“Where are the female sage ... and her wolf?” she asked.
Osha realized his mistake. Except for Nikolas, Wynn was the only other visitor who had been in the kitchen with him. And Osha had come alone in looking for Aupsha, one of two people seen in the passage last night.
He should not have focused so suddenly on the elderly sage. When he did not answer, Aupsha’s eyelids drooped, half closed as she watched him.
She leaped backward.
Before Osha could charge, Aupsha ducked around a support post laden with gear and straps for wagons and horses. A sudden breeze rushed into his face and blew his hair upward. An instant later a foot struck his lower back.
Osha lashed back to grab a booted ankle, and pain exploded in his left temple as his head whipped under a blow.
He lost consciousness before he hit the stable floor.
As Jausiff pulled the door wider, Wynn walked into the master sage’s chamber and tried to regain her composure. There was too much at stake for her to be rattled so quickly. She couldn’t let him put her on the defensive this time.
A few steps into the room, she stopped with Shade close by her side. As she heard the door close, she buried her fingers in the fur of Shade’s neck.
“Would you like some tea brought up?” Jausiff asked, as he rounded her toward his cluttered desk.
“No, thank you.”
His bed in the corner was unmade, and he slipped around the desk to where four of the texts she’d brought him lay open. She watched as he closed them one by one. Had she awakened him by knocking, or had he been delving into what Premin Hawes had sent him?
“I heard two of your companions had an outing last night,” he said casually, not even looking up.
Wynn stiffened and then shook off that reaction; that was his mistake, not hers, and it gave her an opening.
“They said the same thing about you.”
Jausiff raised only his eyes, not quite closing the last book, and Wynn rushed on before he had a chance to think.
“What was the device you were carrying? What were you and Aupsha looking for in that back passage?”
She didn’t really expect an answer, and she didn’t need one. As Shade’s neck muscles tightened beneath her hand, an image appeared in her head.
Wynn—Jausiff—stood in a passage so dark that a nearby pale light barely revealed a ruddy metal object in her hand. Her—his—hand obscured the object too much, though its ends stuck out beyond his closed grip. Something about the metal itself seemed familiar. Were there markings on it?
She—he—was bent over it and staring at the passage’s stone floor and creeping along in small steps. He then leaned even more, lowering the object, and ...
The memory vanished.
Wynn was careful not to flinch, as either Shade lost that memory or Jausiff dismissed it.
“Why hold the object so near the floor?” she asked.
Still he stalled. Perhaps he wondered or worried how much had been seen by her companions but did not know that he had just shown her and Shade even more.
Jausiff recovered, flipping the last book closed. “That object is just an old keepsake, gifted by a metaologer I once knew at the guild. It locates other objects made of metal, and the duchess recently lost a favored ring.”
“In a back passage with only a padlocked side door?” Wynn asked dryly. “Maybe she dropped it on her way down below the keep?”
Wynn heard the door’s handle ratchet behind her. Shade twisted backward out of her grip as the door slammed open against the wall, and Wynn started to turn.
A yelp broke Shade’s snarl as Jausiff shouted, “No, wait!”
Before Wynn could finish turning, someone’s hand clamped over her mouth, jerked her head up and back, and she felt an edge of cold steel press suddenly against her throat.
Osha groggily pushed up off the straw-strewn stable floor. When he touched the side of his head, it only made the pain worse, and he struggled to his feet.
Aupsha was nowhere to be seen.
He remembered that she had somehow gotten behind him, though it should not have been possible. He should have spotted her coming around either side of the tackle and post, but he had not. He had felt only the strikes that came at him from behind, but before that ...
There had been a sharp breeze, like in the passage last night.
Even so, he had no doubt of where she had gone.
Stumbling out of the stable, Osha made it halfway across the courtyard before finding his feet enough to run. He slowed only long enough to open one of the keep’s front doors and then bolted toward the main hall. But once there, he stalled at a voice.
“I don’t know what to do.” The duchess stood near the burning hearth with Nikolas nearby as she went on. “He has always been difficult, but at least I understood him. Now he is a stranger.”
“I’m so sorry,” Nikolas breathed, “but I don’t know what—”
“Duchess!” Osha shouted as he ran for the stairs. “Nikolas! To your father’s room—now!”
Wynn took shallow breaths and tried not to move, feeling a hand over her mouth and a blade against her throat. Someone tall was pressed up against her back, but she hadn’t seen who it was.
Shade was snarling, her claws raking the stone floor as she came around into Wynn’s view.
Jausiff stumbled around his desk as he shouted in a language Wynn didn’t know. The words sounded somewhat close to modern Sumanese.
A memory rose in Wynn’s mind as she found Shade’s eyes fixed on her. She recalled the first time she had seen a tall, deeply dark-skinned woman come out of the keep into the courtyard. Shade’s gaze shifted slightly, and Wynn knew it was Aupsha behind her.
Aupsha shouted in the same tongue the master sage had used.
It wasn’t hard to guess that Jausiff ordered her to stop what she was doing, but nothing came of it. Instead, Wynn stumbled, trying to keep her feet and avoid being cut as Aupsha sidestepped, perhaps to get her back away from the open door.
Shade mirrored their movements, and Wynn raised a hand to hold Shade off.
“Stop this—it accomplishes nothing!” Jausiff commanded, this time in Numanese.
“Lock the door,” Aupsha answered likewise.
“And then you will release her?”
No answer came, and Jausiff finally headed for the open door. Aupsha turned, forcing Wynn to do so as the master sage passed. Jausiff gripped the door to push it closed ... and it bucked out of his grip as he stumbled back.
Osha lunged into the room with a dagger in his hand. He halted at the sight of Wynn’s situation, and his gaze shifted up above her head.
“Let her go!” he ordered.
Shade’s snarling grew louder, and the blade at Wynn’s throat pressed until it made her skin sting. Jausiff stepped between Wynn and Osha, though he flinched when Shade snapped at him.
“Put your weapons away, both of you!” the old sage commanded.
Neither Osha nor Aupsha moved.
Wynn wasn’t exactly afraid—though she knew she should be. In her searches for the orbs, she had been in worse positions than this.
Osha was positioned squarely before the door, and he’d left it open without even looking back. The sounds of fast footsteps and voices carried in from the passage outside. Sherie and then Nikolas, followed by Captain Holland and two standard guards in gray tabards, rushed in as Osha shifted around the room to stand beside Shade’s left hip.
The cluttered chamber became quite crowded.
Osha held his dagger out as all of Shade’s hackles rose.
Wynn hoped no one would be stupid enough start something now.
The duchess looked at Osha and then Aupsha and finally at Wynn with her mouth still covered by Aupsha’s free hand.