by Barb Hendee
Wynn was relieved that she and hers were free to move about the keep, making her tasks easier to accomplish. After Chane’s and Osha’s foolishness from the night before, this was far more than she expected. She shooed Osha and Shade out before she pulled the door closed and wished she could lock it behind herself.
The duchess looked Osha up and down. “What about your swordsman?”
“He’s a late sleeper and usually remains awake for my needs at night,” Wynn answered, knowing it sounded ridiculous in the middle of all this noise and chaos.
“As you wish.” Sherie turned down the passage, with Aupsha and then Nikolas behind her.
As Wynn took a step, she stalled at one thought and let Osha and Shade slip out ahead of her. Yes, she was now free to move about except for anywhere below the keep.
• • •
As Osha entered the kitchen, he took a little satisfaction in having Wynn to himself until dusk. She had come to him to exchange ideas, to think through obstacles in seeking his help, and then he succumbed to bitterness again. It was not right to press her about her own past since they had parted, now that they faced hidden threats amid seeking the identity of a messenger and a thief, one and the same or not. But he hoped to know soon why she, too, had changed so much.
For now Osha had this day to show her exactly how much help he could be to her.
Sgäilsheilleache had not taught him the traditional methods of Anmaglâhk interrogation, for he had not believed in the use of torture. But he had started to teach Osha other things, such as how to ask unexpected questions, ones seemingly disconnected, and how useful silence could be as well, even after an answer was given.
Osha never had the chance to practice any of this, but by nightfall, before that undead rose again, he would turn any opportunity he found to Wynn’s favor. As he sat down at the kitchen’s table, his only discomfort was the way the dark-skinned woman glanced too often at him.
If Aupsha had been in the passage with the elder sage, had she seen him there?
“You may go, Aupsha,” the duchess said.
With a bow of her head, the tall woman departed the same way they had all come. This left Wynn, Osha, Shade, Nikolas, and the duchess alone, sitting at the table. Everyone looked at one another in an awkward moment of silence.
The bad-tempered cook came stomping through an archway at the kitchen’s rear.
“I’ve got breakfast ready, my lady,” she announced angrily, “but that girl, Eliza, can’t be roused. I’ll have to serve you myself.”
“Is Eliza ill?” the duchess asked.
“Just lazy,” the cook growled. “Says she can’t seem to wake up.”
The duchess frowned at the cook’s manner. “We will be glad to have you serve us, Martha.”
Osha exchanged a glance with Wynn, who looked tired as well. They had both experienced the same thing this morning, and only Wynn’s calling his name through the door had brought him to his senses.
With a grunt, the unhappy cook served strong tea with milk, eggs, potatoes, and bread that was too white. Osha did not care for the latter, as it felt like paste compared to his people’s rich, wild grain breads. Wynn fixed a plate for Shade, and no one chastised her. Osha found the rest of the food better than what he had eaten at the sages’ guild or while sailing across the far ocean. He ate three eggs.
Wynn kept glancing at him, and he sensed that she felt limited or hampered by the duchess’s presence. Then, as the meal neared its end . . .
“Sherie, you said Karl was unwell this morning?” Nikolas asked. “Is there anything to be done for him?”
The duchess looked across the table at the young sage. For an instant her expression filled with a sad longing that Osha knew only too well.
“I was about to see that the fire has been lit in the main hall,” she said. “Perhaps you could walk with me to talk of this.”
Nikolas stared at her as if he had not heard her correctly. “You want me to . . . ?” He nearly jumped to his feet and then looked to Wynn. “Will you and Osha be all right on your own?”
“We’ll be fine,” she answered.
Nikolas followed the duchess out and left Osha with Wynn and the majay-hì, who still licked her plate on the floor, as the cook stomped about and irritably muttered near the ovens.
Osha said nothing, merely waiting on Wynn.
She finally blinked and leaned in to whisper in his tongue. “I can hardly believe it, but it seems that we are free to move about as we like.”
He could hardly believe it, either, and whispered back, “Where do we start?”
Wynn glanced at the cook. “I should try Jausiff again and hopefully catch him off guard about what he was doing last night.”
“Do you have any reason to fear speaking to him alone?”
“No. Even if he was in league with a minion of the Ancient Enemy, knowingly or not, he’d never openly risk harming a friend of his son or an emissary of the guild.”
Osha nodded, though he was not as certain as she was. “I will seek out Aupsha. More and more she seems the likely one with the elder sage last night. If nothing else, I will find a way to confirm that first . . . and if I can, there may be more to learn.”
Wynn’s expression grew anxious. “Are you sure? We don’t know anything about her, and her allegiance to this house, and especially Jausiff. She might not have any reluctance to injuring one of us.”
“I will be cautious,” he assured her. “We will meet in our rooms afterward, the easiest place to find each other . . . in privacy.”
Wynn nodded and stood, and then she looked toward the cook as she spoke loudly in Numanese. “Thank you for breakfast, Martha. Could you tell us where we might find Aupsha again? We need some help getting about the keep without mistakes.”
“That foreigner?” Martha grunted, holding a pot in midair. “It’s not my job to keep track of her comings and goings.” Then she set down the pot and faced Wynn. “I heard she don’t like it much indoors, and spends mornings in the courtyard. Try there first.”
Wynn nodded and turned back to Osha, whispering, “Shade and I will try Jausiff’s study first, while you look to the courtyard.”
For the first time, Osha did not feel so much like an outsider in Wynn’s world . . . in her life.
Chapter Fifteen
After leaving the kitchen, Wynn steeled her resolve as she made her way toward Jausiff’s study. In recent years she’d managed to face down premins, nobles, Stonewalkers, and the undead. So what was it about Nikolas’s father that left her feeling like a stuttering little guild initiate? She wasn’t going to let that happen again, and she stroked between Shade’s ears as they climbed the stairs to the keep’s second level.
“Jausiff’s a guarded one, but try to catch anything that slips out of his memories.”
Shade huffed once for yes.
Upon reaching the second floor, they stepped off down the passage, but Wynn faltered at the master sage’s door and paused for a deep breath.
“Ready?” she whispered.
Shade huffed again, and Wynn knocked on the door—and she waited longer than expected.
For some reason Jausiff hadn’t come down to breakfast, and so Wynn assumed he would be in his chamber, but that might have been a mistake. She knocked again, harder, and this time heard a faint rustling or movement beyond the door. A moment later it opened.
Jausiff’s gray robe was rumpled, as if he’d slept in it. His eyes were mere slits behind strands of uncombed silver-white hair, but at the sight of Wynn, his eyes opened fully.
“How may I help you?” he asked.
All of Wynn’s confidence drained away.
• • •
A cloudy sky and drizzling rain met Osha as he reached the keep’s courtyard and looked around. Straight ahead, three standard guards were on watch at the large gate. To hi
s left was a stable and to the right the barracks. There were no Suman guards in sight.
Neither did Osha see Aupsha, and the courtyard was not large. As he stepped onward, movement near the stable caught his attention.
Aupsha came around its far corner toward the courtyard’s front and stopped upon spotting him. He nodded politely in turning toward her.
He had never before seen a human like her, with such very dark skin and eyes like stained walnut wood. Her tightly curling hair was even darker. With long and slender limbs, she was easily as tall as the average human male—perhaps taller. She wore no cloak and seemed unaware of the falling rain, but she watched Osha without moving as he closed the distance.
“May we . . . speak?” he asked in Numanese.
During the past moon he had worked hard on his Numanese and had become slightly better with it than he was at Belaskian, but he could not remember the word for “privately.” Instead he swept a hand toward the stable, and by that she should take his meaning. He hoped the structure was empty of anyone but horses.
Only Aupsha’s dark eyes shifted once toward the stable’s open central bay doors. The barest crease of her brow signaled suspicion.
That gave Osha a strong suspicion of his own. If she had been the one with the elder sage in the passage last night, it was possible she had seen him as well. She turned for the stable, as if he was no concern to her, and he followed.
Something more caught Osha’s attention—something he should have heard but did not.
He dropped his gaze down the back of her wool tunic and down the low, full skirt. He saw the back of one boot push up against the skirt’s hem. There was no extra layer at the heel and the sole was flat, thick leather worn smooth over time. When that foot moved forward in another step . . .
It did not make enough sound in landing as her other heel-less boot came up.
The packed-dirt courtyard was drenched by rain. There were puddles of water everywhere, even along her path. He should have heard at least the soft smack of footfalls, but no. She walked with more silence than the average person would, almost . . . like an anmaglâhk.
Once inside the stable, alone and out of sight of the gate guards, she turned as he stepped in, three paces behind her.
“What do you want?” she asked clearly, with only the trace of an accent he had never heard before.
Her bluntness, and that walk, and the look she had given him when he had first spotted her called for a change in approach . . . as Sgäilsheilleache would have done.
“I saw you and the old counselor in the passage last night. You were there and then not. How?”
Her expression flickered with sudden wariness, as he knew it would, and he remained silent in waiting for her answer. She would not answer his actual question, but she would say something to change directions.
“There are secrets . . . within secrets in this place,” she said. “They are not mine to share, and none of your concern.”
That brief falter—catch—after that third word told him she perhaps lied in a quick second thought. He had learned of such the hard way as he had waded through all of the much better lies of Brot’ân’duivé. That she had not given him a direct lie as to how they had left that passage said something more.
However she and Jausiff had vanished last night, it had nothing to do with the secrets of the keep. It had to do with her. When she said no more, he knew further silence on his part would not induce her.
“What object did Counselor Jausiff hold?” he asked. “What did he do with it?”
Aupsha glanced beyond him toward the stable’s bay doors or somewhere outside.
“Where are the female sage . . . and her wolf?” she asked.
Osha realized his mistake. Except for Nikolas, Wynn was the only other visitor who had been in the kitchen with him. And Osha had come alone in looking for Aupsha, one of two people seen in the passage last night.
He should not have focused so suddenly on the elderly sage. When he did not answer, Aupsha’s eyelids drooped, half closed as she watched him.
She leaped backward.
Before Osha could charge, Aupsha ducked around a support post laden with gear and straps for wagons and horses. A sudden breeze rushed into his face and blew his hair upward. An instant later a foot struck his lower back.
Osha lashed back to grab a booted ankle, and pain exploded in his left temple as his head whipped under a blow.
He lost consciousness before he hit the stable floor.
• • •
As Jausiff pulled the door wider, Wynn walked into the master sage’s chamber and tried to regain her composure. There was too much at stake for her to be rattled so quickly. She couldn’t let him put her on the defensive this time.
A few steps into the room, she stopped with Shade close by her side. As she heard the door close, she buried her fingers in the fur of Shade’s neck.
“Would you like some tea brought up?” Jausiff asked, as he rounded her toward his cluttered desk.
“No, thank you.”
His bed in the corner was unmade, and he slipped around the desk to where four of the texts she’d brought him lay open. She watched as he closed them one by one. Had she awakened him by knocking, or had he been delving into what Premin Hawes had sent him?
“I heard two of your companions had an outing last night,” he said casually, not even looking up.
Wynn stiffened and then shook off that reaction; that was his mistake, not hers, and it gave her an opening.
“They said the same thing about you.”
Jausiff raised only his eyes, not quite closing the last book, and Wynn rushed on before he had a chance to think.
“What was the device you were carrying? What were you and Aupsha looking for in that back passage?”
She didn’t really expect an answer, and she didn’t need one. As Shade’s neck muscles tightened beneath her hand, an image appeared in her head.
Wynn—Jausiff—stood in a passage so dark that a nearby pale light barely revealed a ruddy metal object in her hand. Her—his—hand obscured the object too much, though its ends stuck out beyond his closed grip. Something about the metal itself seemed familiar. Were there markings on it?
She—he—was bent over it and staring at the passage’s stone floor and creeping along in small steps. He then leaned even more, lowering the object, and . . .
The memory vanished.
Wynn was careful not to flinch, as either Shade lost that memory or Jausiff dismissed it.
“Why hold the object so near the floor?” she asked.
Still he stalled. Perhaps he wondered or worried how much had been seen by her companions but did not know that he had just shown her and Shade even more.
Jausiff recovered, flipping the last book closed. “That object is just an old keepsake, gifted by a metaologer I once knew at the guild. It locates other objects made of metal, and the duchess recently lost a favored ring.”
“In a back passage with only a padlocked side door?” Wynn asked dryly. “Maybe she dropped it on her way down below the keep?”
Wynn heard the door’s handle ratchet behind her. Shade twisted backward out of her grip as the door slammed open against the wall, and Wynn started to turn.
A yelp broke Shade’s snarl as Jausiff shouted, “No, wait!”
Before Wynn could finish turning, someone’s hand clamped over her mouth, jerked her head up and back, and she felt an edge of cold steel press suddenly against her throat.
• • •
Osha groggily pushed up off the straw-strewn stable floor. When he touched the side of his head, it only made the pain worse, and he struggled to his feet.
Aupsha was nowhere to be seen.
He remembered that she had somehow gotten behind him, though it should not have been possible. He should have spotted her coming ar
ound either side of the tackle and post, but he had not. He had felt only the strikes that came at him from behind, but before that . . .
There had been a sharp breeze, like in the passage last night.
Even so, he had no doubt of where she had gone.
Stumbling out of the stable, Osha made it halfway across the courtyard before finding his feet enough to run. He slowed only long enough to open one of the keep’s front doors and then bolted toward the main hall. But once there, he stalled at a voice.
“I don’t know what to do.” The duchess stood near the burning hearth with Nikolas nearby as she went on. “He has always been difficult, but at least I understood him. Now he is a stranger.”
“I’m so sorry,” Nikolas breathed, “but I don’t know what—”
“Duchess!” Osha shouted as he ran for the stairs. “Nikolas! To your father’s room—now!”
• • •
Wynn took shallow breaths and tried not to move, feeling a hand over her mouth and a blade against her throat. Someone tall was pressed up against her back, but she hadn’t seen who it was.
Shade was snarling, her claws raking the stone floor as she came around into Wynn’s view.
Jausiff stumbled around his desk as he shouted in a language Wynn didn’t know. The words sounded somewhat close to modern Sumanese.
A memory rose in Wynn’s mind as she found Shade’s eyes fixed on her. She recalled the first time she had seen a tall, deeply dark-skinned woman come out of the keep into the courtyard. Shade’s gaze shifted slightly, and Wynn knew it was Aupsha behind her.
Aupsha shouted in the same tongue the master sage had used.
It wasn’t hard to guess that Jausiff ordered her to stop what she was doing, but nothing came of it. Instead, Wynn stumbled, trying to keep her feet and avoid being cut as Aupsha sidestepped, perhaps to get her back away from the open door.