Bastion

must have missed something while he’d been sifting dirt.
    “What’s going on?” Mags whispered to Amily, who was assiduously working on mending some of Dallen’s barding where the stitches had broken. He settled down next to her, enjoying the feel of the fire on his front instead of his back.
    “This time Jakyr is in the wrong, and he won’t admit it,” Amily whispered back. “The vanner is a little lame this morning. It isn’t bad, and Bear thinks he’ll be fine in a couple of days, with poultices, but it turns out the plow is supposed to be pulled by two horses, not one. The vanner probably didn’t notice he’d pulled his hock muscles until they stiffened up overnight, he was so glad to get out into the sunshine. Now Jakyr won’t admit that he was wrong for using only one horse, wrong for not checking him periodically as they plowed, and wrong for just rubbing him down and blanketing him instead of checking all four legs for pulled muscles before he left the horse alone. If the leg had been properly wrapped and poulticed, the horse wouldn’t be lame today.”
    “And Lita is gonna glare at him until he apologizes.” Mags nodded. “Well, I didn’t find much, but it was pretty spooky back in that cave. I kept feelin’ like someone was watchin’ me.”
    Amily’s eyes widened a little. “I was exploring those sleeping tunnels, and I felt the same!” she exclaimed, this time loudly enough that Lita looked up. “I even thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye! I—I usually don’t get feelings like that. Is there something about these caves, do you think?”
    “Well, lots of people died here,” Mags said, repeating his own earlier thought. “Lots of ’em were people the bandits were holdin’ prisoner. I dunno, you’d’a thought if anyplace’d be haunted, the mines I worked would’a been, and I never actually felt or saw anything there but . . .”
    “But ghosts are supposed to be the spirits of people who have unfinished business, things unresolved,” Amily put in, her brows creasing. “If I had died working in that mine, I wouldn’t be able to get away from it fast enough, but the people the bandits killed—maybe they didn’t feel that way.”
    “Or maybe they did, and it’s just weird shadows and echoey sounds and us having nerves on edge cause Lita and Jakyr can’t stop pickin’ at each other,” he countered, pitching his voice low again, since she was starting to look a little frightened.
    “Mags!” called Lita at that moment. “Come over here where the light is good and look at this.”
    Obediently, he got up and moved over to the warm place near the kitchen stove, where Lita had set up her favorite lantern, one that used some clever glass balls to magnify the amount of light the candle put out. Lita was holding one of the stone bits he’d found into the light. She’d been rubbing the dirt away with a moistened cloth and had finally gotten it clean. “Does this look familiar to you?” She held it flat on the palm of her hand so he could see it clearly.
    He stared at it in astonishment. He hadn’t thought anything of finding what looked like a dirt-caked agate pendant, because it was smaller than the piece he remembered all too well. But now that he saw it clean, he realized this was a miniature version of the amulets that his kidnappers, and the men who had taken Amily, had all worn around their necks. Amulets that he knew had some sort of nasty spirit in them, one that could completely take over a person. One that could kill!
    He wanted to shout at Lita and slap the thing out of her hands—but Dallen and Jermayan were still dozing quietly in the corner, and hadn’t reacted to it, and he himself wasn’t feeling the angry, sullen presence he had always sensed around those talismans. So though it looked the same, maybe it wasn’t the same. Cautiously he touched it with one finger.
    It was only stone. There was no presence, no spirit. There was, however, a crack running right through it. Maybe when it was broken, whatever had been in it had gotten out.
    “It looks exactly like the things Levor and Kan-Li had around their necks,” he said, furrowing his brows. “The men that kidnapped Amily had them, too. There was something bad in those, but—” he shook his head. “I can’t feel anything from this. It’s just a stone.”
    “I thought it looked like the ones we took from those corpses,” Lita replied. “I didn’t get a real good look at