“I assume you’ll be wearing a disguise?” Tinor asked, looking him up and down. “Those eyes of yours are very distinctive, and everyone in Terragaard knows what you look like.”
“Yes, I have one of those newfangled charms.” Alistair went to a locked chest and retrieved a small wooden box. He slipped on the silver ring waiting within, then turned around. “How do I look?”
Tinor choked. “Like a little old woman,” he said.
“No, really.” Alistair crossed his arms over his chest.
“I am completely serious,” Tinor said, finally giving in to his laughter. “Look down at yourself. You’re even wearing a dress!”
Alistair did, then scowled. He was indeed wearing a red, ankle-length woolen dress. “At least it’s my color,” he muttered, yanking off the ring. This only made Tinor laugh even harder, so he chucked the ring at his friend’s head. “You can wear that one,” he said.
“I have no need of a disguise,” Tinor said, catching the ring deftly. “You’re the one with the pretty eyes.” He grinned.
The two of them packed a few essentials for the trip, then took off, Tinor riding Alistair’s back. It was a joy to stretch his wings and soar above the clouds, and Alistair couldn’t help swelling with pride as Tinor whooped and laughed, sounding both terrified and elated as he experienced his first flight. Alistair knew the thrill of flying would eventually dull a little, but he had a feeling that taking someone to the skies for their first time would never, ever get old.
It only took them a few hours to reach the border, and once they did, Alistair landed in the midst of a thickly wooded forest and shifted back to human form. The town was an hour’s hike from the forest, but the spies had reported there was no safe place for Alistair to land nearby. The last thing they needed was for the warlocks to spot a dragon in their territory.
“Do you really think these will be effective against trained warlocks?” Tinor asked, fingering the amulet he wore on a chain around his neck. “How much protection can one little stone really provide against magic?”
“The way Lucyan explained it to me, it all depends on how powerful the warlock who cast the stone was,” Alistair said. “The stronger the magic within the amulet, the more powerful the spells it can repel. When Lucyan came to rescue Dareena and me from Elvenhame, he brought one of these with him.” Alistair touched the amulet resting against his own chest. “The anti-dragon spell was making me deathly weak and ill, but with the amulet, it only took me a few hours to recover most of my strength. He must have gotten very lucky, because any spell that can blanket large swaths of an entire kingdom must be very powerful.”
Tinor shrugged. “Maybe, but if the spell truly did extend over such a wide area, perhaps it was diluted,” he said. “I imagine that if the warlock who cast it had focused only on the castle, you would not have recovered nearly so fast.”
Alistair shrugged. “That may be so. It just means we’ll need to be quicker with our swords than they are with their spells.”
They reached the hamlet in good time and stopped at a tavern for some lunch. While they ate, they chatted up the locals and listened to the buzz of conversation. As the spies had reported, the community only had a few hundred members, and many of them lived in the outlying lands rather than in the hamlet itself. There were fewer than a hundred residents within the town’s borders. The residents were a bit standoffish, but once Tinor and Alistair explained that they were refugees running from the war looking for work, they became more sympathetic to their plight.
“These bastards really seem to hate outsiders,” Tinor muttered when they’d left the tavern. “I can only imagine what they’d do to us if they knew who we really were.”
“Hush,” Alistair said in a low voice as they made their way to the center of the hamlet, where a buxom server had told them they could find the temple. “Someone could be listening. Let us not draw any more attention to ourselves than necessary.”
Tinor looked around, then nodded. There were not very many people walking the streets, and in a town as small as this, newcomers would stick out like a sore thumb. Alistair spotted a woman peering out the window of her small cottage, her face barely visible through the curtains. He smiled at her, and she abruptly pulled them shut.
No warm welcomes for him, then.
“There it is,” Tinor said as the temple finally came into view. “Bit bigger than I thought, wouldn’t you say?”
Alistair blinked. He’d expected a simple wooden structure, but this temple was carved from some kind of gray rock. It dwarfed the humbler buildings on the street with its tall, forbidding presence, and a chill ran down his back as he spied a robed priest guarding the front entrance. His hair was shorn close to his scalp, and beneath his black robes, Alistair spied broad shoulders and the hint of a powerful physique.
“If that’s a clergyman, I’ll eat my own sword,” Tinor muttered under his breath, and Alistair privately agreed. The man guarding the entrance was far too vigilant, his keen eyes taking in everything around him. Alistair and Tinor moved on, walking up the street at an unhurried pace. If they loitered around the temple for too long, the guard would get suspicious, so instead, they took a roundabout way to the back. It seemed to be unguarded, but for all they knew, there could be wards.
“I wish sunset wasn’t so far away,” Alistair muttered under his breath to Tinor as they moved on. “We’re going to be sitting around here with our thumbs up our arses for hours.”
Tinor shrugged. “I think I saw a few men playing chess in the back of the tavern. We could always join them.”
Alistair shook his head. “We have to keep our eye on the temple,” he said. “The last thing we need is for the warlocks to suddenly decide to move whatever they have hidden there, or worse.”
The two of them parked themselves on a rooftop a few streets away. Tinor had brought a telescope to spy on the temple, but Alistair needed no such device—his dragon eyes were sharper than any hawk’s. From his perch, he could clearly see the temple, and he marked the faces of the priests and visitors who came and went. He also caught a glimpse of a few of the strike force soldiers off in the distance, spying on the hamlet from behind the cover of a large hill.
“It’s time,” Alistair said, nudging Tinor. The sun had slipped beneath the horizon now, washing everything in shades of red and gold and purple. The colors were fading fast, twilight descending upon everything. Tariana and her men would be readying themselves now. Quietly, the two of them dropped to the ground, then made their way back to the temple. Torches had been lit around the entrances, the priests casting long shadows against the stone fa?ade.
Alistair and Tinor waited behind a building around the corner. Gradually, the strike force soldiers trickled in—Tariana sent them in pairs, as a group of twenty swarming this small town would have drawn far too much attention. Finally, Tariana herself came, the last two soldiers beside her.
“Any surprises?” she asked Alistair in a low voice.