with and had spent every one of them on purpose.
"I don't like him," Rook said, into the quiet that followed.
"Nobody asked," Corwin said, already limping toward the alley's mouth, axe held like it weighed nothing at all anymore.
"Nobody had to," Rook said. "I'm telling you anyway. Professional courtesy."
To Be Continued.