Chane mouthed, Where is Wynn?
Ore-Locks returned only, Safe.
That was not enough. But then Chane heard footsteps across the passage in the kitchen.
Ore-Locks’s red eyebrows rose, and he peeked around the archway’s edge.
Guards, Chane mouthed, and held up two fingers.
Ore-Locks scowled at him.
“He must have doubled back!” someone shouted. “Come on.”
Ore-Locks leaned back out of sight.
Chane had had enough, and there was only one option left. When he heard a guard step into the passage outside, he snapped his fingers, trying to pull the man’s attention. But in a stroke of bad luck, as the guard stepped through the arch, he glanced the other way and raised his sword at the sight of Ore-Locks.
“A’ye!” the dwarf shouted. “Behind you.”
The guard’s head began to turn.
Ore-Locks brought his staff down on the man’s helmet with a dull clank.
The man’s eyes rolled upward, and as he crumpled, the second guard ran through the arch, swerving to grab the staff’s end with one hand. Sword up, he rounded on Ore-Locks.
Chane snagged the shoulder of the man’s tabard and jerked him about. His fist cracked against the guard’s jaw, dropping the man in his tracks.
Ore-Locks stood beyond the heap of two guards, glowering at Chane. Without waiting, Chane grabbed the top guard and dragged him farther along the common hall’s inner wall before dropping him.
“Where is Wynn?” he asked urgently.
Ore-Locks dumped the other guard a short way up the other side.
“Heading out through the library, no thanks to you,” he retorted, and then paused with a seemingly confused shake of his head. “Some others came after her . . . two Lhoin’na wrapped up like thieves.”
Chane knew exactly whom Ore-Locks meant and slumped in relief—at least briefly. This was not all of what he had wanted. Wynn was safe, but she would soon be back with her old companions, including Magiere.
“Did she call one of them Leesil?” he asked, needing to be certain.
“Yes,” Ore-Locks answered with a surprised blink. “You know him?”
Chane nodded bitterly. “Yes . . . I know him.”
“Enough dawdling. This is over, and we should leave now . . . before you attract any more attention.”
Moving fast for his bulk, Ore-Locks ducked out the archway and stalked off into the kitchen. Chane followed, at a loss for what the dwarf was up to. But it became all too clear once he caught up to Ore-Locks, standing before the kitchen’s rear wall.
“Brace yourself,” Ore-Locks said, and without a moment’s grace, he grabbed Chane’s wrist.
Chane never got out a word as he was jerked into the wall. Darkness, cold, and smothering silence swallowed him whole. He had not counted on leaving this way. Then again, nothing this night had occurred as he had planned. Wynn was free, but in the darkness of stone, Chane felt only bitterness, not relief.
After all that had happened, the guild would be locked up tighter than ever before. Worse still, should Wynn somehow be granted access to the resources required to decipher what remained in the scroll, should she ever be allowed within these walls . . . he would not.
The guards, and Premin Hawes, had seen him breaking in at night. The Premin Council would soon learn of this.
It had been only a few nights since he had come to terms with what was required of him. If he wished to remain at Wynn’s side, her goal, her mission, had to be his, as well. If he wished to have any existence that involved the guild, he had to abide by it and watch over all within it, regardless that some did not belong here.
Perhaps he was one of those who did not.
In Chane’s effort to help Wynn, all seemed lost to him, including her. He could not even imagine how she would contact him now—considering whom she would be with.
He felt the comparative warmth of chill night air on his face, and the darkness outside appeared bright for an instant as he was hauled out of the stone by Ore-Locks. He nearly stumbled at suddenly standing in the shadows of the inner bailey between the northern keep tower and the northwest outer building. He had enjoyed peace and quiet, more than once, in the guest quarters there. That was lost, as well. He looked at the thick bailey wall before him, behind the leafless trees.
“Once more,” Ore-Locks whispered.
Chane nodded, steeling himself, but he could never be ready for his last glimpse of the guild.
Pawl a’Seatt had not moved from the rooftop near Norgate Road. Neither had the tall stranger that he watched one rooftop away. That cowled figure with the tied-up cloak still crouched at the rooftop’s edge, watching the guild grounds, and Pawl wanted to know why.
Then the cowled man tensed almost imperceptibly.
Pawl looked to the keep as someone climbed out a rear library window and dropped to the top of the bailey wall. This figure was slender, his face and hair covered by wraps. It was one of the pair who had scaled the wall and entered earlier through that same window.
The slender man stood up, looking both ways along the wall, and then turned to help someone else. A smaller figure came out the window. The second one dangled over the sill and dropped with steadying help from the first one, who then watched as a third figure—the tallest one of the original pair—came out last, his face and hair still covered. That one dropped straight from the window’s edge, landing in a crouch.
Pawl focused most sharply upon the newer figure, the smallest one. Two had entered, and three had come out. He saw no sign of this being a capture or kidnapping. The reasonable alternative was a rescue, and there was only one person Pawl had heard of who would count as any kind of a “prisoner” within the sages’ keep.
Even in the dark cloak and high, soft boots, it could only be Wynn Hygeorht.
The translation project had been stopped shortly before Pawl heard of Wynn’s incarceration. It was unlikely that her freedom would start it again, and more likely that it would prolong its pause. He wondered whether to halt her flight himself.
The shorter of the two men handed something to the other one. After a brief exchange, the tall one tossed a rope’s end over the bailey wall’s side. The shorter one climbed down and stood waiting, and then Wynn took quite a bit longer to follow.
To Pawl’s mild surprise, the tall figure dropped the rope over the side and scaled quickly down the wall using two blades. In an astonishingly brief time, all three crept southward along the base of the wall. And then Pawl looked back to the cowled stranger on the roof.
That one had risen, gripping a strange short bow by its silvery white metal grip, and reached behind his back, beneath his tied-up cloak. When his hand came out, his fingers pinched the end of a short arrow. He notched the arrow and aimed down at the trio below in the shadow of the bailey wall.
Chane nearly gagged in relief as Ore-Locks pulled him through the bailey wall onto the northwest side of Old Bailey Road near Switchin Way. They were finally out, and Chane focused on the moment, unable to face this night’s outcome.
“We need to find Shade,” he rasped.
They had left her at the keep’s front, but Chane could not be spotted near the gates. How unexpected that it bothered him to think of Shade waiting out there alone.
Ore-Locks cocked his head toward the west tower down the way. “We can try to get to the front if we . . .”
He fell silent, and Chane followed Ore-Locks’s fixed stare.
Something . . . someone dark stepped from the shadows of the wall and into the street. Chane did not need to wait as she pulled back her cowl. Even if she had not been wearing the midnight blue robe, he would have recognized the way she moved. But he had no idea what the sudden appearance of Premin Hawes meant here and now.
She stepped steadily up the street toward him, and then he noticed she held something slung over her shoulder. His puzzlement grew, as did Ore-Locks’s wariness, as she stopped an arm’s length away.
&
nbsp; Premin Hawes rolled the strap off her shoulder and held a pack out toward Chane.
“You did not wait as instructed,” she said calmly. “Under the circumstances, I thought you would prefer to hold on to these yourself.”
Still confused, Chane took the pack from her and looked inside. Within it he found the cloth-wrapped bundles of the dwarven mushrooms and the flowers he had scavenged from the plain outside the lands of the Lhoin’na. There was also the precious text The Seven Leaves of Life.
Profound relief came first, followed by suspicion.
Why was Hawes doing this? Did she wish to help in Wynn’s cause, or was this just a ploy to gain his trust for some other purpose?
“She is out of the keep,” Hawes said.
Chane tensed.
“Tell her that if she has need to send for me,” Hawes added. “But she must not return here . . . not yet. Do you understand?”
Ore-Locks was watching them both in silent puzzlement. He had no idea what was happening, let alone why the premin of metaology came out unaccompanied in the night to speak to a Noble Dead who had invaded her guild.
“I understand,” Chane said, and he did, in part.
“Good,” she said, turning away. “Keep her safe.”
He hesitated, despair beginning to close in on him again. “I do not know if I will see . . . she is with other companions now.”
“She will come to you,” Hawes called without looking back.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“I know.”
Premin Hawes neared the bailey wall and stepped through, not into, stone.
Chane watched the wall appear to buckle or perhaps ripple around her like a disturbed vertical pool of water. She vanished completely through the wall, and the ripples in the stone quickly settled. For a moment, Chane was tempted to touch that spot and feel its solidity for certain.
At a guess, Hawes could not travel distances through earth and stone like a stonewalker. Unlike them, she probably found no barrier, even wood, an impediment at all.
Chane thought of Wynn and of Hawes’s final prediction. Perhaps they did have one ally inside the guild—a subtly powerful and potentially dangerous one, who also sat on the Premin Council. But how was he to tell Wynn any of this?
“How . . . how did she?” Ore-Locks mumbled, and then his mouth just hung open.
In spite of everything, Chane could not stop a slight smile. He clutched the pack with his precious components, and then a bark broke the silence. A dark form loped toward him along Old Bailey Road.
“Shade,” he said quietly, waiting for her.
Her shape often made him forget the intelligence of the majay-hì, equal to or perhaps even greater than that of people, though differing greatly. Or so Wynn had said more than once. Shade must have been roaming the road, watching for them, or perhaps sniffed them out.
Ore-Locks glanced up at the bailey wall’s top, but as of yet, Chane had heard no guard’s footsteps coming their way.
“We should get out of sight,” Ore-Locks said.
Chane agreed, and with little else to do, they all headed for the Grayland’s Empire and Nattie’s inn.
Pawl rose, poised as the cowled stranger turned slowly, tracking the trio below in the street with his bow drawn. But Pawl could not be certain at which of the three this lurker aimed.
Everything that had happened around the guild somehow pointed to Wynn Hygeorht.
Everything Pawl needed from the transcription project concerning the white woman of centuries ago might also be linked to the young sage.
And the figure on the rooftop had not drawn his bow until after Wynn had appeared.
Pawl took off at a run across the roof. Swiping off his broad-brimmed hat and ripping off his cloak, he pulled his blade from behind his back.
Too dark for steel, the hardened iron blade was barely the length of a shortsword, with a handle of only rough hide straps wrapped around its bare tang. In the night, no one would see the strange, rough, but evenly patterned serrations of its edges. That blade was the only relic of his living days, of his own people long gone from the world . . . and nearly gone from the fragments of his own memories.
Pawl took his last step at the edge of the roof as he threw his blade at the cloaked figure across the street. Then he leaped into the air to a height no one would have believed if they had seen it. The blade was too heavy and unbalanced to strike true, but all he needed was to stop that archer.
An instant before the blade struck, the man whirled out of its path. The blade hit the roof beyond the archer and tumbled away as Pawl arced across the street in midair. The stranger instantly spotted him.
An arrow struck low in Pawl’s shoulder and punched through skin and muscle.
He landed and charged on without slowing. Another arrow hit him dead center in the chest.
He heard and felt his breastbone crack as the second arrow’s head pierced his heart, but he never even slowed. A third arrow punctured him just to the left of the second. He closed on his quarry and saw the man’s—the elf’s—amber eyes suddenly widen above the dark gray-green wrap across the lower half of his face.
The stranger dropped his bow and reached quickly up his sleeves.
Pawl closed the last step at a full run and slammed his hand into the would-be assassin’s throat.
Bone cracked audibly as the elf’s head whipped forward and then back. His feet left the shakes as force drove him backward under all of Pawl’s strength and speed. The body hit the roof, flopping and sliding across the shakes until it rammed into and caught on a chimney, toppling one tile off its top.
The stranger lay there unmoving as Pawl went to look down over the roof’s edge.
Old Bailey Road was empty. Wynn and her two companions were gone, never aware how close she, or one of them, had come to death. Yet Pawl was no closer to what he needed, though he had halted an event that could have further hindered his answers.
He began pulling arrows out of his flesh and bone. The one through his chest took both hands.
Black fluids spilling from his wounds would never show against the black cloth of his attire. He would have to burn his tunic, though, to be certain the evidence was never found. Dropping the last arrow, he walked to the corpse caught on the chimney and ripped away the face wrap.
He had never heard of assassins among the Lhoin’na. Nor had ever seen one with such near-white blond hair or such a dark complexion. He had counted at least four others like this in his nightly roaming. How many of these were in his city?
And why were they after Wynn Hygeorht?
Leaving the body where it lay, Pawl retrieved his ancient, serrated iron blade. There was nothing more he could learn here. At a run, he leaped over the street again to the nearest rooftop, heading for home.
Dänvârfij grew nervous in the dark above Wall Shop Row. She had been waiting for a report since Én’nish had gone to fetch Rhysís and go after the wagon. Too much time had passed, and one or both should have come to her by now.
Worse, without Én’nish, there was no one to send off to check in with Owain and Eywodan. If anything happened outside her view, she would not know it. She hesitated at leaving her post and missing Én’nish’s return, but it was not wise or safe to allow so much time to pass without an exchange of information.
Dänvârfij stood up, heading for the roof’s edge. A light thud sounded behind her, and she turned.
Én’nish rose from her jump as Rhysís landed lightly beside her.
Had any prisoners already been delivered to Fréthfâre? Then she saw that Rhysís’s right forearm was bleeding, and his cloak was torn.
“What happened?” she asked.
“A trap . . . a decoy,” Én’nish answered, “to pull some of us away. They know we are watching the castle.”
“Of course they know. Brot’ân’duivé is with them!” Dänvârfij quickly tempered her anger. “What do you mean by ‘decoy’?”
Rhysís would not look her in th
e eyes as he answered. “The half-undead woman, the majay-hì, and . . . another of us pulled the wagon around a corner and were prepared for us.”
Dänvârfij stared, uncertain she followed all of his meaning. “Another . . . of us?”
“Osha is now with Brot’ân’duivé,” Én’nish hissed. “Another turned traitor.”
Dänvârfij chilled at this disturbing news, though, in retrospect, it was not a complete surprise. Osha had been there, like Dänvârfij, when Sgäilsheilleache and Hkuan’duv killed each other. She had never understood how someone as untalented as Osha had ever gained Sgäilsheilleache as his jeóin. And after that encounter, when she had fled, Most Aged Father had instructed her to wait on the ship that retrieved her. Soon enough, Osha had come, though her presence aboard the vessel surprised him.
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