'What was that?' one asked suddenly, and looked northward along the inner bailey. But the other was already running, and the first took off behind him.
Wynn peeked out at the voices. She stepped into the open and stared to where the men disappeared beyond the western orchard and tower. She just stood there.
'Oh, please! Just go!' Ghassan whispered.
Finally she rushed out and slipped through the bailey gate.
Ghassan gave her a moment, watching her over the wall as she headed south. Then he descended directly into Old Bailey Road and followed.
Chapter 13
Chane crouched at the stable's rear corner, uncertain what he would say to Wynn. And the smells of dung, old leather, and straw rose around him.
The horses inside had already been fed and settled for the night. No one would come out back after dusk. This was the nearest and safest place he knew of for a private word without having Wynn walk too far at night. Something… someone besides him was after the folios—and it had fixed upon Wynn outside the scribe shop.
Chane had brushed out his cloak and combed his red-brown hair, which had once hung to his shoulders. More than a year ago, in Venjètz, Welstiel had cut it jaggedly to disguise Chane for a ruse played on Magiere. The hair would never grow back. He pushed a loose strand behind his ear, closing his eyes briefly.
Wynn would come, but how could he explain his actions, driven by obsessions that he did not fully understand?
He watched the street from along the stable's side. Across the way he could just make out the tops of the guild's keep towers above shops, inns, and one eatery across the street. Then movement pulled his gaze back down.
Wynn stepped into sight on the street, wearing a brown cloak over her gray robe.
She gripped a walking staff taller than herself, and the two hands' length above her head was sheathed in leather. She halted, reached into her pocket, and pulled something out. When she flattened her hand against her wool robe and rubbed brusquely, Chane knew it was her cold lamp crystal. Faint illumination filtered through her fingers, and he stepped quickly along the stable's side to its front corner.
Wynn halted midstreet, staring at him. Faint lines of concentration creased her forehead.
An ache swelled in Chane's chest at the sight of her oval face within her robe's raised cowl. Wynn embodied what little he held worthwhile in this world—all the things he could never have. She finally came toward him, stopping a few paces off, well beyond his reach.
Something about her face was different, not in her features but in her expression. She seemed older, too serious, and poignant. All Wynn's youthful curiosity, her wonder and innocent passion… it all seemed gone from her soft brown eyes.
But so long as he saw no fear, he could bear anything else.
'I did not kill them,' he rasped in Belaskian. 'Any of them! I would never harm a sage.'
Watching her flinch made him hate the sound of his maimed voice more than ever before. But her reaction to his words was far more important.
'I believe you,' she whispered, yet as her gaze searched his face, he still saw doubt. 'Why did you send for me?'
Blunt and to the point, but she certainly had many other questions. Why was he here, halfway across the world, and how was he involved with the folios' thefts? But she had not asked him any of this. She treated him like a stranger, and the ache in his chest became a pain.
Chane reached into his cloak and drew out the aged tin scroll case.
'Did you ever see this… while in the castle of the Pock Peaks?' he asked.
He had found it on the floor as he fled that place, not knowing who had dropped it there.
For a moment Wynn looked at the case in puzzlement. Then her eyes widened, staring with intensity—and recognition. She opened her hand slightly, allowing more of the crystal's light to escape.
'Where… how did you get that?' she whispered, taking two steps closer.
Chane saw the Wynn of past days as she looked up at him with that old curious astonishment.
'Near the passage out of the library,' he answered. 'I actually kicked it as I left. I still do not know why I picked it up.'
Wynn reached out hesitantly toward the scroll case. 'Li'kän took it from the library shelves.'
'Li'kän?' Chane asked. 'Do you mean the white undead?'
Wynn did not seem to hear him. She was fixated on the scroll case, shaking her head slightly.
'She went right to it… never touched anything else,' Wynn whispered. 'She wanted me to read it to her.'
Chane hesitated before saying, 'That is not possible.'
Wynn's brow crinkled again. Before she could ask, he pulled off the case's pewter cap. Scholarly wonder always got the better of her, and Chane was more than willing to distract her from the harder questions concerning him. He slid out the leather scroll and opened it.
'You could not have read this to her,' he said.
Wynn stepped all the way to him and held the crystal closer. It was instantly clear what he meant when she saw the ink coating.
'I don't understand,' she said, her small fingers lightly touching the blackened surface.
'There is something hidden beneath it,' he added. 'Something marked in the fluids of a Noble Dead.'
Her gaze flicked up, and he could swear her face paled.
'How do you know that?' she asked.
'I can smell it.'
Doubt and suspicion returned to Wynn's eyes. 'It's too old. No scent would last that long. No one, even something… someone like you, could catch it.'
Chane tried not to flinch: some…
'I did not smell it until I had nearly finished restoring the scroll's leather. The scent was faint but exactly the same as freshly spilled fluids from one of my kind.'
'Like the writing on the castle's inner walls,' she whispered, gazing again at the scroll.
Chane remembered the vague, thin smell inside the white undead's fortress.
'This is why I want to see the folios,' he said carefully. 'From those texts, from that same library, I had hoped to learn what it is, if not what it contains. I could not risk stripping the coating to see what was hidden. Then I heard… saw how the works that you brought back had placed you and the guild in danger.'
'Why?' she demanded. 'Do you know what is hunting us?'
Sharp as it was, her earnest question held no accusation toward him. The pain in his chest lessened a bit.
'I do not,' he answered. 'At first I assumed the texts you chose were ones clearest to read. But with your project still ongoing, that must not be the case for all of them.'
'I selected a range of works from the library,' she explained, 'based on what was oldest but still sound enough to transport… and what I—or others skilled in old tongues—might have a chance at translating.'
'Yet the work continues,' he said.
Wynn shrugged weakly. 'Yes, the translation has been… seems more difficult than I guessed.'
'Someone hid whatever is in this scroll,' he added with his own emphasis, 'either the author or someone else, in place of simply destroying it. I believe it is of importance. More so now, as your Li'kän wished you to see it, knowing there was nothing here you could read. Perhaps it might be a key to uncovering other secrets in your texts… Why else would that black figure be shadowing the folios and killing for them? I think it, too, is having difficulty in finding what it seeks.'
Chane held out the scroll to Wynn.
