She had most definitely not expected a simple answer. She had never gotten a simple answer more than a handful of times in all the years she had known them.
So when she sent the message out, and sat for a moment with her mind empty and her hand still clasping her bracelet, it was not with any expectation of something more than a moment of respite before T'fyrr emerged from his bath.
But she got far more than she had reckoned on.
The spell of music and message she had sent out had been a delicate, braided band of silver and shadow. The reply caught her unawares and wrapped her in a rushing wind, spun her around in a dizzying spiral of steel-strong starlight, surrounded her with bared blades of ice and moonbeams, and sang serenely into her heart in a voice of trumpets and the pounding sea.
And all of it, a simple, single word.
YES.
When T'fyrr emerged from the bathroom, he found her still shaking with reaction and the certainty that if their reply had been so ready and so simple, there must be a reason. So she sat, and trembled, and she could not even tell him why. She could only smile and tell him it was nothing to worry about.
She moved through the day holding onto each moment, savoring every scrap of time with him_but trying her best to act as if nothing had changed between them. He knew there was something wrong, of course, but she was able to convince him that it was only her own fears getting the best of her. She told him that she would be all right; and she bound herself up in the rags of her courage and went on with all their plans.
But when the blow came, as she had known it would, it still came as a shock.
He had spent the night at the Palace, hoping for a summons from the High King, but not really expecting one. She was expecting him in midmorning, as always; she sensed his wild surge of delight as he took to the air, and went to the roof to await his arrival.
She shaded her eyes with her hand and peered upwards into the blue and cloudless sky, even though she knew she would never see him up there. It would take the eyes of an eagle to pick out the tiny dot up there; if she'd had a hawk on her wrist, it might have looked up and hunched down on her fist, feathers slicked down in fear, all of its instincts telling it that a huge eagle flew up there. Nothing less than a hawks keen senses would find T'fyrr in the hot blue sky, until the moment he flattened out his dive into a landing.
But she always looked, anyway.
She was looking up when the blow struck her heart, and she collapsed onto the baked surface of the roof, breath caught in her throat, mouth opened in a soundless cry of anguish.
It was pain, the mingling of a hundred fears, a wash of dizziness and a wave of darkness. She could not breathe_could not see_
She blacked out for a moment, but fought herself free of the tangling shroud of unconsciousness, and dragged herself back to reality with the sure knowledge that her worst nightmare had come to pass.
They had taken T'fyrr, snatched him out of the sky by magic.
And there was nothing that anyone could have done to prevent it, for the sky was the one place where they had thought he was safe.
T'fyrr was gone.
"You're sure?" Tyladen said for the tenth time. She bit her lip, and said nothing. She'd already told him everything there was to say, at least three times over.
But Harperus, who had a listening device of his own, growled at both of them from his room in the Palace, his voice coming through a box on Tyladen's desk. "Of course she is sure, you fool! Didn't I just tell you that he left here an hour ago? He went straight from my balcony_and he was going directly to Freehold! If Nightingale says he was kidnapped, then you can take it as fact!"
"B-but magic_" Tyladen stuttered. "How can you kidnap someone with something that doesn't_"
"These people believe that what we do is magic, child," Harperus interrupted. "If you must, assume it's a different technology; for all we know, that's exactly what it is! Just accept it and have done! Nightingale, what can we do, if anything?"
She had thought this out as best she could, given that her stomach was in knots, her throat sore from the sobs she would not give way to, and her heart ready to burst with grief and fear. "I don't know yet," she said honestly. "I'm not certain how you can combat magic. I have to do something myself_I was promised help from the Elves, and I'm going to get that help when I am through talking to you. I think that I can find T'fyrr myself, or at least find the general area where he's being held. After that_I may need some of your devices, if there are any that could find exactly where he is in a limited area." She had some vague notion there were devices that could probably do that, some Deliambren equivalent of a bloodhound, but that those devices probably had a limited range. They couldn't scour the whole city for her, but if she could give them a small area, they might be able to narrow down the search to a specific building. "I do need someone to watch the High King and the Advisors around him. Father Ruthvere will provide sanctuary if we are being hunted from the Palace, or by someone connected with the Palace, but I need to be warned if someone comes up with a charge against us. If you can think of anything_"
"I will take care of it," Harperus promised. "Now_you go do what you can."
"I will_" Then her voice did break on a sob as she told him the one thing she did know. "Old Owl, wherever he is, he's hurt. He's hurt badly. I don't know how badly, but all I can feel from him is pain_"
Harperus swore in his own language, a snarl of pure rage. She had never heard him so angry in her life.
"Go_" he urged. "This youngster and I will work together."
She rubbed at her burning eyes with the back of her hand, got up from her seat, pushed open the office door half-blinded with tears, and fled up the stairs to her room. She had not yet called in her promise from the Elves, and she needed to prepare the room before she could do that.
The Elves did not care for the human cities and did not like to walk among the artificial buildings, but it seemed that for her sake, they would put their dislikes aside. She put the bed up into the wall, and pushed all the furniture out of the way. She put her harps in the bathroom. She swept every vestige of dust and dirt from the floor so that it was as white and shiny as the day the surface was laid. Only then did she lay ready the circle with a thin trickle of blue sand on the white floor, inscribing a pattern that the Elven mage she had been pledged service from would be able to use as a target.
Then she stood outside the circle, clasped her hand around her bracelet, and let her heart cry out a wordless wail of anguish and a plea for help.
The air in her room vibrated with a single, deep tone, like the groaning of the earth in an earthquake; the floor sang a harmonic note to the air, the walls a second, the ceiling a third, the whole room humming with a four-part chord of dreadful power.
Then the blue sand exploded upward in a puff of displaced air.
She did not recognize the Elven mage who stood where the circle had been, blinking slowly at her with his amber eyes slitted against the light. His hair was as amber as his eyes; his clothing of deep black silk, a simple tunic and trews without ornamentation or embroidery of any kind. By that, she knew he was more powerful than any Elven mage she had ever yet met; only a mage of great power would be confident enough to do without the trappings of power.