“Easy, Mara.” He tugged gently on my fingers. “We’re meant to look like partygoers, not assassins.”
He was right, of course. I forced my muscles to relax and looped my arm through his. As we wandered toward the gambling rooms, his words flitted through my mind with every heartbeat, like starlight scattered across a dark sea:Our home. Our home. Our home.
Chapter 29
An hour later, we’d found no leads, I’d knocked six house guards unconscious and left them slumped in various dark corners, and even Gareth was beginning to look worried.
As we hurried down yet another quiet, carpeted hallway lined with portraits of dead Lemaires and elaborate wooden carvings of the Knotwood, I thought over Mother’s words for the hundredth time:A towering staircase. A pretty room and a pretty bed. A man with rings. A piano, and it’s making such a racket.
Evocative words, but the only towering staircase I’d seen since entering this wretched house was the one in the ballroom, and that part of the mansion was Gemma and Talan’s territory. No matter how far I stretched my senses, I couldn’t take in the whole house at once, and all I could really hear anyway was a faint din from the party.
And footsteps against the carpet, approaching steadily from around the corner up ahead.
I held out an arm, warning Gareth away. He fell back and stood flat against the wall. His hand hovered over the knife strapped to his hip, hidden under his coat. He gave me a sharp nod, and quick as a cat I raced ahead down the hallway and darted around the left corner. Thefootsteps belonged to a house guard on patrol—tall, broad-shouldered, quite obviously bored. I delivered one sharp blow to a spot between her shoulder blades, and she collapsed to the floor before she even got a chance to see me coming.
I carried her to a linen closet we’d passed, tucked her inside, and returned to Gareth.
“Another guard,” I muttered. “Let’s keep going.”
“That makes seven,” he said, joining me as we hurried down the now empty hallway. “Someone might start noticing something’s wrong if we dispose of too many more.”
“If it were just me, I could probably slip past them with no need for incapacitation.”
“If you’re implying that it might have been better to leave me safely at Kirsa’s house,” he said wryly, “I can’t say I disagree with you.”
In fact, Iwasstarting to think this very thing. The longer the night crept on, the more I worried about him, and the more I worried, the more distracted I became. Normally, my mind was clear and sharp as crystal during missions. No agitation, only calculations.
Tonight, however, I felt as though I was laden with precious, vulnerable cargo. Gareth could fight, certainly, but would he be able to see well enough to do so?
“I do wish you had your glasses,” I admitted.
“That makes two of us.”
More footsteps. I held out my arm and waited for Gareth to flatten himself against the wall, then hurried down the corridor, turned right at the next junction, and knocked the patrolling guard unconscious with a swift kick to his head.
And that makes eight, I thought grimly, hurrying back to Gareth. But he wasn’t where I’d left him. He was moving slowly back down the hallway, running his fingers over the wall with his head slightly bent as if listening hard to something.
I hurried to him, fighting the urge to scold him for wandering off. “What are you doing?”
“These wall carvings,” he murmured. “I’ve been pressed up against several of them now while you dispatched our guard friends, and they all look the same: twisting branches, leaves, the occasional animal. A lovely tribute to the Knotwood. But every ten feet is a random nonsense word tucked into the carvings. The letters are scrambled. But right here”—he touched a particular gnarl of wood—“this is anactualword. It saysenter.”
I squinted at it. “All I see are leaves.”
“It’s well hidden unless you can read Zelophar. Then it leaps out like a beacon.”
“Good thing you’re a brilliant Anointed sage with a mind like a steel trap who memorizes and files away everything he’s ever seen.”
“Yes, that helps too,” he said pleasantly.
Zelophar.The word sounded familiar. “Is that an Olden language?”
He nodded. “Believed to be the favored tongue of the gods. Various sites all over the world are marked with these characters—high mountain cliffs, excavated caves, the land where the five Cloisters now stand. Old places, places scholars agree were marked by the gods themselves.”
“How many people can read Zelophar?”
“Besides me? Two of my colleagues at the university. Certainly the five abbots.” He paused. “Thefourabbots, now.”
“And when were you going to tell me about all these hidden words you’ve been fondling?”
