“The palace is being searched now,” he said, glancing quickly at Dav-Ingahm and getting a nod before proceeding. “We will find her. I’m sure she’s well.” But there was an opaqueness in his eyes, in the way he looked at her, that told Alaria the man was far from sure.
“Is she,” Epion pressed his tongue against his upper lip. “Forgive me,” he said. “But of course I really know neither of you well, do I? Is Princess Cleona likely to—” he waved one hand in a circular motion. “Wander about on her own?”
“I cannot say no, Lord Epion, not exactly. But you must be aware that our customs are not yours. What might be commonplace for our high noble ladies may be much otherwise for yours.” And that was putting it gently, Alaria thought. “Lord, could I, that is, would you ...” Alaria hesitated. What she was about to ask might be considered an affront.
“You must actually ask the question before I can say yes or no.” A gleam of humor shone in Epion’s eyes.
“May I have the Mercenary Brothers sent for?” Alaria asked. “As you said, you don’t know us. And I know no one here except Cleona. No insult is intended to the Tarkin or to his guards, but the Mercenaries are the only people in Menoin who are not strangers to me.”
Epion searched her face, a small frown causing a line to form between his brows. He nodded. “Of course, I’ll have them sent for. I’m sure Falcos would agree.”
And where was Falcos, if it came to that? Alaria wondered what the Tarkin found more important than his missing bride.
While they were speaking, a junior guard had come into the room to whisper to the Steward of Walls. Now the older man came nearer to them.
“My lord? News from the stables. The Tarkina took out a horse last night and had an escort with her.”
“Last night? It’s true the moon was full, but—” Epion turned to Alaria. “What about midnight rides? Is that something Cleona would do?”
Alaria shook her head, but slowly. “But it was long before midnight—the sun had hardly set. She thought—” Alaria hesitated, everyone seemed to be staring at her. “It was something you had said, Lord Epion, that put the notion into her head. It would be a way to relax,” she said. “Cleona wanted to be sure to sleep well.”
“We spoke of riding, that’s true,” Epion began, his brow furrowing. “But I advised against it, and she seemed likely to heed my advice.”
“But she returned?” Now it was Dav-Ingahm’s turn. “You waited for her?”
“The Princess Alaria is not a servant,” Epion said before Alaria could speak in her own defense. “There would be no reason for her to await her cousin’s return. The safety and security of the Tarkina is the concern of the Tarkin’s guards.”
Perhaps so, but Epion’s words did nothing to dispel Alaria’s guilt. How had she fallen asleep so quickly? She’d been tired, but why hadn’t she waited for Cleona? Better, why hadn’t she insisted on going with her? Regardless of what Cleona may have said about wanting to be alone, Alaria should have gone.
But Epion was still speaking to the Steward of Walls. “Send out searchers along the riding paths, and send to find the Mercenary Brothers. Ask them to come as quickly as they can.”
“The Mercenaries, my lord?”
There was something in the Steward’s voice that gave Alaria a chill. The man sounded almost as though he were trying to warn Lord Epion of something without speaking aloud.
“You heard me, Walls. If nothing else, they are likely to be exceptional trackers.”
“Immediately, Lord Epion.”
“I tell you I did look for the other Mercenaries, the Brothers who were already here,” Gundaron said. “Of course I did, as soon as I knew I needed help.”
At a gesture from Parno, Dhulyn Wolfshead passed the plate of cheese pies they’d ordered, along with a jug of hot cider and one of ganje, for their breakfast. Long talk the day before had taken them through the evening meal, until they had been the only people still in the taproom and had finally taken pity on the inn’s staff and moved off to their beds.
Gun’s speculations about the murders were intriguing, and under other circumstances she would have been interested in offering their expertise in tracking down the criminals. But they already had an assignment, and their focus had to be on their missing Brothers. Dhulyn had gone to sleep congratulating herself that meeting Gun and Mar had made their task just that much easier. What better than a friendly Finder, when you’ve been sent to locate missing Brothers?
Breakfast had scattered her ideas. It seemed their task would not be easy after all.
Parno leaned forward abruptly, stabbing at Gun with the half-eaten pastry in his hand. “The Brothers were seen after your find in the ruins?” he asked.
“Parno,” Dhulyn said. He looked at her and rolled his eyes.
“I haven’t taken leave of my senses,” he told her. “If the assignment given to our Brothers was the assassination of the old Tarkin, Dorian would have told us so. I meant merely to ask whether they might have suffered the same fate?”
“The Mercenary Brotherhood performs assassinations?” Mar-eMar said, her hands arrested in the motion of pouring olive oil on a piece of toasted bread.
“Never mind that just now, my Dove,” Dhulyn said, patting the girl on the shoulder. “Our questions first if you don’t mind.” She turned back to Gundaron.
The young Scholar had his lower lip between his teeth, his mug of ganje cooling in his left hand. “They were still here when the announcement was made that the old Tarkin had died of a sudden fever. That’s when we started to wonder whether something was amiss.” Gun blinked and turned to Mar. “Were the Mercenaries here when the old Tarkin was buried?”
Mar was nodding as she chewed. “But after that I certainly never saw them again. When Gun couldn’t Find them, we asked Dav-Ingahm, the Steward of Walls, and he told us they’d left and gone to Ishkanbar.”
Dhulyn drummed on the table with the first two fingers of her left hand. “Gun couldn’t Find them? No trace? That makes no sense. Gun, where is Bet-oTeb,” she asked.
Gun shut his eyes. “In her bedroom,” he said, still with his eyes shut. “Asleep, I think.”
“If you can Find the Tarkina of Imrion, you should be able to Find our missing Brothers.”
“Unless they are dead,” Parno said.
Dhulyn’s face felt stiff as she nodded. “Which merely changes the nature of our mission. Instead of finding them, we would find their killers.”
“Could it be the same person who killed the late Tarkin?” Parno said. “Did you try to Find him?”
Gun shrugged. “I had nothing to focus on. At least with the Mercenary Brothers, I’d met them.”
“But you’ve Found much more abstract things than a man you’ve never met,” Parno pointed out. “After all, you’ve Found people’s souls.”
“Yes, but I knew those people, I’d met them. I’ve never met this person.”
“So far as you know.” Dhulyn sipped at her cider.
Mar and Gun, both with eyes wide and brows raised, looked first at her, then at Parno. “You already know a few killers,” her Partner said, his voice warm. “Some of them at this very table. It wouldn’t be beyond the realms of belief that you’d met others.”
“But ...”
“You don’t think of us as killers,” Dhulyn said, smiling her wolf’s smile. “But don’t you see? You might not think of the person who did this as a killer either.”
Movement at the door of the inn drew their attention. Parno Lionsmane drew in his feet, ready to stand up, and was amused to see that both Gun and Mar had shifted so that they were out of the way. Apparently lessons learned long ago were still fresh in their minds. The intruder was a young female guard in the palace colors, her face flushed with the speed of her arrival.
“Mercenary Brothers,” she said. “If you would please come with me. Alaria of Arderon requests your immediate presence.”
Dhulyn was already getting to her feet. “Will we want our hors
es?”
“The Tarkin said ‘as quickly as possible,’ ” the guard said.
Dhulyn was two strides away from the table before she turned back to Gun and Mar. “Follow us as quickly as you can,” she said. “And Gun? Bring your bowl.”
Dhulyn Wolfshead had seldom seen anyone as frightened as the Princess Alaria was at this moment—though the girl was doing a good job of hiding it. The assured, even arrogant, young woman who had spoken to Dhulyn in the horse enclosure on Dorian’s ship was gone, replaced by a girl with round eyes and a clamped jaw. When they had come into the room Alaria had actually rushed toward them, hands held out. Dhulyn had hung back, letting Parno take the girl’s arm and lead her back to her seat on a bench near the Tarkin’s chair.
“Wolfshead, Lionsmane, I thank you for coming so promptly.” Dhulyn noted that the Tarkin, like all High Nobles, had been taught the proper forms of address and knew better than to call Mercenary Brothers by their given names. “What have you been told of our dilemma?”
“Nothing,” Dhulyn said. “We thought it best to hear the problem from the source.” She looked at Alaria. “Though evidently it concerns the Princess Cleona.”
The Tarkin made a face, his blue eyes momentarily flashing icy cold. He gestured at the Steward of Walls.
Dav-Ingahm cleared his throat. “Last evening, while we were preparing for the late meal, the Princess Cleona expressed the wish to go riding,” he said. “There would have been no reason to deny her,” he added, speaking more quickly. “She is not a prisoner here. And we know that the Arderons are excessively fond of riding—even the Princess Alaria admits that her cousin has been known to ride at night—”
“I am not interested in who is dodging the blame for this,” Dhulyn said. If she didn’t stem the flow of words, they might be here until the moon rose again. “Am I to understand that Princess Cleona has not returned?”
“She is nowhere in the palace,” the Tarkin said. “Nor is the guard who accompanied her.”
“That is Essio,” Epion Akarion cut in. “I vouch for him.”
“You vouch for him? Whose man is he?”
“There are two sets of guards within the walls, Mercenary. The Palace Guard watch the buildings and grounds. The Tarkin’s Guard watch over his person and his family.”
Epion gestured to draw her attention. “I have a small group of the latter assigned to me personally,” he said. “They do not rotate in the duty with the others. It simplifies things since I travel so much for Falcos. Until a few months ago Essio was one of these, but,” Epion shrugged, “there’s little room for advancement in my little cadre, and Essio asked to transfer.”
Everyone seemed to accept this, though Dhulyn would have had something to say about it if she had been asked to review the palace security. She judged that the Tarkin was looking unusually pale for a man with his coloring. Paler, certainly, than he had looked the afternoon before. And there was a muscle jerking in the Steward of Walls’ cheek that spoke of tightly clenched jaws. She looked at Parno; he blinked twice.
“Do you think the princess may have been taken by a sudden illness?”
If she had thought the Tarkin pale before, it was nothing compared to how he looked at those words. Ah, a hit, she thought with an inward smile. He is guilty of something. His blue eyes actually looked dark, and his eyebrows were like smudges of ink against his skin.
“What do you know?” he said.
“I know I have a Finder waiting in the outer chamber, and we waste time.” She turned toward the door, but the guard there was already opening it and gesturing. Gun and Mar came into the room hand-in-hand, both in formal Scholar’s dress with the crest of the Library of Valdomar on the left breast of their tunics. Mar’s tunic had the crest of her Noble House sewn on the right side.
Falcos cut off their salutations with an abrupt gesture of his hand.
“We’ll dispense with the formalities for the moment, Gun,” he said. “Can you Find the Princess Cleona for us?”
“I’ve never met the princess,” Gun began.
“Princess Alaria’s her cousin,” Parno said. “Will that help?”
“There’s a room full of her things, if it comes to that,” Alaria said. Dhulyn was glad to see the girl was becoming more animated. She was regaining some of her color, and her voice did not sound quite as tight.
Gun looked around and headed for the Tarkin’s worktable. Knowing what was needed, Dhulyn joined him in clearing away the dishes and cups that were still sitting there, untouched, the food gone cold and ice melted to slivers in the drinks. When the end of the table was clear, Mar stepped forward, unslinging her shoulder bag and placing it on the surface. From inside the thick folds of leather she took out a silk-wrapped bundle and a small glass flask, tightly stoppered and sealed with green wax.
“Gift from my House,” Mar said, when she saw Dhulyn was looking at it. Glass of that quality had to come from Tenezia and would normally be beyond the reach of Library Scholars such as Gundaron and Mar.
“Your House?” Alaria said.
“I am Mar-eMar Tenebro,” Mar said, making a half-embarrassed face at claiming her noble status. “A High Noble House of Imrion. That and a copper piece will get me a decent room at an inn,” she added with a smile.
As they were talking, Gun had been folding back the layers of quilted silk to expose a shallow bowl, perhaps as wide as two narrow hands. The outside was thickly patterned and glazed, the colors glowing in the sunlight from the window. The inside was a pure bottomless white. Gun placed the bowl close to the edge of the table and held out his hand to Mar.
“And what is the liquor in the flask?” the Tarkin asked as Gundaron poured a small amount into the bowl.
“Water from a pure spring, passed three times through undyed silk,” Mar said. “That’s what the writings tell you to use, though sometimes I think ordinary water works just as well.”
Gundaron placed the tips of his fingers lightly on the edge of the bowl and leaned in until he could look straight down.
This is what I saw in my Vision, Dhulyn thought, catching Parno’s eye.
Everyone fell silent, watching, though there was nothing to see. At first Gun’s eyes moved as though he were reading, and then they grew still and focused. Dhulyn glanced at Mar and raised her eyebrows. The younger woman smiled and shook her head very slightly. Parno was completely still, his thumbs hooked in his sword belt, his eyes resting comfortably on Gun, his smile showing a tolerant affection. As if he felt Dhulyn’s eyes on him Parno shifted his gaze without moving his head, and his smile warmed. Dhulyn winked and turned her attention back to the others.
Falcos Tarkin stood as though at parade rest, his hands clasped in front of him, his eyes focused on the middle distance, a frown pulling at his perfect lips. Alaria was also very still, her fingers twisted tightly together. Only her eyes switched from face to face, as if she were trying to decipher what they were all thinking.
“Snail scum.” Gundaron slapped the tabletop with the palm of his hand, and Alaria jumped. “All I can Find is that blooded maze. The Path of the Sun,” he said, turning to face the others in room. “That’s all I’ve been Finding for the last moon. It’s like playing a harp with only one string.”
“Gun, what you’ve Found, what your Mark is showing you, is it anywhere near where you came upon—” Dhulyn checked as the Tarkin made a slight movement with his hands. “Where you came upon the body,” she said.
“It was in that area, yes,” the Scholar said. Out of the corner of her eye Dhulyn saw Alaria raise her clasped hands to her lips.
Dhulyn turned to the Tarkin. “Is it at all likely that the Princess Cleona would have ridden that way?”
“It is a popular trail, yes,” the Tarkin said. “It only leads to the ruins and the Path, but the road is maintained. My mother used to take me that way when I was a child; she had a favorite grove she liked to visit. And, of course, the Scholars have been using it.”
“Then that is where we sta
rt.”
Five
HAH! This was luck. The rain was heavy enough to flatten the grass and to keep any aspiring shaman who was watching the Door of the Sun close to his own shelter—and far from noticing him. He checked the ties on the packs and gathered up the leads again, turning them once round his wrist for security. Horses never seemed to notice the peculiarities of the Path, too stupid, he supposed. He’d never tried to take any other animals through, but he was fairly certain that dogs wouldn’t be able to stand it. Cats now, they might. Always landing on their feet. But there were no cats in these plains, and he wasn’t about to bring one just to experiment. Catch him wasting his time.
He set off south and a little west, taking it slow. Riding would have been faster, but he just didn’t like the smell of wet horse.
He’d never freed two at once, and he almost wished he’d had the time to try it now. Though the guard would have been a waste, really. Too simple to need his help. The woman, now she had really needed someone. Her life had been about to change very drastically, and while she’d been all calm and smiling on the outside, she wasn’t happy. There was a real sorrow in her, and on the inside she was nothing but resignation, and determination, and under those real fear, almost terror. He’d been happy to help her with that. She was much calmer now and genuinely happy. It was a pity that the treatment—properly done—took so long.
And it was taxing for him—that’s what no one realized. He had to put so much of himself, his talent, into the treatment. It was hard work, and if he did gain by it in the end, well that was only fair, wasn’t it? Considering the risks he ran to give people the help they needed so badly.
He’d left her sleeping, peaceful and quiet. She’d be awake now, maybe, and heading back for her wedding. If only—
Path of the Sun: A Novel of Dhulyn and Parno Page 9