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is already darkening. I’m out of time. Swallowing a curse, I head towards the waterfront. Without a carriage, we won’t be able to transport the Degaths—it’s too long a walk to the house Rafiki has in mind, and the family will be too obviously out of place wandering the streets. I’ll have to come up with something else.
    I keep a watch out for vacant buildings along the way, pausing at the intersections of alleys, studying the more decrepit structures for signs of occupancy. There are a few. Karolene may be a thriving trade city, but the occasional building does fall into disrepair; businesses close and leave behind empty shells; families board up their houses, intending to return one day, only they never do. Plans have a way of unraveling.  
    I barely step into the first building before I slip out again, moving on before the squatters I spot can register my intrusion. The second and third have too many broken windows and doors to hide our presence or be in any way defensible. When I happen on the fourth, only a few streets from where Rafiki and the Ghost will already be waiting for me, I know that this one will have to work.  
    The doors and shutters at ground level are still intact. It only takes me a moment with my trusty lock-pick set to get through the back door. Inside, I light a candle stub I keep for just such occasions and inspect the rest of the building. Past the large back room, a long hall lined by two rooms on either side leads to the front entry. The rooms have precious little to offer: moldering mattresses, blackened lumps that may have once been cushions, a scattering of refuse. But one of them does have a workable door.  
    Back in the hallway, I find a stairwell built between the front room and these smaller rooms, but the treads have long since fallen to pieces, leaving a splintered framework incapable of supporting weight. My eyes search the stairwell. How did it fall in when the doors and shutters are still in tact? I find my answer in the blackened ends of timbers: a fire that must have started on an upper floor. Given how thick the dust—and ash—lies here, there should be no one upstairs.  
    I cast around one last time, knowing that this is hardly the place to put a lord’s family. But we have no way to get them to Rafiki’s safe place tonight. It will have to do.
    Before I leave, I pull a pouch from my pocket, weighing it in my hand, then extract the string of stone prayer beads within. Better to set them up now, when no one can guess at what I’m doing. I suppose I could tell the Ghost or Kenta about my Promise, if I had to. I can’t imagine them betraying me. But there’s no reason whatsoever for Rafiki to know. He may be part of the League, but I’m not convinced that he wouldn’t report me to the High Council for hiding my Promise and remaining “untrained”—formally, at least.  
    I shudder. Untrained Promises aren’t merely fined or sent to school. At my age, there would be only two options. I could choose to have my magic stripped from me, which would likely take my mind with it. Or I could agree to become a source slave, living in a mage’s household and being forced to funnel my magic into the mage’s own spells.
    No, the wards go up now, before anyone else arrives.
    With a quick tug I release the knot holding the loop of beads together. One by one, I line the inside of the building with the beads, leaving them below each window and along the walls, and at both exits. I return to the center of the building and kneel on the floor, cupping the last bead in my hand. I focus on the bead until I can feel it in my mind, feel the old ties that bind it to the circle I have set out, like the filaments of a single-stranded web. Reaching out through it, I slowly wake each stone, renewing old bonds and closing the circle I’ve created around the building. The bead in my hand grows warm as I send my thoughts out through it, sensing each of its siblings, assuring I haven’t