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please.”
    “Of course, love.” She wound her way through the crowd to the bar, chatting and laughing with several patrons on the way.
    Nolan assumed she was Aunt Bonty, but he wasn’t sure. He’d never set foot in the woman’s famous pub before. When he arrived, the crowd nearly made him turn back around. However, the smell of freshly baked bread wafting from the open door—and the fact he still had an hour to kill before the tournament—finally lured him in. Aunt Bonty’s pub was one of the few places in Alton where everyone was welcomed. Clothing of all shades filled the room—segregated into their own sections, of course. Luckily for Nolan, working at the manor allowed him to sit wherever he wanted.
    Nolan repositioned the book and flipped back to Kael’s tournament year. He was one of thirty-two discovered that year. The number of Rol’dan recruits increased the further back he looked. Thirty-eight. Then forty. Then sixty-five. The most recent tournament listed only nine names.
    He stared at the page.
    Why hadn’t he noticed? The numbers had radically dropped. How much longer until the Shay powers would disappear completely?
    “You all right there, love?” Bonty stood at Nolan’s elbow, waiting patiently for a place to put the ale.
    “Sorry.” He closed the book and stuffed it into his pack.
    “Ah, not to worry.” She placed the mug on the table. “You meetin’ someone?”
    “Um, no. Why?” He picked up the mug and took a drink. It tasted much better than he’d imagined.
    Bonty smiled. “Just wondering. I thought she might be looking for you.” She pointed toward a young woman seated at the bar, patted his arm in a motherly fashion, and continued to the next table to drop off a bowl of savory smelling stew.
    A girl, maybe a few years older than Nolan, sat straight on a stool. Her dark brown hair hung down her back, tied loosely with a strip of gray cloth. She was pretty. Not exotic like Mikayla, but still quite lovely. Wearing simple clothes—a light blue dress and no jewelry—she could easily fit in with the girls back home.
    He took a prolonged drink and murmured a laugh. Don’t be an idiot, Nolan. He shouldn’t think of home—or admire pretty girls, for that matter. The manor was his life. Today, he’d leave to record the proceedings at the tournament, like last year and every year to come. And when he returned, he’d hide in his gloomy room and die of old age as the scribe of Alton Manor. No trip home. No girls. No life. Just him, his ink, and his quill.
    A boisterous laugh rebounded off the walls. A large, hairy man perched on a stool too small for him with his back to the pub’s far wall. His eyes sparkled. His beard hung long and matted. Everything about him was huge. If Nolan guessed, he would assume the man to be a Higherlander, the people from the other side of the mountain range. But that would be ridiculous; they didn’t usually leave their lands.
    An energetic group of children, dressed in every shade of the districts, sat on the floor surrounding him, hanging on his every word.
    “Nay!” the man said in answer to a child’s question. “I’ve never seen them. No living man has. But I have seen a man after the fact, after the dark beasts took his soul.” He leaned forward for effect. “Aye, you best listen to your mums about the night. Everything she’s said is true.”
    The children leaned their heads together, whispering.
    The Higherlander was quite a storyteller. Activities of the pub died as others hung on his words. Nolan reclined in his chair and stretched his legs to get comfortable.
    “And the Demon Wars?” a girl asked.
    “That, my lass, I do not know. I’ve heard a man who can tell those tales, so he says.”
    “And the magic stones!” a boy asked. “Do you have the magic stones?”
    The man stroked his long beard, smiling. “And what do you know about those?”
    The boy looked around shyly. “My friend, Tommy, showed them to me. He said you gave