For the entire rest of the night, I can’t bring myself to sleep. My short trip to Treston Mox’s private tower keeps playing over and over again in my mind. Dovik is out there, in pain, lying on a bed under the surveillance of armed guards. Someone has my friend, and they want to use him to blackmail me.

  Nothing is able to get me out of my head. Working in the lab doesn’t accomplish much. I even spend time reorganizing my entire vault, busying myself with cleaning, sorting my enchanted items, neatly aligning the stacks of coins I keep under the four-post bed, all just to keep my hands busy. Half-baked ideas and plans surrounding breaking into Mox’s tower mix with ideas about how I am to win five fights against strong second ranks in my head. I run them past Galea and find some comfort in just speaking with her.

  She is always here with me. A constant.

  At last, the first rays of light start to splash across the city. Standing and looking out past the balcony, staring at the spot where a metal bird had been sitting just a few hours ago, I notice the decorations for the first time. Compared to Brass Burn, the decorations for this new holiday–Talos something or other–are subtle. Navy blue banners list lazily from the buildings, each decorated with a unique splash of stars in a myriad of colors.

  I can’t enjoy any of it. As soon as the sun crests the far horizon of the emerald wall, I am out of the penthouse.

  Before I make it down to the main lobby of the complex, I think that Lady Talagast’s note about being followed is a little too paranoid. Then, as I walk out onto the street and feel the sunlight start to wash over me, I see them. Two men dressed in the same attire as the ones I had seen last night lounge across the street. They wear jackets now, but as one shifts, I catch the flash of a weapon tucked into his belt.

  One pauses in his conversation as he notices me standing out in front of the building. He elbows his buddy, pointing at me as I raise my shaded spectacles and wave over to them. Slowly, the second one raises his own hand, waving back. I nod, take a deep breath, and take off at full speed down the street.

  The two men squawk something as I start to run, but my eye lets me know that neither is a magician, and the scruffy-looking dwarves definitely didn’t appear to be endowed either. People walking down the side of the street cry out as I flash by faster than even the swiftest horse can run. As the crowd grows thicker, my sprint very quickly becomes dangerous.

  I turn, dashing into the road and swerving around enchanted carriages and livestock-driven vehicles slowly navigating the traffic. More shouts follow after me like an echo as I blur past surprised faces. Mox’s two obvious men are a distant memory after just a few blocks, and any hope of following after me vanishes after I make the first mile.

  “Two and a half minutes,” Galea comments as I take a turn and start heading toward the outskirts of the city.

  “It’s crowded,” I reply defensively. “Would be faster to fly.”

  “Maybe you can purchase some kind of permit for that,” she says.

  “You know, that never even crossed my mind.” On most days, I enjoy the bustle of the city and navigating through the crowds. Today, today I need speed.

  I make it to the far north of the city in under an hour, which is a ludicrous speed given just how large Faeth is. Lady Talagast said she wanted to meet this morning, and while I have no intentions of doing much of anything else, I also know that I don’t need to sprint to her manor. I spend an hour distracting myself on the north end of the city and finding something to eat. An hour passes as I sit at an outdoor cafe, drinking tea and waiting to see if any of Mox’s men will somehow track me down here. The man is an enchanter, and I have no idea what means he might have available to him.

  No obvious goons ever show themselves. Spreading out my presence to check the surrounding area would be more of a giveaway of where I am than helpful. So, after paying, I make my way to the nearest entrance to the underground and head off to meet with Lady Talagast.

  As I wait for the woman to appear in one of the sunrooms on the east side of her manor, it strikes me just how familiar this situation feels. Not meeting her; I have done that many times since coming to the city. Today feels like one of the occasions when Arabella Willian would call me to come meet her in her office. I wonder if that is a cycle I have fallen into, one of meeting powerful older women who offer me vague advice with hidden agendas. No, this meeting is different than those had been. I am not the same girl I was then.

  “Charlene,” Lady Talagast says, smiling radiantly as she enters the room. A manservant follows after her, placing down a tray of finger cakes and a kettle of mint coffee before retreating. “I am sure that you have questions for me, but first, I would like to explain myself a bit.” Lady Talagast reclines in a chair across from me and pours each of us a cup of coffee. She knows I like this brew quite a bit. “I asked you here because of the meeting you had last night with Treston Mox. I am not privy to the exact details of that meeting, but I believe I can guess the specifics.”

  My eyes linger on the soft, pale green color of the coffee for a while before taking a sip. The liquid is scalding hot as it splashes over my tongue, but it doesn’t even come close to burning. There is something perverse in the incredible heat mixed with the minty flavor that I find so intoxicating. For the first time today, I feel my emotions begin to settle.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  This meeting is exactly what I had thought it would be. Two people with power in this city were trying to push and pull me. The similarities to Arabella become even clearer. I continue to stare down at the porcelain cup and the coffee inside until the surface calms to a green mirror.

  “He is holding my friend hostage,” I say, setting the drink aside. “He said that he would kill him if I don’t do what he wants. If I don’t fight in his arena and humiliate some man that I don’t even know.”

  Across from me, Lady Talagast nods. She opens her mouth to say something, but stops. Her eyes turn hard as she relaxes back and sits straight in her chair. “You seem to be taking this rather calmly,” she says.

  “I don’t feel calm,” I say. When I look up at her, the kindly woman that I have gotten to know over the last few months is gone, replaced by a businesswoman, a politico. “I feel like I am three steps away from tearing the city down. That wouldn’t solve my problems, though. I know that. But I still want to.”

  “Could you, Charlene? Could you tear the city down?” For some reason, I sense that she is genuinely asking.

  I force myself to breathe out, calm and steady. Fire burns just beneath my skin, and it is difficult to keep it there. “No. Of course not.”

  Lady Talagast nods. “I thought that the man might turn to you again when your friend failed at completing the task.” She nods to a corner of the room where her metal bird stands dead and still on a table. “After our last conversation about the man, I had him put under surveillance. Near midnight last night, he had your friend pulled out of one of his casinos and beaten. He offered your friend the same deal he made you, and your friend agreed to it. By the time I made it to the arena, it was too late to intercede in any meaningful way. A brute named Mallis jumped into the pit before your friend even came close to facing the man Mox wanted him to humiliate, and foiled Mox’s plans. With his relationship to you, I knew Mox would turn your way.”

  “He thinks that he can bully me into doing what he wants,” I say, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice. “He thinks that he has power over me.”

  “Doesn’t he?”

  “Not nearly as much as he thinks.” My hands ball into fists. “I could rip his tower down. He doesn’t think I can, but it wouldn’t even be that hard. He spoke like he knew what I have been through, like he understood it, but if he had, he never would have thought that he could manipulate me.”

  The barest hint of a smile quirks at the corner of Lady Talagast’s lip, but it vanishes almost as quickly as it appears. “You know, when I was a girl a long, long time ago, I found myself having a rather difficult time getting my feet underneath me in this city. Half of the people I brought my designs to didn’t believe that they could possibly work, or they thought that I had stolen them from someone else. More than once, I had the authority called on me. It took a while, but eventually…”

  “Please stop,” I say. Annoyance flashes across Lady Talagast’s face, but she stops like I ask. With a long gulp, I down the rest of my coffee and set the cup aside. “If you are going to go on a story that will illustrate why Treston Mox thinks he can push me around, you don’t need to. I already know what the problem is.

  “Last night, I was pulled unceremoniously from my home, shown my friend who had been nearly stabbed to death, and berated by a loathsome man in his office while his hired muscle held a blade to my neck. The entire time Mr. Mox was yelling and carrying on, I simply could not believe it. The thought kept passing through my mind that this kind of thing would never happen to many of the people I know. It would have never happened to my brothers. People know them, and they know that they can’t disrespect them without consequence. Then it struck me. Nobody knows me.”

  When I look up, I fix the woman in front of me with a hard eye. “Nobody in this city really knows me. Even that man, a man who has looked into what I have been up to through the Adventurer's League, only has a loose understanding of what and who I am.” Dragonfire seeps from the beds of my fingers, and I can’t help but look down at it and watch it dance. “All of this strength that I have worked so hard for, and people are still treating me like I am just some girl no more than a week off the farm. Like I am someone that they can make do what they want.” A smile comes to me, and when I look up at the woman sitting across from me, I know it isn’t a pleasant one based on her expression. “I don’t have a reputation. That is what you were going to try and sell me, right?”

  “You are clever,” Lady Talagast says.

  “So I’ve been told.” I clench my hand, banishing the flames. “You have some sort of plan to achieve that.”

  “I do,” she says.

  “Why would you want to help me with this, other than us being friends, that is?”

  “Why, my dear, for my own benefit,” Lady Talagast says. “To put that little man under my thumb.” Then, with her grin growing more predatory the more she speaks, Lady Talagast begins to describe to me a plan that might very well ruin Treston Mox. Her explanation is extensive. It includes several deviations, potential pitfalls, and externalities that could potentially appear. For a full hour, I am shown what the mind of a schemer gets up to. A part of me is repulsed, but another part finds something attractive about the way she methodically approaches bringing about someone else’s downfall.

  When Lady Talagast finishes her explanation, I am left with only two questions.

  “Why this man?” I ask as I refill my cup once more, draining the last of the coffee from the pitcher. “Why does he want this man beaten so badly?”

  Lady Talagast snorts a laugh. “It isn’t really some great mystery. That man Senya is sleeping with Mox’s daughter. The girl thinks that sleeping with one of her father’s fighters will get under his skin, and she is right about that.”

  I tsk. “I am going to beat a man bloody because of something like that.”

  “Most issues, at least the ones where someone needs to be beaten bloody as you say, boil down to personal problems like that. They are weaknesses, and you are going to help me exploit this one.”

  “Dovik nearly died for something so small.” The handle of the teacup snaps between my fingers. I catch the porcelain in my free hand before it can spill a single drop. “Such small problems.”

  Lady Talagast clears her throat. “You said that you had another question, dear?”

  I nod, reaching forward and setting the cup aside once again. “Yes. I wanted to ask you for a loan.”

  “A loan.” She pauses, thinking for a moment before her predatory smile returns. “I think I might be able to accommodate that. How much were you thinking?”

  “Just a small loan,” I say, figures running through my head. “A hundred thousand suns should do.”

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