I got up and opened the window. In a whirl of golden wings and emerald-green scales, Pip tumbled into the room, shedding raindrops. Catching the air with its wings, it flapped to the table and landed in the middle of it, lashing its tail.
All of the magisters and councilors and advisors stopped talking and stared.
Then, its claws leaving scratches on the shiny tabletop, Pip crawled over to my place. It fixed me with an ember-bright red eye, opened its mouth, and dropped something on the table in front of me.
A shiny black shard of rock on a golden chain.
“Is that—” Brumbee said, craning his neck to look.
“A locus stone!” exclaimed Trammel.
Brumbee peered more closely at it. “My goodness! That’s the locus stone of my apprentice, Keeston. It went missing last night!”
I recognized it, too. Without thinking, I reached out and picked it up.
The other wizards at the table gasped; Brumbee ducked behind his raised arms. Beside me, Nevery snatched up his cane and leaped to his feet.
The stone and its length of chain lay in my hand. I felt a buzz from it, a tingling that ran up my finger bones and itched in the bones of my arm.
I shouldn’t have been able to touch someone else’s stone at all. True, I’d stolen Nevery’s locus stone when I’d been a pickpocket gutterboy, and the stone hadn’t killed me, but that’d been strange enough that he’d taken me on as his apprentice afterward. Anybody else in the city would die if they touched a wizard’s locus magicalicus. Even a wizard would die if he or she touched another wizard’s locus stone.
That meant if this stone had gone missing, only one person in the city could have taken it.
The other magisters knew this. They were all staring at me, and Captain Kerrn at the other end of the table was glaring, and it was clear as clear what they were thinking.
Thief.
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About the Author
SARAH PRINEAS lives in the midst of the corn in rural Iowa and can usually be found writing fantasy novels on a stealthy silver MacBook Air called Dash. Prineas’s Magic Thief series introduced readers to the irascible wizard Nevery and his gutterboy apprentice, Connwaer. Sarah holds a PhD in English literature and recently taught honors seminars on fantasy and science fiction literature at the University of Iowa. She has an amazing dragon action-figure collection and occasionally bakes biscuits (although she says hers never seem to turn out as tasty as Benet’s do in The Magic Thief). She is also the author of Winterling, Summerkin, and Moonkind.
Sarah is married to John Prineas, a physics professor, which comes in handy when she’s writing about magic. They are the parents of Maud and Theo. You can visit Sarah online at www.sarah-prineas.com.
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Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Sarah Prineas
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
EPub Edition © 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229023-6
EPUB Edition JULY 2014 ISBN 9780062290236
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
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Sarah Prineas, A Proper Wizard
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