Spellbreaker: Book 3 of the Spellwright Trilogy. Blake Charlton

too much about four-arms. I took care of him.” He turned her and she looked up into his handsome face. His deep brown eyes looked into hers. “I mean it now. You think about him too much.”

      She smiled at him. “Your dimples don’t show when you’re jealous.” She reached up and ran a hand along his cheek. “There’s no need.”

      He pulled her close. “I’m not jealous. But he’s an odd one. He converted himself. What kind of neodemon converts himself?”

      “One who has requisites for glory and can pick a leader to get him there. And we agreed that he never had to talk about his past before conversion.”

      Kai frowned. “He gets out of line. He’s too competitive when the whole crew has to paddle together.”

      “I’ll talk to him—”

      “No, no … We got something more important to worry about now.” He kissed her again, even more gently than before, but she could feel the almost limitless strength in his arms.

      “Oh?”

      His fingers started working again and slowly drew the hem of her robes up her thighs, over her hips.

      Aboard his first barge, Nicodemus watched Rory direct repairs to the barge that the River Thief had tried to steal.

      After Nicodemus had dispelled the neodemon, Rory had edited the druidic text in the ship to keep it afloat. Sir Claude had emerged from his metallic cocoon and—though careful never to touch his patient—treated Nicodemus’s minor wounds.

      As dawn began to hide stars behind vivid sky, the rest of Nicodemus’s party appeared on the river. John had had difficulty rousing Doria from the River Thief’s godspell. It was only with the neodemon’s death, after which her godspells rapidly decayed, that John woke Doria and the rest of the party.

      Rory was barking commands to the pilot of the fourth barge as he and a dozen sailors lashed the two barges together. Rory wanted to transfer some text from one boat to another to complete the repairs. Nicodemus tightened the blanket he had wrapped around his shoulders even though the tropical morning was warm and the coming day promised to be hot.

      “I haven’t blackmailed you yet,” a woman said behind him, “only because I haven’t decided what I want to extort from you.”

      Nicodemus turned to see Magistra Doria Kokalas, his envoy from the hydromancers of Ixos. At one hundred ten years old, Doria was the most senior spellwright in Nicodemus’s court. Born of the Cloud People in Chandralu, Doria had trained first in her native city as a hydromancer then as a clerical physician in Port Mercy.

      Despite her age, Doria stood straight at nearly five feet ten inches and possessed brown eyes that were only just beginning to cloud over. Her long white hair was tied back into a ponytail and she absently bothered the sleeves of her long blue robes.

      Nicodemus smiled. “Magistra, it is good to see you on this fine Ixonian morning.”

      “Don’t change the subject; when I tell your wife about the risks you took attempting to convert a minor neodemon, her head will explode.”

      “Not until after she made sure mine exploded first.”

      “What did you expect? You married a dragon.”

      “Doria, I’m sorry I didn’t wake you up. By the time I thought of it, it was too late.”

      “Oh, it’s nothing that I can’t forgive after a little blackmail.”

      “What are you hoping to extort from me? A large estate? A position on the league’s council?”

      “I was thinking more along the lines of five to six handsome young men to cook for me, carry me about on a palanquin, give the occasional foot massage.” She shrugged.

      Nicodemus laughed. Of all the envoys and personal advisors he had known, Doria was the one he liked and trusted most. Likely that was because she had been twenty-five years in his service; the other envoys had had the bad habit of getting killed.

      “Five to six handsome servants sounds a bit much. How about two?”

      The water mage smiled at him. “Didn’t you have a ‘First rule of fighting a water goddess’ or something to that effect?”

      “The River Thief had requisites for equitable theft; you know how useful she could have been to us.”

      “But you didn’t know that when you got into the God-of-god’s damned water, did you?”

      “Three handsome young servants,” Nicodemus replied. “Final offer.” Just then a cry from the barge turned their eyes to the repairs. Something had gone wrong and the two boats nudged each other and began rocking. With a yawp, Rory dove off the bow and splashed into the river.

      Doria sighed. “At least you managed to keep your druid and highsmith envoys alive this time around. Maybe these two will last longer than a season.”

      “They both did rather well.”

      “Which brings me to why I sought you out on this oh-so-lonely perch of yours.” She paused and then nodded aft where Sir Claude was leaning on the gunnel and studying Rory. The druid now swam alongside the barge and periodically reached up to touch its hull to edit the druidic text written within its wood.

      “Sir Iron Pants over there,” Doria said, “just told me how the River Thief claimed one of the divinities in her goddess complex might have come from the Old Continent. Sir Steel also reports that the neodemon wore your daughter’s face.”

      “It’s not a tall tale. I asked Sir Claude to inform you when no one would overhear.”

      “So he did.”

      “Can you think of any way we might find out if the River Thief was from the Old Continent?”

      “Given that Freckles down there”—she gestured to Rory’s red head bobbing in the river—“killed all of the River Thief’s crew before we could question them … no, nothing comes to mind.”

      “It’s my fault. I should have ordered Rory to restrain them if possible.”

      “You should have. And you should have woken me.”

      “Agreed.”

      “As for why the neodemon should be wearing Leandra’s face … other than the fact that it’s a young and lovely face … no, I can’t think of any earthly reason the goddess would do such a thing.”

      Nicodemus nodded and changed the subject. “What’s your opinion of Sir Claude? Can we trust him?”

      Doria looked the knight up and down. “Well, he’s sarcastic enough to fit in with our crew. I think we can trust him to do his duty, especially if that duty involves picking a fight with Freckles. Those two have it out for each other in a way that I can’t figure out. Did they know each other before?”

      “No.”

      “Did one of them kill the other’s brother or something during one of the skirmishes between Lorn and Dral?”

      “They deny it and there was no mention of such in the reports I read. In fact, Sir Claude was a veteran of the Goldensward War in the north of Lorn, and Rory a veteran of the Whiteforest Wars in southern Dral. I don’t think they’ve come within a hundred miles of each other until they joined my service.”

      Doria made a thoughtful sound. “I wonder what it is then. Maybe just personal dislike. Anyway, my Lord Warden, what are we to do about preventing the River Thief from reincarnating?”

      “Magistra, you are my advisor. Aren’t you supposed to be advising me?”

      “I’m too old to do my own work. That’s why I went into politics.”

      “Very well, given the River Thief’s requisites, I am wagering her cult will be mostly in the river villages.”

      “Because