edges of their cloaks.
Brant crouched down with Dart as if the falling darkness had crushed them to the stairs.
“Lorr?” Dart breathed out softly.
“Hush.”
Brant’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, discovering it was not as complete as he had first imagined. The lower stairs were slightly less murky than the deep blackness above.
Faint words reached them, rising from below, too muffled by distance to discern.
Someone was down there.
“I would question this squire myself,” Kathryn said.
She stood in the middle of her hermitage. She let her outrage at the violation of her private spaces ring in her voice. Half a bell ago, she had arrived in the high hall to discover an upended beehive of confusion. Men and women, knights and masters, all scurrying about or standing dazed. The word daemon echoed all around.
Worst of all, the door to her hermitage had been standing wide open.
She had discovered Warden Fields already in her rooms, fists on hips, ordering the place searched from niche to cranny. By the time Kathryn had shouldered through his guards, she had been red-faced and barely able to speak. She had stopped it all with a resounding command to desist.
Though Argent might rule Tashijan, all knew the hermitage was the sole domain of the castellan.
“I understand your consternation, Castellan Vail,” Argent said calmly as his men cleared from her spaces. “But I have already summoned soothmancers to examine the young men, to test the veracity of their claims.”
Off to the side, Master Hesharian stood with Keeper Ryngold. The rotund master kept his hands folded across his robed belly, looking serenely dispassionate about it all, but Kathryn read the glint of amusement in his eyes. Contrarily, the head of the house, Keeper Ryngold, shared none of the master’s amusement. He stood beside Kathryn’s maid, Penni, who still had her face covered with her hands, sobbing silently into her palms. The shoulder of her dress had been ripped. Apparently Argent’s men had manhandled her upon breaking in here. Keeper Ryngold was not pleased, almost as angry as Kathryn. Penni was one of his charges.
Kathryn stepped closer to Argent. “Perhaps you should have tested their stories before breaking my latch and entering my inviolate spaces. My hermitage is as sacrosanct as your Eyrie. To break that threshold upon the rantings of an injured boy is an affront beyond measure.”
Before he could respond, a figure stepped out of Dart’s garret and back into the main room. His face and hands were caked in black, reeking of black bile. A bloodnuller. Kathryn gaped at him. She had not known anyone was still in there. Men of his caste were imbued with alchemies of bile, able to nullify Grace with a smear of their fouled hands.
“Nothinggg,” the man slurred with a bow toward Argent.
Kathryn shoved her arm toward her door. “Begone from my rooms!”
The man hesitated until Argent gave him a slight nod to obey. He shuffled out, trailing his stench behind him.
Kathryn glowered at Argent. “I hope such a discovery will temper your unseemly haste until you’ve had the squires properly soothed. As I understand it, one of your squires had already confessed to attacking my page. Yet it is upon the word of such dishonorable young men that you break the peace of my private rooms.”
She said this last loudly enough to be heard out in the hall, where she was sure many ears were listening. Let that rumor be spread, too-to counter the talk of daemons.
Argent’s face grew a shade more red. “That is all well said,” he forced out grudgingly. “I certainly owe you my sincere apologies. But in such dark and trying times, it seems that an overly officious attention to protocol might not serve us well. Remember, we have many high personages from around Myrillia under our roofs and have a responsibility for their security. Do we not? Is it proper to sit on our swords when word arises of daemons among us?”
“Better to sit on our swords than panic,” Kathryn said, loudly yet again. “There are reasons for protocol, for rules of conduct…lest in haste someone get accidentally stabbed with a cursed sword again.”
Argent’s one eye flared. He flushed as if she had slapped him.
Off to the side, she noted Master Hesharian backing toward the door. This was a tender point that even the master wanted to avoid.
Argent glared a moment more. “Then we’d best begin the soothing this very night. I find it strange, though, that your page remains missing.” He let this question linger, tying guilt to her absence.
Kathryn refused to let it hang unaddressed. “Is it truly any wonder? After being attacked by three squires twice her size? She must wonder whom to trust after such a violation.”
“I assume she trusts you well enough,” Argent said, heading at last toward the door. “And I’m sure you’ll present her to be soothed when she comes out of hiding.”
Kathryn followed him, ushering everyone from her rooms. “Most certainly. And the first question I will ask will be concerning her attack. I wonder if it was a random act of malice or if some other hand might have directed them. I understand that all three bore the sigil of the Fiery Cross. And that a branding iron with your symbol was found in the room where the attack took place.”
Argent glanced back to her. His eyes narrowed, more with concern than anger this time. Kathryn doubted the warden had had any hand in the attack. At least not directly. Members of his Fiery Cross had grown more emboldened of late, stoked by Argent’s fiery speeches. Still, it didn’t hurt to plant a seed of doubt in his mind. It would be a blight on his image if it was found that the Cross had planned the attack as some affront against the castellan. It could turn the tide against him.
Kathryn suspected that to assuage such suspicions, Argent would spend a fair stretch of the night doing his own private investigations. The distraction would allow her additional room to maneuver, to find some way to circumvent Dart’s exposure.
With nothing else to be said, Argent sailed out of her room with a flourish of his cloak. He was followed by a cadre of his men, a flock of black geese headed to warmer climes after the cold greeting they’d received here.
Master Hesharian bowed, almost mockingly, and left, collecting another robed master with him-Master Orquell, the one who had come here from Ghazal. His milky eyes glanced over Kathryn’s face as he turned. Though he appeared to be nearly blind, she suspected he saw more than most ordinary men.
At the door, Keeper Ryngold promised to console Penni. “A bit of honeyed mead and a warm fire will settle her. If there is anything you need in the meantime…”
“I’ll be fine. Thank you.”
He set off, and the hallway slowly emptied out beyond her door. As the flow of robes and cloaks drained away, a single figure remained, a bronze boulder in the waning stream.
He forded toward her through the last of the onlookers.
“Gerrod…” Kathryn sighed with relief. She stepped aside to invite him into her rooms.
He touched her on the elbow as he passed, a silent approval of her handling of Argent.
She closed the door after him.
He stood a moment, glancing around.
“We’re alone,” she assured him.
Satisfied, he pivoted a switch at his neck and his helmet peeled back, revealing his bald pate and tattooed sigils-and also the wry amusement in his eyes. “Argent will not be sleeping this night.”
Kathryn smiled.
“And I’ve heard he had to cancel his grand feast.”
“Small favors there.” Kathryn motioned him to a seat. “At least Tylar will be happy to hear about that.”
“Yes, but he might not be so happy to hear about what we discovered about his flippercraft.” He ignored her offer to sit and crossed toward her draped windows.
Kathryn followed him, noting a slight complaint that rose from his mekanicals. “What did you find?”
He pulled aside the heavy woolen drape. The hearth’s firelight cast the glass into a mirror. She read the worry in her friend’s expression.
“The ship’s apparatus appeared fine-at least what we could tell from the burnt slag. But it was the reserve of blood alchemies that seemed to be the source of the trouble. We tested the level of Grace and found it almost drained. Only a few dregs of power remained. The ship was lucky to land at all.”
“So what do you think happened?”
