That night, I staggered up to the eaves of the only guesthouse that had had a spare room, my tailbone burning from the jolting of the coach and my ears assailed by unfamiliar noises. We were on the outskirts of the city of Tresteny, and despite the late hour, there were people guffawing, dogs barking, carts clattering by below. I had no idea how I was going to sleep. At least I could take off my laconite pendant, which had purred against my breastbone all day, stopping me from dozing.
Egard narrowed his eyes as I set it on a table.
“We’ll be right down there, between the stairs and the door, so don’t eventhinkabout scuttling, little Orha rat.”
“I wasn’t,” I said shortly, squashing a spike of anger. I wished Icouldrun, if only to deny Egard his payment.
After he and Belamy stomped down to the dice tables, I crouched and opened the leather case of my belongings. As I lifted the nightshift that lay on top, something fluttered out: a folded scrap of parchment. Unfolding it, I saw words inked in a precise hand across it:
If You Wish to Know What Happened to Your Friend, Go to the Veil, Port Rhorstin, on 14th Tima. Sunset Exactly. Bring a Mask.
I stared. Heard my breath over the rumble from downstairs.
With shaking fingers, I put the note aside and dug through the rest of my luggage. But there was nothing else, only my clothes, a pair of slippers, candles and rushlights, a tinderbox…
I sat back and reached for the note again.
Zennia.
The fourteenth of Tima was less than two weeks from now. And Port Rhorstin…that was the closest town to Bower Island. The embarking point for the nine-mile crossing to House Shearwater.
I had no idea what the Veil was, or why I had to bring a mask, or even if there’d be any possibility of getting there, but I already knew I’d do everything I could to make this meeting.
A meeting that someone at Arbenhaw must have arranged.
Loud thumps on the staircase made me jump to my feet. I crumpled the parchment into my palm, stood there frozen.
A rap on the door, Belamy’s voice issuing through it: “Forgot my coin purse. You decent in there?”
I angled my face away as he rummaged in his pack and hoped he couldn’t see the feverishness in my eyes.
That niggle of doubt I’d felt in Caerig’s office; that wrongness that had struck me at her words,“unfortunate accident”…My instinct had been right. There was more to all this—to Zennia’s accident—than I’d been told.
And in two weeks, I was determined, I would find out what it was.
4
Onthe fifth day, with a nervous lurch in my abdomen, I spotted gulls circling over the treetops of the Drowning Woods. The roads looked sandier, the people windburned, and the air had taken on a strange new freshness.
My whole body ached. I was exhausted from lack of sleep, not merely from the scritching of mice in our guest rooms but from lying awake each night for hours, my mind raking over the note in my case.
It had to have been left by someone at Arbenhaw. Egard and Belamy had been in the coach with me all day, and I’d had to lug my own bag up the steep steps to our room.
There was whoever had been ordered to pack my things, but at Arbenhaw, most chores and odd jobs for the Instructors were performed by the younger trainees, in preparation for service. They wouldn’t have known either me or Zennia, nor had the means to arrange a meeting on the other side of Nemestra.
It seemed more likely that someone else had packed my case. Caerig had known I was bound for Bower Bay, but I simply couldn’t imagine whyshewould have a hand in this.
That left Rhama.
I recalled his too-long look at my departure, him standing guard outside Zennia’s room. He alone had seemed to understand how close we were. Perhaps he had taken pity on me after all, arranged for someone to share the details of her fate.
But why not simply seek me out and tell me? Much as I tried, in those long hours tossing and turning, I couldn’t square what I knew of Instructor Rhama—who’d been a stalwart presence at Arbenhaw for far longer than I’d been there—with the mystery, the clandestine unorthodoxy, of this note.
It was dark when we finally rattled into Port Rhorstin. The moons were close, almost touching—at the beginning of each month, one eclipsed the other—but tonight, their faces were swaddled in thin cloud. As I limped from our coach through the doorway of our last inn, the note crumpled small and hidden in my pocket, I saw only the dark outlines of gables and weather vanes and the uncanny glow of hanging lamps.
For the first time on our journey, I slept like the dead, the accumulated fatigue of four nights of poor sleep at last overcoming my racing thoughts. My grief, too, seemed finally to have blunted: no longer the raw, open wound of a few days ago but a yawning black hole I now teetered on the edge of.
The next morning, I woke late, groggy and disoriented. Daylight, dulled by a heavy blanket of cloud, filtered in through the window and beckoned me from bed. I opened the catch, pushed the casement wide, and with a sudden thrill felt the bracing briskness of the breeze, smelled salt on the air, heard the snapping of ships’ sails.
