Mjeah finished spreading out the assembled components and looked at them thoughtfully. It wasn’t the items themselves that mattered exactly, it was the sacrifice. The rarer, the harder to get, the more potent the magic. Of course each object did, colour the magick a bit. If you wanted a good flying spell, you got a phoenix feather, not that every lamebrain in the city wouldn’t try to sell you a fake one that was little more than a painted cock’s feather usually.

Thoughts of the city irritated her to no end. City folk always tried to rob her, or if not rob then cheat, which was just a less honest kind of robbery. At the very least there were always suggestions that she would make good company- for a night. Wretched people.

She much preferred her home of Thorton’s Crest, but there were no teachers there, only farmers and their families, living as they had for the last fifty-odd years. It had been a difficult choice to leave them, they were the only family she’d ever had, but they couldn’t teach her magick.