Lila shrugged. “Can’t hurt.”
Kell supposed she was right. He slid his knife free and drew the blade across his palm, a thin line of blood welling up. He dabbed it with his fingers and made a mark on the wall.
“Take out the stone,” he said.
Lila eyed him distrustfully.
“You’ll need it,” he pressed.
She sighed and pulled her broad-brim hat from a fold in her coat. It was crumpled, but with a flick of her wrist it unfolded, and she reached into the hat’s bowl like a magician and drew out the black rock. Something in Kell twisted at the sight of it, an ache in his blood, and it took all his strength not to reach for the talisman. He bit back the urge and thought for the first time that perhaps it was better if he didn’t hold it.
Lila closed her fingers around the stone, and Kell closed his fingers around Lila’s, and as it was he could feel the talisman humming through the flesh and bone of her hand. He tried not to think about the way it sang to him.
“Are you sure?” he asked one last time.
“It will work,” said Lila. Her voice sounded less certain now than it had been, less like she believed and more like she wanted to, so Kell nodded. “You said yourself,” she added, “that everyone has a mix of humanity and magic in them. That means I do, too.” She turned her gaze up to his. “What happens now?”
“I don’t know,” he said truthfully.
Lila drew closer, so close their ribs were touching and he could feel her heart racing through them. She was so good at hiding it, her fear. It didn’t show in her eyes, or the lines of her face, but her pulse betrayed her. And then Lila’s lips tugged into a grin, and Kell wondered if it was fear she felt after all, or something else entirely.
“I’m not going to die,” she said. “Not till I’ve seen it.”
“Seen what?”
Her smile widened. “Everything.”
Kell smiled back. And then Lila brought her free hand to his jaw and tugged his mouth toward hers. The kiss was there and then gone, like one of her smiles.
“What was that for?” he asked, dazed.
“For luck,” she said, squaring her shoulders to the wall. “Not that I need it.”
Kell stared at her a moment and then forced himself to turn toward the bloodstained bricks. He tightened his hand over hers, and he brought his fingers to the mark.
“As Travars,” he said.
The wall gave way, and the traveler and the thief stepped forward and through.
III
Barron woke to a noise.
It was the second time that morning.
Noise was a fairly common thing in a tavern; the volume of it ebbed and flowed depending on the hour, at some times thunderous, at others murmuring, but it was always there, in some measure. Even when the pub was closed, the Stone’s Throw was never truly silent. But Barron knew every kind of noise his tavern made, from the creak of the floorboards to the groan of the doors to the wind through the hundreds of cracks in the old walls.
He knew them all.
And this one was different.
Barron had owned the tavern at the seam—for that was how he thought of the aching old building—for a very long time. Long enough to understand the strange that drifted past and in like debris. Long enough for the strange to seem normal. And while he was not a part of that strange, having no interest or affinity for the practicing of that strangeness others called magic, he had come to develop a sense of sorts, where the strange was concerned.
And he listened to it.
Just as he listened now to the noise above his head. It wasn’t loud, not at all, but it was out of place and brought with it a feeling, under his skin and in his bones. A feeling of wrongness. Of danger. The hair on his arm prickled, and his heart, always steady, began to beat faster in warning.
The noise came again, and he recognized the groan of footsteps on the old wooden floor. He sat up in his bed. Lila’s room sat directly over his own. But the footsteps did not belong to Lila.
When someone spends enough time under your roof (as Lila had beneath his), you come to know the kind of noise they make—not only their voices but the way they move through a space—and Barron knew the sound of Lila’s tread when she wanted to be heard, and the sound of her tread when she didn’t, and this was neither. And besides, he had first woken to the sound of Lila and Kell leaving not long before (he had not stopped her, had long since learned that it was futile to try, and had long since resolved to be instead an anchor, there and ready when she wandered back, which she invariably did).
But if Lila was not moving about her room, who was?
Barron got to his feet, the shivery feeling of wrong worsening as he tugged the suspenders from his waist up onto his broad shoulders and pulled on his boots.