Fate's Edge

first.
    Now that would be a challenge.
     
    JACK perched on the wyvern’s back and watched the scrubby forest around them. The little cat he’d rescued in the Broken lay next to him, curled into a tight, furry ball. He wasn’t as skinny now, and Jack had cut and washed most of the green paint off his fur. The little cat still didn’t meow or purr, but he followed Jack around the camp like a baby duck after his mother. Not that Jack minded.
    A little farther off, closer to the wyvern’s hips, Ling the Merciless watched them with alert, suspicious eyes. Kaldar and Audrey were gone, and without Audrey, the raccoon turned into a nervous, listless ninny. Usually if a raccoon was out in daylight, it was sick, desperate, or rabid. This one sat out right under the sunshine and didn’t care. Weirdo.
    Below, George was going through his fencing routine. Lunge, scoot back, lunge, scoot back. Gaston had been gone for most of the day, too. He said he was going to gather information from the locals, but now he was back, writing something down in a notebook.
    The sun baked the wyvern’s back. Jack stretched. Mmmm, warm. Strange creatures, wyverns. The schoolbooks said that they were extremely smart, smarter than dogs, smarter than foxes, but Jack couldn’t see how one would find out how smart a wyvern was. When he wasn’t flying, the wyvern lay still, like a rock. The only time he came to life was when Gaston dumped buckets of food paste into his mouth in the morning.
    Jack stirred. The little cat twitched an ear, opened one yellow eye, and looked at him. Jack raised his finger to his lips, and told him, “Shhh. Stay.” The little cat closed his eyes.
    Jack slid off and padded to the wyvern’s head, silent like a shadow. Smart, right. Let’s just see. He passed the blue shoulder, the long neck, as thick as a century-old tree, the brilliant blue fringe that protruded from the corner of the wyvern’s jaw.
    The heavy eyelids snapped open. Jack froze.
    A huge gold-and-amber eye, as big as a dinner platter, stared at him. The dark pupil shrank, focusing.
    Jack stood very still.
    The colossal head turned, the scaled lip only three feet from Jack. The golden eyes gazed at him, swirling with fiery color.
    Jack breathed in tiny, shallow breaths.
    Don’t blink. Don’t blink . . .
    Two gusts of wind erupted from the wyvern’s nostrils. Jack jumped straight up, bounced off the ground into another jump, and scrambled up the nearest tree.
    In the clearing, Gaston bent over, guffawing like an idiot.
    “It’s not funny!”
    “He knows you’re there, you dimwit. He just chooses not to care.”
    The wyvern lowered his head.
    George straightened and sheathed his rapier. “Kaldar and Audrey are back.”
    Jack climbed down from the tree before anyone asked him any uncomfortable questions. That’s all he needed. Especially since Audrey would be there. Audrey was . . . pretty. Really, really pretty.
    Ten minutes later, when Kaldar and Audrey came up the path, he was sitting on the wyvern again. That way, nobody would think that he was scared. Not that he was. He was just cautious.
    “We have a job,” Kaldar called out. “Come here.”
    Jack slid down the wing and came over to sit by George. It took Kaldar about fifteen minutes to explain about Magdalene and Ed Yonker.
    “I may be overstepping myself,” George said, “but why don’t we just steal the invitation?”
    “It won’t work,” Audrey told him. “First, we don’t know where it is.”
    “Second,” Kaldar continued, “if we steal it, she would let Morell know we have it. We’d walk straight into a trap.”
    “I thought she hated him,” George said.
    “Hate doesn’t mean ‘doesn’t do business,’ ” Kaldar told him.
    “He’s right. It’s a very costly mistake to make,” Audrey said.
    Kaldar turned to his nephew. “Gaston, did you get anything on Yonker?”
    Gaston flipped open his notebook. “Ed’s a local. Born and bred in the Edge. His parents still live about six miles east of here. The Edge here looks like Swiss cheese—you know, the one with holes. Bubbles of the Edge pop up all over in the Weird and in the Broken. The boundary is very thin, and the Edge itself isn’t that wide, but there are a lot of people living here, and there are several powerful merchant families. The families keep the peace.”
    “Makes sense,” Kaldar said. “Conflict is bad for business.”
    “Ed’s not too well liked. The expectation was that when he made it