"Yes."
"The Prophet Mothers are not."
"Willow seemed curious, but urgently so.”
“Does not surprise me. The others?” he asked.
“Dremma is uncertain. That's different from being certain she isn't." Edi-Veen adjusted his cloak. "Sraaak has reasons of her own for hoping I'm wrong."
He hadn't said that in the chamber. He wasn't sure he should have said it now. But Kra-May had trained him, which meant Kra-May had also taught him to say the true thing in the true company, and this was the truest company he had.
"Be careful with that thought," Kra-May said. "It may be correct. It is also the kind of thought that makes people careless."
"I know."
"Keep her safe." He said it simply, without ceremony. "Whatever she is or isn't — keep her safe. The rest will sort itself."
Edi-Veen nodded. They stood in the passage for a moment in the way they sometimes stood — not needing to fill the space with words, which was its own kind of communication.
Then Kra-May turned and walked back toward the main corridor, and Edi-Veen turned toward the chamber where the woman was waiting, and the passage between the two of them stretched in both directions into the low light, equal and irreversible.
She was standing in the center of the room when he came up through the floor, which told him she had heard the tribunal — or heard enough of it to know that standing near walls would give her away — and had decided to look like she hadn't been listening.
He respected that.
She was also dressed, which meant Dremma had moved efficiently, and she was looking at him with an expression that was working very hard to be neutral and mostly succeeding.
Her eyes, he noted for the second time, were an unusual color — a dark amber that the pink light made almost gold — and they were doing the same thing her posture was doing, which was collecting information while appearing to give nothing away.
She was, he thought, very good at that.
She was also, up close and dry and not in immediate danger of dying of cold, considerably more arresting than the loading dock had allowed him to register. He immediately set aside the irrelevant observation, for it didn’t provide any purpose at the moment.
"I will take you home," he said.
As expected, she asked her questions — his name, whether he'd been going to kill her, whether he would tell her what had happened. He answered what he could answer and was honest about the rest, which seemed to register with her in some way, though she didn't show it. When he told her she'd been here sixteen hours she went very still for just a moment, the stillness of someone processing an unexpected fact.
He noticed that too.
He held out the cloak. She took it, and pulled it around her shoulders. When she met his gaze again, her expression gave away nothing. No anger, no fear, nor any trust.
"All right," she said after a beat. "Take me home."
He led her to the transport panel and said nothing else, because there was nothing else he was permitted to say, and because the things he wasn't permitted to say were considerable enough that he needed the silence to keep them contained.
Keep her safe, Kra-May had said.
He intended to.
Chapter Five
Coreni
The transport panel was a circle of stone that didn't look like it moved until it did.
Edi-Veen stepped onto it and waited. Coreni stepped on after him, close enough that the cloak he'd given her brushed his arm. The circle descended smoothly, and the floor sealed above them with a sound like an exhaled breath — a soft pressure change that popped in her ears and told her, more clearly than anything else had, that she was going somewhere the ocean could reach.
Walls rose around them as they dropped. A chamber, narrow and dark, smelling of salt and old stone and something faintly metallic she couldn't name. She kept her eyes forward and her breathing even and did not mention that the walls were very close.
