Serafina dipped a little curtsy to the crowd and all the young men clapped.

Even Rowen.

Jordan’s too-wide lips pressed together in a frown.

Catrina tapped her own forehead lightly, her gaze drifting to Jordan, who forced herself to relax and erase the faint crease of worry that would eventually deepen into a wrinkle. Sighing, she focused on Serafina.

The illusionist’s assistant pulled a piece of paper from the decorated trunk, passing it to her master with a flourish. It was the same stuff used to wrap packages at Wilkinson’s. Nondescript, brown, and of a sturdy weight. Rectangular in its proportions. Another flourish and scissors were handed to the illusionist, their handles and body black except for the silver sheen of the blades themselves.

“I shall now issue a challenge,” the Wandering Wallace declared. “If anyone here can cut a perfectly proportional five-pointed star from this paper without drawing a single line and using these scissors, I shall allow him to choose any item from my trunk of tricks.”

His assistant gasped an obviously rehearsed response, her slanted eyes widening and her small mouth drawing into a perfect o in a parody of shock.

No one had successfully taken the illusionist’s challenge.

But, wine flowing freely and Rowen’s friends in attendance, it was only a moment before the challenge was accepted.

And lost.

Another accepted, another piece of paper was butchered, and another young man returned to the crowd perplexed.

They grew still and the illusionist grinned, waving another piece of paper, taunting them. “Is there no other taker? No other among you to take my challenge?”

“It cannot be done,” a disillusioned member of the aristocracy declared. “A perfectly proportioned star is too difficult a shape to construct without the aid of proper tools and appropriate mathematics.”

“That is nearly precisely the argument our country’s founding fathers used against dear sweet Betsy Ross when she suggested five-pointed stars to adorn our nation’s flag! But Mrs. Ross was an enterprising soul and, in the same spirit, with my help, the good lady—”

“Serafina,” she volunteered.

“The good lady Serafina,” he said, “will help me show not only that it can be done, but it can be done with only a single cut of the scissors!”

Skepticism flooded the crowd in barely audible gasps as the Wandering Wallace took one last piece of paper, waving it before the crowd. He handed it to Serafina.

“Now we shall fold this paper. Here,” he instructed, adjusting Serafina’s fingers on the paper. “And here. Now unfold … Now fold here … And here and here … Here, unfold. Here. Unfold. And cut from here to there!”

Serafina did each thing as he prescribed and with a hiss of the scissors and a moment of unfolding, the promised star was produced. Everyone clapped, and Serafina curtsied once more and danced her way over to Jordan. “For the true star of the evening,” she said, handing over her paper prize.

Jordan smiled, finding Serafina quite clever indeed. Gently, Jordan refolded the star and slid it up her sleeve.

The illusionist, finishing some card tricks and a few more bits of bird work, glanced at Rowen, and cleared his throat.

Rowen leaned over Jordan, whispering, “Back in a moment.”

She tilted her head and watched as he strode out of the crowd and stood front and center with the illusionist.

Lightning crackled in the clouds overhead.

Rowen cast a wary look at the sky but grinned for the crowd. “I have studied with the Wandering Wallace and have learned a few things from him, but not, of course, the face of the man beneath the mask. Some things, it seems, are to remain secrets—but not all,” he said. “And this evening, as a tribute to the lady who has me bewitched—”

The crowd gasped.

Micah laughed at them, saying, “He speaks figuratively, not literally. Had he truly been bewitched he would be unable to talk about it. Everyone knows that.”

Rowen smiled, adding, “She has bewitched my imagination, and so I shall share with you a special trick.” He motioned to Jordan. “Please step forward.”

Lowering her head, she did so.

Rowen threw a hand out to her and, as she took it, he proclaimed, “My lovely assistant!”

The crowd clapped and Jordan raised her head, straightened her spine, and put her shoulders back.

“I said I had a surprise for you.”

“Rowen.” Her eyes darted to the crowd and back. “Not here…”

“Have a little faith,” he said, the words tight. He grinned at the crowd, all showman, and said, “That is a lovely hairdo. Do you fine people not agree?” Clapping answered him. Rowen stepped up beside her to seemingly examine her hair. “Elegant. Wrapped very tightly and yet with so much body to it … Colorful ribbons weaved in…” He reached up and tugged one slightly, his grin tilting when the ribbon bounced. “But what’s this? One seems different…” He turned her so one side faced the crowd and his hand closed gently around one ribbon and then he yanked his hand back, trailing a long set of colorful handkerchiefs after it.

Jordan’s hands flew to her mouth and the crowd rioted with laughter.

“Look at you,” Rowen mused, “you’re so beautiful there’s beauty wrapped up inside you that no one has glimpsed until now.” He looked away from her then, addressing the crowd once more. “What would a young lady want on her seventeenth birthday but…” He drew the last word out so it became the longest single syllable ever uttered as he bowed before her and, on the ascent, produced a bouquet of “… flowers.”

Jordan clutched them to her and blushed.

“And, as I would not dream of doing anything but sharing such a delightful lady with all of her friends and family…” He towed her forward gently, lowering his face so his lips came level with her ear. “Be brave, Jordan,” he whispered, and swallowing, she held tight to the smile smeared across her face for the good of the guests. The crowd parted for her and, taking her hand, Rowen led them back inside, pausing in the main hall where three waiters held a large silver platter on which balanced a cake in three dramatic levels.

Seventeen candles burned in a fiery ring around the cake’s top tier and the waiters lowered it with aching care so the entire thing balanced just before Jordan’s smiling lips.

“A wish, a wish!” the crowd chanted.

Jordan blushed and nodded. She turned from the cake, clutching Rowen’s hands, closed her eyes and screwed her face up in her most thoughtful look before whipping around and blowing the candles out with a puff of breath that left her dizzy.

The guests burst into cheers and raucous clapping.

But everyone fell silent when the Wardens marched in.

Heavy boots slapped out an intimidating rhythm on the marble floor, drowning out every sound except the rush of blood filling people’s ears at sight of the Wardens invading their festivities.

Tall, broad, and dressed in hip-length charcoal-colored cloaks and sleek trousers tailored to slide over black boots, the Wardens were the most elite of guards. Unshakable, undaunted, and irreversibly silenced by a mysterious event rumored to be called “Lightning’s Kiss,” their faces were carved with crimson fern-shaped tattoos recalling their arcane path to power.

Behind the Wardens something else whispered with movement, things so tall they were more long than tall, more sleek than slender, and a more accurate description than saying that they walked would have been to say that they glided, they drifted, they haunted the space between the Wardens and the walls.

Until the Wardens parted and, black as a heartless sea, the Wraiths flowed forward.

Wearing relentless black, from their strange soft boots and long frock coats to their tall crowned top hats shrouded with mourner’s black, the Wraiths cut imposing figures against the backdrop of the crimson-and-bone hall. Still as stone they stood, faceless beneath the dark veils hanging along their hats’ brims; even their hands were robed in gloves the color of a moonless sky.

Deaf as doorstops, they were a sharp contrast to the Wardens. To many it seemed all they had in common was witchery. And the power of flight.

Everyone in the hall stood mute, their eyes fixed.

Everyone except Morgan Astraea—the man whose youngest daughter’s extravagant birthday party was being ruined.

“What is the meaning of this?” Jordan’s father stormed, his face purpling as a vein rose by his hairline.

The Ring shifted, the Wardens took one stomping step to the side, and Astraea immediately recognized the Councilman. Though a range of emotions slid across his face in rapid succession, surprise was not among them. But rage? It settled on his features and he thrust a pointing finger toward the foyer. “We shall speak. There.”

The Councilman nodded, following old Morgan Astraea, the Wardens marching behind, and after the Wardens drifted the Wraiths, every piece of them swallowed up in fabric and unimaginable. The crowd hissed, seeing one last person in their ranks.

A man so thin he seemed nearly skeletal, ceremonial robes hanging off him like draperies from a pole, slunk in amongst the Wardens, a slender cane wrapped tight in his gnarled hand, his other hand sheathed in metal—a contraption more mechanism than man. For a moment he turned, icy eyes scanning the crowd.

They gasped again. Although most had never seen one before, all the party’s attendees knew him by his manner as much as his clothing.

Tales of the Testers were not easily forgotten.