Scarlett Ravenclaw had three days to reach the mage before the trail went cold, and no coin in her purse. The armor she hunted was buried somewhere in the Shadegrove hills, wrapped in a spell that hid it from ordinary eyes. Rumor said the piece made its wearer irresistible and invincible, which was exactly the sort of edge a woman with too many enemies needed. Without a caster to sniff out the magic, she would walk the hills for a year and find nothing. The mage's fee was steep. Scarlett had already sold her horse. She cut off the main road at dusk and took the path that ran behind the university, where the students kept a party house lit up like a festival. Music thumped through the walls. Red cups littered the porch. It was forbidden ground for townsfolk, but the shortcut saved her half a day, and the boys inside were too drunk to notice a woman slipping past their fence. She almost made it clean through. Then a shout went up behind her, and a knot of pledges spilled onto the lawn, laughing and blocking the gate. Scarlett turned the trouble into work. She told the loudest one she'd wrestle any three of them for a silver a match, and she wore the bright green shirt they tossed her, the words TROLL WENCH bleeding down the front. She threw the first boy into the hedges in under a minute. The second went over her hip and into a folding table. By the fourth match, the crowd was betting heavy, and Scarlett was choosing which drunks she'd let last longer. She walked off the lawn near midnight with a purse full of silver and a bruised shoulder. The mage kept rooms above a warm, lantern-lit house at the edge of town, the kind of place with heavy drapes in every window and soft voices behind every door. Scarlett climbed the back stairs and laid the silver on the table. The mage counted it, then shook her head. Coin wasn't the price tonight. She wanted the sculpture on Scarlett's belt, a twist of ribbon and gilt shaped into a heart, sold to Scarlett years ago by a lover she no longer named. A night of passion, the plaque read. The mage had wanted the piece for a decade. Scarlett cut the cord and set it down without a word. The spell took an hour. When the mage finished, she pressed a small iron pin into Scarlett's palm and told her it would grow warm within a mile of the armor and hot within ten paces. Scarlett walked out into the dark with the pin closed in her fist. She was halfway down the lane when she felt it tick, faint but steady, warm against her skin. The armor was closer than she'd thought. Someone else was already moving it.