24
Trial by Phantom
Pacts are my gift to you. This gift has been given to everyone. Cherish it, study it, and use its power to improve the world around you.
—From The Book of the Traveler
Saying she’d do it had been the easy part.
“Try again,” Cade instructed. His voice was only a hoarse whisper now. He needed to take breaks between fits of coughing.
Cade had spent the last hour teaching her the fundamentals of phantom bonding through the Pact. It was a subject on which you could spend a lifetime and never master. She only had hours.
As luck would have it, the parts she needed to use were the easiest to learn. There was a lot of subtlety with Bearing, Cade told her. For example, anyone given a knife could cut a tomato. A skilled chef, however, could cut one into perfect slices and d
