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“Your sheep, ser.” The herder set the animal in the space beside the wizard’s table.

Splattttt…

The sheep repaid the warmth by defecating on the rush floor.

The innkeeper looked nervously at the wizard.

Antonin smiled, then gestured. Both soil and odor vanished, although the faintest odor of brimstone remained.

For a moment, everyone stopped talking, even the gentry.

Baaaa…

“You…promised…two…silvers…”

“You shall have them, my man.” Antonin drew the coins from his purse and laid them on the edge of the table.

…snaaaaath…snathh…Arlyn the carpenter was snoring.

The herder pulled a small iron hammer from his pouch and touched each coin with it. They remained silver.

“Stupid…” muttered the man beside me.

The fellow in green nodded.

Stupid? To check the coins provided by a wizard? I would have, but with Arlyn asleep, snoring on the table, there was no one else I dared to ask why it was stupid.

Antonin stood, swinging his sleeves back to reveal bare arms. Not heavily muscled, as I would have expected, nor thin like a cleric’s, but knobby like a merchant’s.

“Before you go, friend herder…”

The herder turned back and looked down.

“You, my friend…” The white-robed wizard gestured toward the innkeeper. “The two largest trays you have.”

“Long ones be all right?”

“Those would be best, friend.”

If nothing else, the continued use of the word “friend” was not just annoying, but boring.

With a sour look as he sipped from his mug, the wizard in gray glanced from the sheep to the wall, then let his eyes pass over me and along the common crowd.

In the meantime, the innkeeper brought out two enormous wooden serving trays and set them upon the trestle table just beyond the gentry’s area. The veiled woman had turned her chair to watch, but the older fighter at Antonin’s table kept his back to me.

The tradespeople, including a woman tinker with a broad face and muscles that would have exceeded those of either Koldar or his stonemason wife-to-be, reluctantly shuffled off the benches and stood at the end of the table away from the innkeeper.

Antonin stepped past two gentry tables, both filled with travelers wearing fur collars on their cloaks—no women—and approached the trestle. He motioned to the herder. “Pick up the animal and put it on the table, right over the trays.”

The herder did so, nearly effortlessly.

The table shivered as the sheep wobbled there.

“Watch,” hissed the man in green. I was watching, as was everyone in the inn.

The wizard advanced; the herder stepped back, his hand on the leather belt where he had placed the silver coins.

Antonin raised his hands.

I closed my eyes and looked down, not knowing why.

SSsssssssssss…

Light like a sunburst flared across the room with the sharp hissing sound.

Even with my eyes closed, the light had hurt. I squinted, blinking. The tears helped, and I could see long before anyone else could. Antonin had a nasty smile on his face, the look of a bully pleased at a beating administered to a small child.

Justen had an even more sour look upon his face, and the rest—from the commons to the gentry—were still blotting their eyes, trying to see. Except for the veiled woman, who was looking at Antonin from deep-set eyes whose expression was unreadable from where I sat.

“…ooooooo…”

“Look at that…”

In my observation of the wizards, I had forgotten the sheep. I tried not to gape with everyone else. But I did. The two trays were heaped with succulent sliced and steaming mutton, with joints at the edges, and with sweetbreads piled at each end. A sheepskin rug lay on the floor beside Antonin, who was toweling off his forehead with the back of his wide right sleeve. Outside of the joints on the tray, there were no bones.

Sweat suddenly poured down my forehead. The common area felt like the kitchen when Aunt Elisabet baked bread for all the neighbors at winterdawn.

I watched as the wizard in white smiled at the innkeeper, then at Justen, the gray wizard.

“Meat. Honest