Rodian was careful not to let his expression betray him, though his stomach rolled.
“Find her.” Leäfrich said, and then strode for the doors. “Tristan!”
The doors opened, and the prince exited without slowing. The captain of the Weardas stood waiting, his hand still on one door’s handle. But Rodian stared after the prince until Leäfrich was gone from sight.
Sworn oaths or not, one thing had been made crystal clear: Rodian had no choice but to hunt down Wynn Hygeorht. He hated this tangled web more than he’d hated anything in life. Nearly dropping from exhaustion, he realized how badly he needed sleep.
As he started for the doors, several memories nagged him. He knew he couldn’t rest until he’d checked the one place where Wynn had commonly been found in the past whenever there was trouble.
Chapter 20
PAWL WASN’T READY TO go home, so he stopped by his shop. The Upright Quill was long closed up, all of his employees gone home, and he unlocked the front door and stepped inside.
In his mind’s eye, he still saw the strangely dark-skinned elven archer, dead and broken against a rooftop chimney, as Wynn Hygeorht fled the guild with two highly skilled infiltrators.
But how was any of this connected to the translation project?
He paused in the dark at the front counter, distracted by a stack of recently scribed pages awaiting approval. Teagan should’ve seen to those before closing, but the old scribe master had been suffering from sniffles and chills the past few days. Perhaps that had worsened.
Pawl reached for the top sheet. His hand stopped, fingers poised above the stack. He raised his eyes first, then his head, peering about in the dark shop.
It was past the midnight bell, yet he felt something ... alive. Stepping back, he turned sideways and glanced at the nearest of the two windows, one to each side of the front door.
Faint light from some outer street lantern seeped through cracks of the left-side inner shutters, but he sensed nothing nearby outside. Quietly, he flipped the counter’s hinged section, stepped behind it, and then pushed through the swinging doors into the large back workroom.
Weak light glowed from the workroom’s left side, and he walked past tables and stools to the back of the room. Glancing toward the one oil lantern still lit and nearly out of fuel, he found Imaret. She was fast asleep on a high stool, her head resting on her arms atop a small pile of papers on her slanted scribing desk.
Pawl stepped closer, hovering over the small girl left alone in his shop.
What was she doing here so late, and why hadn’t Teagan seen her home? The situation was not only annoying and against his rules but unsafe should Imaret wake and head home alone. There were lurkers in the city like none he could remember. Some watched the guild, waiting to murder.
Yet Imaret, like Nikolas, was still foolish enough to ...
Centuries had come and gone—so many that Pawl couldn’t remember exactly when he’d last foolishly become concerned beyond necessity with any mortal. Even those few were now fragments, barely clearer than his oldest memories.
An old, one-legged sailor relegated to tending a secondhand shop ...
Some pompous princeling too eager to flee his family’s disinterest ...
A dog so obsessed with protecting its owner’s property and family that even after the home was abandoned, it still stood guard ...
A woman of insane wisdom ... a vicious elven priest among the trees ... a slave from a distant land, a brigand, a village elder, a would-be tyrant ...
And now a child scribe of singular talent, and a young sage touched too soon by death.
Pawl could not truly remember his mother or father. They were but faint, blurred images in his mind. He didn’t remember if he’d had siblings, let alone been the elder brother of a younger sister. But had he been Imaret’s brother, he would have already come hammering upon the shop door, looking for her.
Still, Pawl grew angry with himself.
This was his city, his territory, and all within it were fixtures of that setting, their necessity varying by degrees. All were impermanent—everything was impermanent but him. All else passed, leaving only loss. Even when memory of loss alone decayed over time, it left another sense of loss, knowing something had been forgotten.
He could not endure more such attachments.
“Imaret,” he said, and then louder when she did not stir. “Imaret!”
She opened her eyes, blinked, and rolled her head to look up at him.
“Master?” she whispered.
“What are you doing here?”
She sat up too quickly, teetering for an instant atop the stool, and then looked about as if uncertain where she was.
“I ... I wanted to finish this,” she stuttered, and picked up the top sheet on her desk.
Pawl did not take it, though he saw what it was: a moon’s-end report for the accountant who often patronized the shop. The fastidious outsider always requested Imaret to do the transcription. Though she had no extraordinary talent for numbers, it didn’t matter; one sound read of the characters on a page and she could duplicate them from memory.
“Master Teagan was feeling worse,” Imaret rambled on. “I told him I could finish, that it wouldn’t take me long, and I’d get home quick enough before dark, but I ... must’ve dozed off ... didn’t hear the bells.”
“Your parents will be worried,” Pawl returned, “if they haven’t come looking for you already and you didn’t hear them knocking. I will be the one to answer for this.”
“No, you don’t need to ... I mean, yes, you should take me home, but you don’t need to explain anything. They won’t ... be worried.”
Her gaze shifted nervously away and she blinked again.
This was the second time the girl alluded to something wrong at home. Pawl had far too much on his mind, with no wish to be entangled in the personal affairs of his employees. But still ...
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Imaret remained quiet for a moment. Pawl folded his arms as she purposefully avoided meeting his eyes.
“Early this winter,” she began quietly, “we found out that Mama was going to have another baby. The three of us were so happy.... But she’s not young, and something happened. She lost the baby this last new moon. She was sad for some days, and then more days, and then she didn’t get out of bed anymore.”
Imaret sniffed before going on.
“Papa tries to make it better. That’s all he does now, but it doesn’t help. No one cooks food anymore ... no one knows when I’m there ... or not there.”
Pawl remained perfectly still and silent. Rationally, he should say nothing at all, for this was not his burden as long as Imaret remained functional in his shop. But still ...
“I am older than you think,” he began. “I have seen such things before. It may improve.”
She tilted her head to one side, peering up at him. “You think?”
“Perhaps.” He paused, trying to find a comparison. “Like a sharp paper cut when you are handling freshly trimmed sheets, the wound is quick and startling. The pain lingers long after. But with enough time, it is nothing but scar and memory, and even ...”
He stalled a bit too long. “And even these can fade ... with time.”
Imaret appeared somewhat consoled, though his words were certainly no answer for a parent’s neglect. They were all that Pawl could offer without becoming more involved. She climbed off the high stool, prepared to leave before he had even said so.
“What time is it?” Imaret asked.
“Past midnight. Set your quills and brushes to soak. Your parents may be more worried than you assume.”