In days gone by, social hierarchy was more minutely determined by aria aptitude. Weavers did building and blacksmithing, anything that imbued magic in objects; water magicians fished and manned boats; air magicians tamed dragons and mimicked their flight. While aria magicians were uncommon, they largely stayed in their communities and fit neatly into their prescribed roles. Magic schools headed by magi turned aptitude into a science, rather than a feeling. Idris assumed Willard’s ‘parasite’, as Kurellan was now fond of calling it, was of the more rustic variety than his own, closer related to the older ways of magic thinking.

Regardless, he needed a weaver blacksmith, and the nearest large town was a three-day ride away. The mayor of Obsidian Lake gave them a carriage and good horses, something Idris thanked him profusely for, and he spent the first day sleeping through everything from the safety of the carriage box. Kurellan rode Crux with the green shard in his pocket at the front of the carriage and Riette rode Noctis behind.

“Sir Idris?” said Lila, showing him the page in Circles and Lines that Willard was using. “This shape?”

“Like this.” He formed a circle with his thumb and little finger, the other three fingers curved. “Like talons on an owl, Willard.”

“Ah. Aye.” Willard shifted his fingers. “Here.”

“Perfect. Looser shoulders.”

“This is making my brain hurt,” he said, sighing.

“It will, until the muscle memory kicks in. Until then, practice and practice and practice. If your brain hurts,” said Idris, putting his coat back over his face, “then you are working hard enough.”

“Are you going to sleep again?” said Lila, kicking his left leg.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Do try not to snore this time.”

He kicked her back.

“’S’all good, Miss Lila. He’s right tired. Let him sleep,” said Willard. “Watch me make owl talons.”

Idris slept so much that by the second night, he could not keep his eyes closed. Instead, he sat on the steps of the carriage under the stars and perused The Necromancer’s Almanac alone, while his companions rested in the roadside tavern.

“Quiet night,” said Riette.

Idris glanced up; she was in her tunic and leggings, rather than her armour, with her hair uniformly braided again.

“There are lamps and comfortable chairs inside,” she said, and he smiled and shook his head.

“I much prefer reading outside than inside.” He put a marker on the page. “Restless, my lady?”

“Somewhat.” She sat on the fence, gazing out into the sky. Outside of her armour, she still cut an impressive figure; her arms were thick, her shoulders powerful. “It is strange, not being in the company of soldiers, anymore. I have walked both paths – the path of the noble lady and the path of the knight – and I have forgotten what this path feels like underfoot, I think.”

“Noble life is… somewhat calmer, with different minutiae,” he said, and she smiled.

“It is complex in its own right.” She smiled at his book. “Back at work?”

“Always.”

“I hope I did not overstep my bounds, grabbing you as bodily as I did.”

“Oh, no,” he said, crossing his stump-leg onto his thigh. “No, you likely held me to solid ground, I may have flown off without you.” He paused. “Actually, I would like to thank you.”

“For what?” she said, laughing.

“You have not once mentioned it,” he said, tapping his half-shin.

Riette relaxed, and her smile was as soft as the moonlight.

“I am a soldier,” she said. “People lose limbs all the time, and they always get up and fight again. It is of no special interest to me, and I do not want to impose. Your body is your business, Sir Idris.”

“For what it is worth, it made me feel highly respected. I… I tend to hide it at court.”

“Why?”

“The questions and assumptions are tiresome. That, and I find the whole thing rather undercuts my position.” He sighed. “But, now I know that you would aid me in any necromantic whim I have regarding my non-foot –“

She laughed again. “Do not get any more ideas like that,” she said, jumping down from the wall. “The heat near scorched my eyebrows off. Pleasant reading to you, sir.”

“Thank you. I hope your night-time stroll calms your mind some.”

“I am sure it will.”

Riette wandered away, the moonlight silver in her hair as she trailed her fingers through the long grasses.

*

The castle town of Istabrook was the fourth largest in the kingdom. Once across the wide, blue-grey brick bridge and past the portcullis, it promised the best market outside of Veridia and housed the Istabrook School of Magic in a walled enclosure, marked with the seal of the school. Willard had never been anywhere as huge, and he kept his head out of the window of the carriage the whole time.

“Is the palace like this?” he said, turning back for a second.

“Bigger, actually,” said Idris, enjoying Willard’s excitement. “And pinker.”

“A pink palace. You’re joking with me, aye?”

“Pink and blue, ringed with lapis draconis. I am sure if you could get onto the roof and pry even half of the stones off, you would be richer than the Imperial Kingdom.” On the floor of the carriage, trying to attach Idris’s prosthetic, Lila tutted and slapped his thigh. “Sorry, I am squirming, I know.”

There was a knock on the carriage door, and Kurellan peered in from the back of Crux.

“I will go ahead, to the castle court,” he said. “I must warn Lord Istaban. Perhaps he will have a scrying mirror so I can talk to Her Majesty about our progress. I will meet you in the castle courtyard in three hours.”

“Of course, Your Honour,” said Idris. “Please tell the Queen that I am well.”

“I shall.” Kurellan passed the velvet bundle to Willard through the window. “Hold that tight, young witch.”

“I will, Honour.”

“On, Crux. On!”

“Can we give Riette the screaming rock?” said Idris, wincing away from the bundle in Willard’s hands.

“Since when were you on first name terms with Lady DeTrentaville?” said Lila, scowling. Idris raised his eyebrows at her. “Begging your pardon, sir,” she muttered, and pulled the strap so tight he yelped.

“Lady Riette?” Willard called out of the window. “Take the rock?”

Her hand reached in and the offending object was removed.

“Lila, I cannot feel my knee, can you loosen that?”

“Stay still then.”

The carriage trundled down stone streets, past aria bells singing a variety of different tunes, until Idris heard the clang and cry of blacksmiths and their trade; the air smelled of hot iron and the tang of weaver magic pressed on his sinuses. They came to a halt and Riette opened the door, smiling.

“Will this suffice, good sir?” she said to Idris, gesturing to the square of shops.

“It will, good lady,” he said, smiling back. “Lila, my cane?”

“Sir,” she said, handing it over and jumping out of the carriage to pull down the steps.

“Willard, stay close,” Idris said. Willard nodded.

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“Aye.” He scrunched up his nose. “Ey, what’m I meant to call you now you’re my teacher?”

“’Idris’ will do.”

“That ain’t proper.”

“It’s ‘my lord’,” Lila whispered to him as he passed.

“It most certainly is not, Lila, do not put ideas into his head.” Sighing, Idris glanced at Riette, who smirked and kept her laughter in. “This is my life now.”

“Well, you offered, did you not?” she said.

“What do you hear, Willard?” Idris asked. Willard looked around, his eyes aglow with what he saw.

“Um… metal work.”

“Beyond that.”

“Lemme see… not much, truth be told. This ain’t a place for fae, I know that much.”

“You should always be aware of that,” said Idris, beckoning him to follow. “Your first instinct in any new place should be to listen for arias. The bells can sometimes make things confusing but, with practice, you can separate the sounds you hear within them. Here, for example, these bells on the post? There is… a stone aria in there, and fire arias aplenty. Water, too. And always, in the background, there will be some whisper of a death aria. It exists everywhere.”

“Must be tiresome,” said Willard.

“Sometimes.”

The castle keep on the hill shone in the morning sunlight, but the blacksmiths had awnings and covered patios to keep them cool as they hammered and tempered. They passed a cookware stall and a farrier, and a place that seemed to only make metal bathtubs.

“Lila,” said Idris, “would you like a new sword? A bow of your own?”

Her eyes lit up. “Really, sir? Do we have money?”

“We do,” said Riette, patting her pocket.

“And after all, you are remarkably good with weapons. Frighteningly so,” Idris added. “You saved our hides at Obsidian Lake, I rather think you should be rewarded.”

“Us ladies should go together,” said Riette, linking arms with Lila. “I will help you find the perfect short sword. Willard, take the ‘screaming rock’, please.”

“Aye, milady.”

The women wandered away, leaving Willard and Idris alone with the green shard.

“Nobody else can hear it,” said the hedge witch, glancing around at the unperturbed masses, “can they?”

“No.” Idris sighed. “Let us dispatch of it quickly.”

At the far eastern corner of the square was a small shop with the mark of the weavers etched on the sign in gold. Idris pointed it out to Willard, taught him how the weaver sigil was an endless loop of interlacing rings, and said if he ever needed someone to craft him a magical item, he would need plenty of money and a great deal of patience.

“Magical weapons are a rarity and incredibly finnicky,” he said. “They are more dangerous than they first appear. Magical armour is perfectly safe. I suspect that is what this craftsman makes.” Idris knocked lightly on the strut of the awning. “Good morning, fine sir.”

“Ah, morning, gentlemen,” said a moustachioed man with the shiniest bald head Idris had ever seen. “What can I do for you?”

“We have a query, and your sign says you have a weaver in your employ.”

“One moment, sir.”

He headed into a small door, and after a while out came a willowy older woman with freckles all over her face. She wore the gold bracelet of a fully trained weaver, with the endless rings carved into every inch.

“Mistress Jackery,” she said, holding out a hand for Idris to shake, then Willard. “Come, sit. How can I help?”

Idris gestured to Willard, and he passed over the velvet. Mistress Jackery felt inside the fabric and her eyes widened.

“Oh, how strange,” she said, pulling the shard out and holding it in the sunlight.

“The sound from it is… intense,” said Idris, his eyes already watering.

The weaver eyed him, then Willard.

“And for you?” she said. Willard shrugged.

“Loud but pretty, lady.”

“Loud and awful,” Idris corrected.

“Hmm.”

She pulled over a trolley of tools and placed the shard on a crystal plate; as soon as she did so, the sound dimmed and became more manageable. On the plate, it looked like nothing more than a chip of jet, except with the green glitter pooling on the surface. The crystal beneath swirled with grey and emerald, as if they had dropped oil through water. Mistress Jackery peered through a glass at it.

“This…” She sucked her teeth, tapped her foot. “This is old. This is very old. Where’d you find it?”

“We chipped it off a dagger,” said Idris. “We have good reason to believe that it has some… necromantic qualities, and something else, something fae, perhaps?”

“Fae. That would make sense.” She lifted the shard with tweezers, and almost instantly the screeching came back. “Is that painful to you, sir?”

“Blindingly.”

“You a necromancer?”

“To my shame, I am.”

“Well, it sounds terrible because it’s chipped. I expect the main body of the weapon is behaving similarly. But the aria you hear in it, it is not right. Here.” She propped a set of bells up beside them and held the shard to it, and the bells shook violently until one tube shattered in a violent explosion. “To break an aria like this,” she said, putting it back on the crystal plate, “it suggests that it is tempered with a second aria. Maybe this fae aria you mention. Tempering with arias is an ancient skill that was lost for good reason. Mixing them like this makes them brittle and volatile; weapons made that way have blown craters where cities used to be. I do find it odd that it is filled with necromantic arias, though.”

“Why odd?” said Idris.

“Aren’t many necromancers around. Never have been.”

“So it was custom made. For one necromancer in particular?”

“To say for certain, I’d need to see the whole dagger. Look at this rock, too. Some kind of precious stone but I could not tell you what.” She shrugged. “Maybe it is not of this realm, this stone.”

Idris looked at Willard; the hedge witch pulled a face.

“That is the extent of my expertise,” Mistress Jackery said. “If you want to know more, I either need the whole weapon or someone with knowledge of aria tempering, and those kinds of weavers have been dead for five-hundred years, young man.”

“One last question,” said Idris. “Do you think there are more weapons like this, somewhere?”

“Could be. I suspect courts and kingdoms keep magical weapons like this in vaults. They’re too dangerous to be left out in the open.”

“I have some questions, if you’ll let me,” said Willard. Mistress Jackery nodded. “Is there a way we can stop it screaming? For my friend here?”

“Wrap it with a sapping crystal. That should dim the noise, some.”

“Could we… make a second weapon, with this?”

Idris raised his eyebrows at the suggestion; Mistress Jackery rubbed her chin, but she nodded.

“Certainly. It could be set in a pommel, or attached to the tip of a sword. Don’t know what good it would do, though. The resonance in it is troublesome and I cannot imagine it would make you popular anywhere there are aria bells.”

“And, last thing,” said Willard. “If the weapon is now broken… does that mean it won’t work the same no more?”

“I would suspect a small chip like this would do little to stop the weapon working completely, but it could have detrimental effects, of course.”

“The aria, then, is contained somehow in the dagger?” Idris confirmed. Mistress Jackery nodded. “It is not externally influenced?”

“I imagine someone who wasn’t even adept could wield this,” she said. “Provided they knew how it worked and what it did.”

“I thank you, Mistress Jackery, you have eased my mind considerably,” said Idris, bowing his head.

“If you ever find the whole thing again,” she said as they stood, “do bring it to me. It is a fascinating object.”

“We shall. Do you have a sapping crystal we can purchase from you, or can you point us in the direction of an alchemist?”

As he and Willard left the blacksmiths’ quarter, a weight left Idris’s shoulders.

“He is not a necromancer,” he said. “He is simply wielding a necromantic weapon. This dagger, that produces green faces somehow. I wonder how it is powered, where its energy comes from.”

Willard clapped him on the shoulder and beamed. “You’re still the only dead-talker in the kingdom. How does that feel?”

“Better than it should, actually.” Idris let out a long breath. “But now we have more questions.”

“At least soon we’ll be able to get the rock to stop giving you headaches.”

“A plus, to be sure.”

The alchemist was able to provide a sapping crystal and a new set of travel bells, and he helped Willard to craft a pouch from the velvet to make the shard easier to carry. As soon as the crystal was in the bag, the screaming vanished, replaced by a jumbled murmur that did not make Idris want to scratch his eyes out. Idris also picked up some red chalk and a variety of casting salts, and he swapped them for some of Willard’s salves.

By the time they were done, Lila and Riette were approaching the carriage. Lila turned and excitedly ran to Idris’s side with a beautiful calf-leather scabbard.

“I will get your clematis engraved on the sheath,” she said, revealing the top inch of the blade. It had the sheen that only a brand-new sword could have, white and liquid.

“Lila, it is glorious. What a sword!”

“It flows in her hand like she is a ribbon-dancer,” said Riette with a wide smile. “She will be a fine protector of her master with this blade at her side.”

Lila blushed, put the blade on her hip. “Did you find out about the rock, sir?”

“We did. Let us return to Kurellan and plan our next steps.”

They were allowed through the guard post to the castle courtyard on Riette’s introduction of the Court Necromancer, and Kurellan was already waiting for them. He nodded as Idris came out of the carriage.

“News?” he said.

“We have the rock… silenced, and some clue to its origins,” said Idris. “Yourself?”

“Messages from the Queen. We have been offered a room to eat lunch in, if you are tired of road fare.”

Idris accepted, and he and his companions were welcomed into the castle’s low-ceilinged entry room. Not long after, they had platters of real court food – stuffed figs and spiced nuts, light flaky pastries and thin slices of venison – and real wine, and were seated in an actual dining room. While they dined, Idris told them all about what Mistress Jackery said, and Willard illustrated by waggling the bag right beside their ears.

“See?” said Idris, sipping his wine. “Not even a tweak.”

“The weaver said you could make it into a weapon?” said Riette, raising her eyebrows.

“We could, but she would not recommend it.”

Kurellan pouted for a moment, thinking hard.

“Fae, she said,” he mused. “Before we go any further, I would like to pass on Her Majesty’s well-wishes. She apologised, firstly, about sending us out here. She thinks she has an idea who the spy is but she has not made her move. She would like us back as soon as possible but not before this business with the dagger is concluded. We are in a bind because we need to be stretched in two directions at once, and we do not have enough soldiers to protect our people.”

“Listen,” said Riette, leaning back in her chair, “we have a large party here. Why don’t we split up? Kurellan and I can head back to Veridia to prepare the troops while you… do whatever your part of the plan is.”

“What is our part of the plan?” said Lila, already on her sixth stuffed fig.

Willard frowned.

“I might’ve had an idea,” he said quietly. “But it ain’t good.” He shuffled on his seat, took a slice of milk bread. “Mistress Weaver said that it might be fae, aye?”

“Aye,” said Riette, with a smile.

“Then… where do you go to talk to the fae?” said Willard.

Kurellan blinked hard. “You… you want to talk to the fae.”

Lila stopped chewing. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Could be,” said Willard. “But the fae and I, we have an understanding, or we did in my forest. I ain’t never spoken to one of ‘em, but I know the rules. Besides…” He hesitated. “If I can hear fae music – arias,” he corrected, at Idris’s raised eyebrow, “then mayhaps they can tell me where I got that skill from. Call it selfish.”

“How would we even go about such a thing?” said Idris.

“I know a few ways.”

“Are you sure you want to do that?” said Kurellan. “The fae are not to be trifled with. And they do not like visitors.”

“You normally have to take an offering, too, right?” said Riette. Willard nodded.

“I have something they’ll want.”

“Are you certain?” said Idris. Willard nodded confidently.

“Would you come with me, Idris?” he said. “I… I ain’t great at negotiations and you being courtfolk and all.”

Idris was not sure he wanted to visit the realm of the fae, but he smiled at his friend and nodded.

“I owe the Queen some blue flowers, anyway,” he said.