“I told you once,” he rasped, trying to keep calm. “I am the one who keeps Wynn safe.”
“That is what you choose to be ... not what you are.”
“Does it matter?”
Hawes went silent for a while. “Did Wynn truly find Bäalâle Seatt?”
The sudden shock of her question numbed the last of Chane’s cunning. How had the premin even known what he and Wynn were up to the last time they had left this place? He had never been a skilled judge of people—only because he didn’t care about anyone besides himself and Wynn, for the most part. Something in Hawes’s tone and her stillness—and now that question—left him wondering.
Had he had misinterpreted what was happening here? Did Hawes genuinely want answers and see this as the only way to get them?
“Yes,” Chane answered.
He saw her reaction, though it was only the barest, briefest widening of her hazel eyes. Hawes wanted the truth for the sake of it, so unlike her counterparts on the Premin Council. If he was going save Wynn—if not himself—his only chance was to answer her.
“What were you seeking there?” Hawes asked.
“A device ... an orb of stone ... used by the Ancient Enemy. Wynn believes there are more, and she is determined to find them before minions of the Enemy do so first.” At this, Chane couldn’t stop, but bitterness leaked into his maimed voice. “She has done so on her own, as no one here sees fit to help her!”
Hawes blinked, but her eyes remained fixed on him. The motion was too much like that of an owl at rest, eyeing a mouse. But it had been a reaction, perhaps a startling one for this premin.
“Not entirely true,” she replied. “What purpose do these ... orbs ... serve?”
Hawes, like all on the council, must have read Wynn’s journal accounts of what had happened in the six-towered castle in the Pock Peaks. She knew at least of the first orb’s discovery. Did she also know of the one Chane had found in Bäalâle Seatt, the one Wynn had handed over to Ore-Locks?
“I do not know,” he answered. “The few who might are desperate to claim them, so I assume they have great power.”
“The few?” she repeated sharply.
Almost instantly, without the sound of a step, she closed on him ... close enough that he could have grabbed her if only he could have gotten free of the wall.
“The one called Most Aged Father among the elves of the Farlands,” Chane answered. “Minions of the Enemy ... perhaps some of the elves of this continent ... and Domin il’Sänke.”
Hawes’s eyes narrowed as she hissed, “Ghassan il’Sänke?”
The reaction confirmed one thing: Chane had warned Wynn more than once against trusting that Suman sage. That Hawes was shaken, even openly angered, by the foreign domin’s awareness of the orbs did not mean she was any more trustworthy.
What did Hawes want with the orbs?
Chane tried to turn away from the subject.
“Wynn has been forced to fight this out on her own!” he accused, suddenly unable to contain his anger. “Except for Shade and myself! Your council has been the most consistent obstacle in the way of the only one who has tried to do anything worthwhile in this.”
Hawes blinked slowly again, watching him. She did not offer any defense of her council.
Chane suspected the premin had already known half the answers to her questions. Was she simply testing him?
“Why did you break in here?” she asked. “To steal her away?”
Chane hesitated, uncertain. Would the truth cause Hawes to rouse the guards to check on Wynn? Hawes looked almost tense as she waited for his answer.
“Yes.”
Premin Hawes once again became the cold, calculating observer as she stared at him.
Fear washed through Chane that he had said too much.
Chapter 17
WYNN CREPT ALONG THE barracks behind Ore-Locks until they reached the courtyard’s eastern corner. Ore-Locks pushed her back as he inched out along the main building’s wall. He peered toward the gatehouse tunnel and finally straightened to wave her forward. There was no one else in sight, and Wynn scurried after him to the keep’s main double doors.
They slipped inside, finding themselves in the empty entryway where the passage leading to the library’s center doors met the main corridor along the inside of the building’s front. Wynn cringed a little at the cold lamp above the door, which exposed them too much.
“We are to meet Chane inside the library’s southeast door,” Ore-Locks whispered.
“This way,” Wynn answered, turning right and stepping past him.
Almost immediately, his large hand clenched the back of her cloak. He pulled her one-handed back behind himself, as if she weighed no more than a puppy.
“Stop doing that!” she growled.
“Shush!” he whispered, and then headed onward.
Trying to be quiet, they quickly made their way to where the next left turn led to the library’s southeast door. Once around the corner, they nearly ran for that door. Wynn exhaled in relief once they stood before it. This was going much more smoothly than she’d anticipated, and she gripped the door’s handle and twisted it.
It turned only a fraction of what it should and clacked softly to a stop.
“No!” she rasped through her teeth.
“Shush!” Ore-Locks warned again.
Wynn grabbed the handle with both hands and tried to twist it again, and still the door wouldn’t open. Her frustration turned to anger.
That damn Rodian—this had to be his doing. It wasn’t enough to lock her up. He had to lock up the whole keep.
She braced her feet, prepared to heave on the handle with all of her little body. Ore-Locks’s hand quickly closed over both of hers, and she glared at him. He only glared back. He was much better at it.
Too much noise, he mouthed.
Wynn stared at the door. Perhaps Ore-Locks could slip through the stone wall to get inside. Then again, he couldn’t take her with him, as he wasn’t as skilled in that as his brethren. Even Chane had difficulty in walking through stone with Ore-Locks, and Chane was dead.
“Chane could not have opened it, either—or it would be open,” Ore-Locks whispered. “We should head back and find another route, as planned.”
But he appeared hesitant as he glanced back up the passage.
If Wynn understood right, Chane would’ve left a glove outside the main doors if he couldn’t secure this path. There had been no glove. So where was Chane? She waved to Ore-Locks as she stepped back up the passage. Ore-Locks quickly followed, not letting her get ahead of him.
“There are two other entrances,” she whispered. “One to the north and one straight in from the entrance. Perhaps he got in through one of those and hasn’t had time to let us know somehow.”
Ore-Locks shook his head, his red ponytail switching across his broad shoulders.
“Maybe,” he answered. “We will check the center doors first, as they are nearest. Just remember that I cannot be seen by anyone but you.”
A part of her wanted to tell him to flee on his own, straight through the walls, now that he’d gotten her out of her room. After all she had put Ore-Locks through in their hunt for Bäalâle, she wasn’t about to have him suffer in being arrested with her. But for as far as this plan had gone, she doubted he would willingly leave her.
That he’d come to help her at all, at Chane’s request, left Wynn even more guilt ridden over the secret she’d kept from a tortured man who was a keeper of the honored dead of Dhredze Seatt. And stranger still ...
It appeared Chane had a friend in Ore-Locks. For as little as was known or believed in Wynn’s land concerning the undead, Ore-Locks, as a stonewalker, with their way of life, should hold any being like Chane as an enemy.