Precious Wind pounced: “We, Xulai?”
We? Well, yes. She didn’t want to talk about Abasio’s having been there. “A tiny chipmunk had taken refuge in my pocket. There were predators about so I left the little thing in my pocket. When we left, I saw that the branch had pulled out some of her hairs. I wrapped them in a handkerchief and brought them back with me. I thought I should tell you about them.”
“You’re sure they were hers, not Jenger’s?”
“They were hers. I saw her brush away the branch, the same branch I took them from, and Jenger was standing some distance away the whole time.”
Precious Wind seemed to be looking into a great distance. “Will you give them to me?”
“Gladly.” Xulai fetched the box from her pack, took out the handkerchief-wrapped bundle of hairs, and put it into Precious Wind’s hands.
“Tell me again what she was to be rewarded for.”
“If she found whatever it was that Huold carried. Or if she found something that the princess . . . my mother had hidden. I think what she had hidden was already in my pocket. My mother had told me where to find it.”
“Did I ever talk to you about the mirror defense?” asked Precious Wind in a faraway voice, as though she was speaking from some other place.
“You and Bear both did. It’s when you reflect an opponent’s strength or tactics back against him so that he beats himself. It sounded complicated.”
“Sometimes it is,” said Precious Wind, yawning. “I’m going back to bed. You?”
“Breakfast. Then I’m going riding with Abasio.”
Precious Wind did not go back to sleep. She went as quickly as she could to find Abasio. She told him one thing and another that he had not known, that no one else had known. “If I am not here, not available, do as you see fit with this information,” she said.
He bowed, agreeing, and she left him to handle his astonishment as well as he might. Then she returned to her room and went back to sleep.
When Xulai finished breakfast she took Flaxen out onto the meadow, where she and Abasio and the two horses, Blue with studied insouciance and Flaxen with as much astonishment as any ordinary horse could manage, went through their paces quite long enough to let everyone on the walls or on the road see them at it. They moved in and out of the corner of the pasture that was hidden from the ramparts. Meantime, they observed what Abasio had observed before: no one in armor went through the anytime gate.
“It’d be good to check the abbot, if you can figure out how,” he said to her softly as they rode back to the abbey gate nearest the stables. “Have you had a chance to talk about the houses at the school?”
“I have,” she said. “I should have told you last night. None of the people I talked to knew anything about them, though one girl said her uncle used to live in one of them. I asked Sister Solace, too. She said the houses were built all at one time by a group of people who had been living in Ghastain before Mirami arrived and weren’t happy there after she came. It made sense to me, for they all look rather alike, not like houses built years and years apart. Sister Solace said some of the people who lived in those houses moved on, farther south where the winters are warmer, and some of them eventually went back to Ghastain because they had family there. She didn’t know if they were still there. The thing that’s interesting is that no one stayed there very long and no one else has ever used them.”
“We really need to know whose idea it was to house us back there,” Abasio said. “How about Solo Winger, the birdman? Did you get a list of his signs?”
“I know what they are and where they go, all but two of them. I’ve written them out for you.” She burrowed in a pocket for a much folded list. “I memorized the two new ones. Brother Winger said they were the abbot’s private signs, so he wouldn’t know where they went or to whom. One is a sign like a house, you know, a square with three lines making a door, and a triangle for a roof. The other one was two curved lines, hunched, like a vulture’s wings, with another curved line at the top making a head. My father didn’t use either of those two signs at Woldsgard, though he used many of the others that Brother Winger has. There isn’t one for anyplace between here and Merhaven, but if we need to, and if we’re in a place that has pigeons from those places, we can send a message to Hallad, Prince Orez, in Etershore, or to whomever he has in command at Wold.”
“Are we quite sure Woldsgard is securely in Orez’s keeping?”
“Oh, yes. The loft man told me messages have come from Woldsgard sent by Hallad to the abbot, asking about us, wanting to know if we’re well. And the abbot has sent answers. I know that’s true, because the abbot asked me if I’d like to add a message, and I did.”
“What about Bear’s claim about the troops supposedly outside that wall?”
“As for asking the abbot to verify what Bear said, I’ll just ask him. I’ll tell him I was thoroughly convinced until Bear got upset with my being late that night we were out there, so I want to be very sure it’s safe, not to worry my people.”
All of which she managed to do, almost by accident, by meeting the abbot and his librarian Wordswell on his way to lunch. She greeted him pleasantly, then asked him the question, just as she had phrased it to Abasio.
“Oh, you’d be quite safe, my dear. Well guarded. Yes. All manner of troops around here and there. Tell your people not to worry in the least.” And
