The belongings spoke of an active mind and a woman who traveled light, who never really settled in any one place—but Zelen had known as much already. He searched the boots for concealed keys or knives or messages, but discovered only leather.
One of the maids was watching him. “Sorry,” said Zelen, “but nobody found a ball gown in here, did they?”
“No, m’lord.”
“No. She’s likely still wearing it, then. Or was.” That argued, strongly, for the theories Gedomir had suggested and Zelen wanted to believe—or at any rate against cold-blooded, deliberate murder. Nobody, much less a warrior, would of her own volition go kill people in a floor-length gown, then climb out a window to get away, not when she had plenty of time to change clothing. “What about a sword?”
The maid shook her head. “Must’ve taken it with her.”
“Yes, just so,” said Zelen absently.
She’d gone to the trouble of getting her sword but not of changing her clothing.
Nobody would have needed a sword, let alone a mystical one, to kill the Rognozis. Branwyn could have done it barehanded. Half the servants probably could’ve managed as much.
Barehanded murder would probably have been considerably less brutal than what had happened. The servants had, as the butler said, done their best to remove the worst remnants of the crime, but a certain sense of events was still very, very obvious from the Rognozis’ chambers.
The human body held a great deal of blood. In Lady Rognozi’s room, the stain spread not only across the floor near the threshold but up the walls as well. One small, distinct handprint stood out from the rest, clear against the gold-figured paper.
In Lord Rognozi’s room, the gore was more contained: a darkness that spread over the sides of the bed and trailed in rivulets down to the floor.
Zelen closed his eyes there and braced himself against the doorframe. He’d seen people die, yes, and blood itself had long ceased to unnerve him, but this was too close to showing the exact circumstances of their deaths, their helplessness and terror.
They’d been his friends.
His heart was hot iron, shrieking on the anvil. If Branwyn had done this—if Branwyn had been forced to it—if she hadn’t—
None of that means a thing, he told himself in the cold inflections that were the closest he could come to his mother’s rebukes.Your duty is to evaluate the situation as it is, not as it might be. That’s the whole of your responsibility just now.
He forced himself to make a closer inspection.
The mattress where Lord Rognozi had lain and died was soaked with blood and torn in several places, and the hangings on one side of the bed had been shredded, but nothing else in the room was damaged.
Lady Rognozi’s room was a very different story. Many of the small glass windowpanes had been shattered. So had the iron bars of the frames, in several places. The mirror on the dressing table lay in shards, and the table itself had practically been cleaved in half. Her bed-curtains had suffered as well, though not so badly as her lord’s—a few wide cuts, as if in passing.
Most notably of all, the wall on one side of the room had a great hole in it. Zelen could look, carefully, past splinters half a foot long and into the study on the other side.
There was no blood there, he noticed, nor any near the window. And while the broken part of the window was large enough for someone Branwyn’s size to crawl through, the edges were treacherous with broken glass and metal.
If the legends were true, a Sentinel might have had ways of getting through unharmed or might simply not care.
Nothing in any of the rooms provided a clue as to where Branwyn might have gone—and the more Zelen found out, the less sure he was of what had actually happened.
Chapter 22
Walking was a truly hellish experience. Not only did every part of Branwyn hurt, but the cloak that the child had brought her was barely large enough to provide any concealment. She had to walk bent over, which didn’t help her spine at all—although it did let her lean on the child more easily, which, to her embarrassment, she had to do often.
“You sure you don’t need a healer?” they asked, after they’d tugged Branwyn off the wall and put their good shoulder under her arm. “You don’t have bones sticking into your organs?”
“No,” she said, “thank you.” A few staggering steps later, it occurred to her to ask, “How do you know that can happen?”
“I listen to things.”
Evidently they also watched, and watched well. Their path didn’t take them through any main street, but rather into a maze of narrow, twisting alleys where buildings cast shadows even in the morning light.
The smell of salt water mingled with that of garbage, meat, and human refuse. They were near the docks, Branwyn suspected, and likely a tannery or two. She couldn’t narrow the location down any further. At times, particularly after a misstep jolted her or the light got in her eyes despite the cloak’s hood, she barely knew where she was even as far as “the back streets of Heliodar.”
“Here,” the child eventually said, and Branwyn looked up, dazed, at the blackened wreck of a building. “Caught fire a while back. Nobody’s going to go in there now. It hasn’t fallen down yet, though.”
