u/florilegus

In one of the Book 2 snippets, Arvel tells Maggie: "All magic has a price."

It made me wonder: what is the price for Maggie's magic?

It would be really macabre if it turns out that the price for Maggie being undying is >!someone else's death!<.

That possibility occurred to me because Maggie first arrived in Kair Toren on the 3rd of Planter, the same day >!Reynald had his accident!<(revealed in Chapter 28).

And Maggie's first >!resurrection!< after grabbing the bag of money happened on the 6th of Planter, the >!same day Reynald passed!<(also revealed in Chapter 28).

Maggie herself noted:

>Chapter 28: >!“On the third of Planter, I woke up naked in a muddy ditch, choking on rainwater. I had been pulled into Kair Toren on the morning Striver collapsed. Probably at that exact instant. There was no limit to coincidences in the world, but that one was a stretch.”!<

Interesting, she hadn't consciously connected that she had >!resurrected the same day Reynald had died!<.

On her second >!resurrection!<, >!Derog and his men died!<. Maybe that was how it was "offset"?

On her third >!resurrection!<, she >!killed the Butcher. !<And also by then, she had saved >!80 mercenaries, including Gort!<. So maybe she had some >!"extra lives"!< on her karmic balance sheet?

Anyway, if it turns out that ">!a life for a life!<" is how Maggie's magic works, then it kinda makes me wonder about another Book 2 spoiler, where Ilona posted on Facebook that she was ">!going to be desperate and mourn the imaginary dead!<" with Maggie. Could that have been another "price" of magic?

Either way, I find this concept of "balance," where magical powers have a price, to be a really cool "truth" to add to that world.

In Chapter 1: “I had seen a dozen stelkas in my three days of stumbling around the city, and only one of them had a white patch like that. I must’ve been really delicious.”

In Chapter 2, after Maggie >!grabs the bag of money, falls into the river, is taken by the current further downstream,!< the stelka reappears, which means it had to have followed her despite the distance.

In Chapter 13, the >!fish gifts!< start to appear and we later see >!"guard vermin"!< behavior.

While all this is not the behavior of a regular stelka, I keep waiting to see if there will be more, especially after Maggie named her. Put another way: we could have had the entire book without the stelka as a recurring character, and nothing about the plot would have changed significantly. So it feels like Chekhov's gun, waiting to be used.

Maybe I'm overthinking this. 😅