'What have you done now?' Rodian demanded.
Her shoulders curled forward as if she might collapse in exhaustion. Then she squeezed her eyes closed in a pained cringe.
'Gods damn you!' Rodian snapped, not caring what anyone thought. '
Wynn tucked the makeshift bandage inside Ruben's split tabard, closing the edges over it. She rose up to lock eyes with Rodian, and then movement in the corner of Rodian's sight made him jerk around.
A shadow-cloaked figure approached along the deeper darkness of the next shop's awning. Rodian raised his sword, inching toward the silhouette draped in a black cloak and… a hat?
Pawl a'Seatt stepped out, wearing a black cloak over his matching vestment and a pressed white shirt.
Upon his head was the flat-topped hat of black felt with a brim almost wide enough to shield his shoulders. He swept his gaze over the scene, pausing briefly on the shattered window of his shop.
'What are you doing here?' Rodian demanded. 'You and yours were to keep away until I told you otherwise.'
Master a'Seatt didn't answer.
'Did you find the dog?' Wynn whispered.
Rodian glanced back in disbelief. Wynn gazed down the empty street like a child who'd wandered off and only just realized she was lost. Rodian didn't care.
After all the careful setup and planning, he'd failed. There had been not one but two perpetrators here this night, and both had escaped. Three of his men were dead and another injured—and he had nothing to show for it. And it was all wrapped around one meddling little sage.
'Garrogh, see to the men,' Rodian growled, and he snatched Wynn by the arm, dragging her down the street.
Chapter 11
Wynn sat alone on her cell's bunk within the military's castle, staring at a heavy wooden door with no inner handle. On top of everything else that her superiors held against her, being arrested was going to destroy any grain of credibility she had left. She took a deep breath, trying to calm thoughts spinning out of control, but the effort failed.
A shrouded black figure, who could walk through walls, had stolen a folio and killed three of the Shyldfälches. The city guards had barely slowed it down. This only strengthened Wynn's belief that it was an undead as well as a powerful mage.
And Chane had appeared in the company of this monster, just as he had with Welstiel.
Then Chap had bolted out of the dark to protect her—only to vanish in pursuit of the black-robed undead.
It was too much to hold all at once in her head.
If Chap was here, then where were Magiere and Leesil? Though she ached to find Chap, to learn why he'd come, her jumbled thoughts kept turning back to Chane.
Once a minor noble in life, he was a scholar and sometime warrior who'd stood between her and death more than once. He was also another monster, a killer who fed on the living and had ended or ruined many lives. She'd tried to shut him out, to make him leave her once and for all in that forgotten castle of the Farlands' highest peaks. Yet here he was again—always again and again.
Wynn slumped, elbows on knees, and buried her face in her hands. Why had she believed his denial in the street?
She'd been disoriented by that thing coming out of the wall and the sudden appearance of Chane… and then Chap. Too much had happened in those panicked moments. Yet, even if Chane was a Noble Dead, he'd always revered the guild.
In Bela, across the eastern ocean, before anyone knew what he was, he'd often come at night to sit with her and pore over historical texts. Not once had he shown the slightest threat to her, Domin Tilswith, or the others trying to establish the bare beginning a new guild branch.
So how and why was he involved with the missing folios? And what had happened inside the Upright Quill that led to a conflict between him and the cowled figure? Perhaps Chane was more interested in the work of sages than she'd ever guessed.
She stiffened at a metal jangle outside her cell door. The heavy lock clacked, and the door opened partway.
Rodian hung in the opening, staring at her.
What could she say that would matter at all to him?
Oh, yes, that would fix everything. They wouldn't lock her up for interfering with the city guard. No, they'd just stick her in a room in the city ward until she was cured of madness.
When the captain finally stepped in, Wynn could tell he was calmer than when he'd nearly thrown her into the cell. But his neatly bearded face was drawn tight, and dark rings surrounded his eyes. His jaw muscles bulged slightly as he ground his teeth.
'You set a trap,' she said.
Rodian paced before the door, taking only four short steps to cross the cell before turning back the other way.
'Domin High-Tower must have helped, if he sent out that folio,' she went on, 'and Master a'Seatt.'
The captain stopped, and the lack of his boots' rhythmic scrape made Wynn tense in the silence.
'What were you doing there?' he asked flatly.
For an instant Wynn considered telling him the truth. That the texts he'd been denied had been penned by ancient vampires. And that she was trying to learn which pages were being stolen and why.
'Answer me!' he snapped. 'You're already complicit in three guardsmen's deaths… though after the fact.'
Wynn almost shouted a denial. She swallowed immediately, studying his face.
Yes, she'd told Chane to run, but Rodian wouldn't care about her side. His only interest lay in stopping these murders, giving the royals a rational and satisfactory answer—and in so doing, advancing himself. He had no interest in the truth, and he certainly had no intention of reporting anything from her that might get him laughed out of his position. As things stood, he would have a hard enough time explaining a culprit emerging through a shopfront.
No, he could handle only pieces of the truth.
'I overheard messengers returning from the Upright Quill,' she began.
'After what happened at Master Shilwise's shop, I feared the worst. So I ran, hoping to find someone still at Master a'Seatt's scriptorium and check on the folio, perhaps bring it back. That's why you caught me peeking in a window.'
His expression never wavered. 'You knew the second man.'
Wynn panicked, ready to deny this as well.
'Don't bother lying,' Rodian said. 'He knew your name.'
'Since returning from the Farlands,' she answered, 'many people I've never met seem to know my name.'
She expected him to press further, as her answer was hardly satisfactory.
Instead he asked, 'Did you get a clear look at the man who took the folio?'
'Man?' Wynn repeated.
'The mage in black robes.' He paused and squinted at her. 'What did you see?'
Wynn settled farther back on the bunk. The captain didn't want to know what she saw—or rather what she
