“Damari is a northern name.”
“Giving her a name won’t change her crimes,” Toran whispered.
“No, but it might explain them.”
Toran nodded, following her line of thought. “Hunting someone is all about where they’re going and where they’ve been.”
She lightly tapped his shoulder with her fist. “Tell me.”
“They’re guard IDs.”
She started. That had been the last thing she’d expected him to say. Her hand sprang open, the coins sliding between the lines in her palm. They stared down at them.
“Show me,” she breathed.
Toran turned his hand over so his palm cupped the back of her hand. His touch was gentle and intimate, and she was suddenly glad they were in this tight space together. Alone. So no one else could see the way this simple action of laying his hand against hers made her cheeks blaze with heat.
With his other hand, he flipped one of the coins over so both showed the side with the King’s face. He pointed to a spot on the coin.
“You see there? On the King’s collar?” he asked.
She brought her hand closer to her face. She squinted. “Are those numbers?”
“Yes,” he said. “They correspond to a member of the King’s Guard. We each get a coin with a unique number upon our graduation. When the four members of my legion died in Aeos, I brought two of the coins back to their families.”
“What of the other two?”
Shame flickered through the sorrow on his face. “I couldn’t get to them.”
She understood. Those bodies—his friends—and their coins were gone. There was nothing left for him to retrieve in Aeos.
His ring burned a hole in her other pocket. The trust Toran must have needed to lend her something precious to him. She reached for his hand, pulling it out from under her own, and dropped the coins into his palm. Her fingers lingered in the dips between his knuckles. It wasn’t the same sort of trust. But it was all she could offer.
She guided Toran’s fingers, curling her own overtop until he’d formed a fist around the coins. She could feel the rapid flutter of his pulse.
“Where did you get these coins?” Toran asked. “And please don’t tell me you stole them.”
She felt her lips twitch. “While I admit that is a valid question, Captain, I didn’t steal them. They were beside two of the bodies. I think she left them for us to find.”
Toran shook his head, his hair falling over his forehead. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would she go through the trouble of searching the pockets of the guards she killed for their coins only to leave them in the street once she found them?”
She thought of the pickpockets in the Ditch. “Why does anyone do anything? For money. These coins do look an awful lot like gadots.”
“You think the Witch is killing people just to rob them?”
Once said out loud, she knew it wasn’t true. The kills were too precise and too ritualistic for theft to be their motivation. If she were going to steal money from people, she wouldn’t choose guards as her marks.
“No,” she admitted. She recalled the night of Mikaud’s murder. He’d still been alive when she came across the attack. Damari had killed the three guards in front of her, then run. She’d had no time to search each of their pockets. A thought struck her. “You say each of their numbers corresponds to a guard.”
Toran nodded.
“So there must be some sort of registry with all the numbers and the guards’ names, right?”
“Of course. It’s kept in the castle.”
“Can you access it?”
“Why?”
