And then, she presented herself at the house of Vissio, one of the city's noble families. Their estate was in the Council Oak district on a small hill overlooking the market. Fragrant orange trees crowded the walled garden. The servant who answered the door scowled at her. "What?"

"I wanted to ask one of the Vissio brothers about their recent problem, and see if I can help."

"We don't need strangers' help, thank you."

The servant was about to slam the door on Ruyo when someone said, "Wait." A man in white and black, one of the two from before, marched closer and pushed the doorman aside. "Are you a ransomer? Spill it."

"No, no! But I'm an apprentice mage, and I thought I might know something useful."

"Then come in."

The house was built around the gardens, and was more shaded arcades than fully enclosed rooms. The Vissio man crushed a felt cap in his hands. "So. What is it?"

"Forgive me for getting involved, sir, but does your younger brother have any unusual magic talent?"

"Who told you that?"

"Only rumor from the shopkeepers below." The man looked impatient already. Ruyo went on: "If that's true, and if someone is trying to capture people with strange magic... I might be usable as bait."

Vissio clapped once and said, "Fetch my brother." A servant scurried away and returned with him, likely a twin. They made Ruyo say it all again. The two conferred, largely by gesture. Then one of them said, "It's true; he was playing with a type of spell that might have been new. His own invention. We're not sure but we wouldn't know. What's so special about your power, that you think you could get the villains' attention?"

"At the moment? Nothing they would notice. But I plan to leave town in the morning and go home, and in a few days I'll return with something to use. Something that will stand out."

"A few days!" cried the first brother. "Who knows what will happen to him by then?"

The other brother said, "This is just one lead of several. We can keep trying our other methods."

"Then this woman must leave now, not tomorrow. You there, are you expecting some sort of payment up front?"

"No, sirs. You're right to keep trying to find him. I'll prepare and come back quickly by horse."

They looked a little more confident in her, for asking no favors. "And you have some sort of flashy trick you'll fetch?"

"I believe so. It might help if I knew what the boy can do. What's his name, anyway?"

"Virid. He has a touch of the stone-shaper's power. Nothing astonishing there; so does our mother. But he seemed able to make stones bounce and roll around on their own in an odd way. As though he were steering the spell without paying attention, or they were alive."

That sounded like what the artificer had said. "A living thing made of a pure element?"

"That's one explanation, but again, we don't know much magic theory ourselves. Mother thinks so."

The other brother said, "Now, miss, will you be safe getting to your cache of spell-tools? We could send a rider along."

That was tempting, but dangerous. Ruyo shook her head. "I plan to travel with the enchanter Quintus."

"Oh, him. I doubt he could find the way to your home unless you led him on a rope."

"His slave-girl will be along to help."

"Then it's decided. Go, and be steadfast." Both brothers gestured with an upraised hand held edge-forward over their hearts.

#

Ruyo hurried back to Quintus' home. Her only detour was to pay a street urchin to tell Felix the Jay, "Tomorrow's date is off for now, but thanks". She figured the kid would enjoy delivering gossip-worthy news.

Fortunately Quintus was at home, muttering as he packed too many magical instruments into a trunk. Ruyo said, "I've been told to leave right away. Can you?"

"Now? I have preparations to make!"

Tulia said, "Sir, I've been trying to tell you the trunks are too much for a horse."

"Which is why we're taking a cart."

Ruyo said, "The Vissio brothers want me to hurry. Maybe you could..." Ruyo considered the possibility of having Tulia follow Ruyo to learn the route and then shepherd her master along, but the brothers were probably right to doubt his travel skills.

"We could travel light," Tulia put in.

"While studying magical phenomena?"

"You've done it before. You were very successful at it, too. Won recognition from the Council, even."

Quintus stood up from trying to stuff gadgets into the chest, and dusted himself off. "That's true. Very well. Saddlebags only. Just a few instruments. A worthy challenge." He looked forlornly at his box of gear.

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Ruyo left the two of them to their packing. Just then a rider from Vissio arrived, dismounting to give her a bag of fruit and cheese.

"Bless you," Ruyo told him.

#

In the village of Sor's Hill, Ruyo arranged to keep Henrik's mare a little longer. But neither he nor anyone else was willing to talk about the hunting expedition they'd done, other than that they'd gotten their quarry. Odd.

Ruyo didn't press them; she hurried onward. The party eventually neared the diverted stream, and veered off of the rutted road. "We walk from here. So, Quintus: this isn't just a cave. It's a Lost World shrine."

The wizard looked as though he'd been struck. "Why didn't you tell me so? I don't have all of the proper tools to document it. Why were you so vague about it, Tulia?"

"I haven't seen it myself," Tulia told him.

They hobbled the horses and left them to graze for the moment, then headed into the darkness with only an ordinary oil lantern. Ruyo called out, "Nusina?"

"You're back!" said the voice of the water spirit. The cave began to emit a dim, rippling glow. "Is everything all right?"

"We have work to do. Did anyone bother you?"

"No. In fact, Baris stopped by once more to check, and offered a prayer. Nice of him."

Quintus said, "I'm unimpressed by you talking to an empty cave, miss Ruyo. But did you make that light source?"

Oh, right; the others couldn't see or hear the guardian. Ruyo said, "Nusina, can you appear to them?"

"Briefly. Come farther in."

Ruyo had the others approach the old murals and the stone circle on the floor. Nusina appeared in plain sight, shedding a brighter blue glow. "Fear not, mortals! Welcome to the shrine of my mistress Ruyo! I can't make myself visible for long, but whatever she tells you is probably true." She began to fade already.

"Wait," said Tulia, reaching out one hand in fascination. "What are you? Do you belong to Ruyo?"

"I'm a guardian spirit. It's my function, and I want to do it well. Nice to meet you, and I can hear you while invisible. Please help Ruyo, and you'll be helping me too."

Nusina faded to her default ghostly state, so that only Ruyo could see her. Tulia kept looking at the space where the spirit floated. "Your function. Do you have any choice?"

The guardian said, "Not really, but I'm happy to do my job again."

Ruyo repeated that and frowned. She added, "For whatever my relaying of words is worth."

Quintus coughed. "So you do have some kind of... spirit, or at least a good illusion. Shall we get on with my studies?"

Tulia said, "We've been asked to, ah, to pray here. I'd like to try that now, especially if it will let me talk more with her."

"I suppose I can watch the process," the wizard said.

Tulia ignored Ruyo other than casting a nervous glance her way, and faced the murals. She crouched and murmured something Ruyo couldn't hear. It went on for a minute. Again Ruyo felt faintly dizzy and warm from the indirect attention. She hoped to get more used to it, but feared what would happen if she got too comfortable.

"Interesting," Quintus said, peering through a hoop of rune-etched metal at everything. The empty space where the lens should have been, shimmered faintly.

Quintus wrote down some notes, then said, "I should make my own donation to the cause." He knelt and mumbled his way through a halting litany of praise and encouragement he was adapting from a Steadfast Church prayer and possibly a textbook. "May the new goddess stand firm and tall; may we be sheltered by her might. Let the sums balance and all weights be properly supported against stress and strain. May all work be properly shown. In the name of the traveler Ruyo."

Ruyo blushed and accepted the trickle of energy without comment. She clapped her hands together and said, "All right! Quintus, would you like to see the hidden part of the shrine?"

The mage's raised eyebrows were clearly a yes. Ruyo asked Nusina to open the hidden back wall. They headed down the stairs to the well or shaft. Quintus peered in, and Tulia sensibly held his belt in case he leaned too far forward.

"My!" he said. "What is it for?"

Nusina said, "Its original name was... I can't recall exactly, but something like 'Tireless Wellspring of Celestial Puissance'."

Ruyo looked skeptically at her.

"What? Theotechnology terms tended to be grandiose."

"It's called a wellspring, now."

"But it's not literally powered by how much water is down there. Anyway, that's not the official term."

Ruyo grinned. "It is now, by divine fiat."

"If you say so, milady. I suggest not trying to ferry them down with ice platforms."

She nodded, and explained to the others: "I had a hard time getting down and back, and we ought to have at least a good rope ladder if you want to explore there. Should have thought to bring one. But down at the bottom is a room with some inscriptions and a large broken crystal."

"A crystal?" Quintus said. "Those can be used to store mana, but if a charged crystal breaks, the results tend to be unpleasant."

"They probably were. The place barely functions, and I had to fight a... wait a minute. Nusina, at the time I only thought of it as a monster. But was that slush thing a spirit too? Oh gods, was it a person like you?"

Nusina swirled into a tighter knot of water, looking uncomfortable. "I've been thinking about that too. I'm fairly sure it wasn't. And... if it was a true guardian spirit like me, it was mad and mindless by the time you fought it. It was beyond helping, I mean."

Reluctantly Ruyo explained what Nusina had said. Quintus looked fascinated, Tulia troubled.

Quintus used an array of tools to take mundane and mystical measurements of the place, from inside and out. Ruyo couldn't follow the technical monolog as he dictated notes to Tulia.

Nusina listened. She told Ruyo, "I'm learning a few things from his note-taking. It's the closest there's been to a proper inspection in ages."

Finally Tulia said, "How can we help each other? Ruyo has been saying she needs more magic. To do something useful, but also to attract the attention of certain criminals."

Ruyo said, "Let's tend properly to the horses, and get everyone caught up."

So they did that, and sat on blankets on the cave floor. Nusina said, "Becoming fully tangible is an energy drain. But if you help, Ruyo, I can manage to keep moving the air to talk with them."

Ruyo eagerly helped act as a mana conduit, learning to channel her small reserve of power to keep Nusina real enough to speak with. The spirit floated beside them like a reverse bonfire of rippling water, barely visible to Quintus' magic-detecting hoop. Quintus and Tulia passed it back and forth while peppering her with questions.

Ruyo didn't mind being largely left out of the conversation. Nusina had the more interesting stories to tell, even if they were very fragmented memories of a forgotten age.

Nusina eventually said, "Ruyo, I have some ideas. What you talked about the boy doing, sounded like he'd learned to animate an element. Impressive at his age, with no tutor! You, though, do have someone who knows a little about the technique. Me."

"Would I be creating another intelligent spirit just to catch criminals?"

"No, not for a simple construct. In the old days there were intelligent ones, but you probably won't figure out that technique for a while. No offense."

Ruyo nodded.

"Besides learning that, I think you can master a basic water creation spell --"

"Yes, please."

"I thought you'd say that. Also, and this is branching out from your water powers, I could help you learn a power of conjuration. Creating small objects from nothing, such as you might find in a ship's hold."

Ruyo blinked. "Random objects?"

"Not random; simple things you envision. Nails, boards, an iron ingot, a patch of sailcloth, a biscuit."