The duchess stopped at the first door and gestured inside as she turned to Wynn. “Mistress ... ?”
“Hygeorht,” Wynn supplied. “Journeyor Wynn Hygeorht.”
“Of course, Journeyor, you may have this first room,” the duchess went on. “Your bodyguards can take the second, and young Master Columsarn the third and smallest ... for his own.”
Chane detected a note of spite in her designation of the last room, as if Nikolas was only a guest here and she meant to remind him. The young sage did not respond. Chane, however, fought against a sudden urge to balk at the arrangements as an unpleasant realization hit him.
Wynn, as a female emissary of the guild, could certainly not share a room with one of her guards. As the counselor’s son, Nikolas also should have a private room. And it was unusual that two “bodyguards”—which was the ruse Chane and Osha played—would even be housed here instead of in the barracks. So the duchess probably thought she was offering a favor by housing them inside the keep. That meant he would have to share a room with the elf.
The very thought pushed him to refuse, until Wynn caught his eye and shook her head once, very slightly.
“That will be fine, my lady,” she said. “Thank you.”
Appearing relieved, as if an unpleasant duty here was done, the duchess swept back down the passage for the stairs. “A meal will be ready soon,” she said over one shoulder.
Chane glanced uncertainly at Wynn, but Nikolas spoke up first. “I think ... I will get settled.”
As the young sage headed for the last door up the passage, Wynn looked to each of her other companions. Once Nikolas entered his room, she tilted her head toward the nearest open door, her room.
“Come, help me get settled,” she said loudly, and then slipped inside with Shade right behind her.
Both Chane and the elf went for the door at the same time. Chane halted at one side, but Osha back-stepped and stood silently watching him. With a glare, Chane raised a hand, ushering the elf to go ahead. Osha did not move.
Wynn’s harsh whisper carried from within the room. “Both of you, get in here ... now!”
Chane stepped in, immediately meeting Wynn’s irritated expression. Shade grumbled and hopped up on one of the narrow beds. Even when Wynn eyed Osha the same way as the elf entered and shut the door, it was not satisfying to Chane. He stood waiting for Wynn’s rebuke over the standoff in the passage, but she only looked away with a shake of her head.
The room was simple but serviceable, with two plain single beds—one near the front wall by the door and one at the rear. A worn, short table stood by each, and a water pitcher and basin rested on the nearest one.
The only light in the room was from the candle lantern that Wynn held, and she set that on the rear empty table as she dropped her pack and staff on the far bed.
“What is going on in this place?” she asked suddenly.
Chane held up a hand to halt any further comment. He stepped back and cracked the door. From what he could see—and hear and smell—the Suman guards had left, but a keep guard remained at each end of the passage, one near the stairs and another at the other end, where an archway led to somewhere else on this level.
Chane quietly closed the door. “It appears we are not to go walking around on our own.”
Osha frowned. “Many guards are not ... normal?” he asked in Belaskian.
Chane realized the elf would have little experience with human castles or keeps or the ways of human nobility.
“No, the number is normal,” Wynn answered, “but they aren’t usually used to keep guests locked inside their rooms.” She sank down beside Shade on the far bed. “At least we can speak freely in here.”
That was true. Without Nikolas, they could speak as they pleased.
“I have not been long in this land,” Chane said. “Are Suman guards often hired for local forces?”
“Not that I know of,” Wynn answered. “And what did you make of Jausiff’s servant, Aupsha? She’s not Suman, though I’ve heard of other peoples farther south described like her.”
“I cannot place her, either,” he answered. “But she, as connected to the duchess and the master sage, might be the likely messenger that we seek.”
Wynn shook her head. “Not if she was sequestered for fear of plague after she and Nikolas’s father went into the villages.”
“One of ... Suman guards could be ... messenger,” Osha put in. “They move free in keep.”
“Maybe,” Wynn said. “But they appear to be more the duke’s men than the duchess’s. Still, it is possible.” She turned to Shade. “Did you pick up anything from any of them, some memory as a hint?”
Shade did not even lift her head from her paws as she huffed twice for no.
“Well, this is where we start,” Wynn went on. “We need to establish the identity of the messenger, if it was someone inside the keep.” She looked at Chane. “I don’t need to consult your sense of deception to know that everyone in that hall was lying about something.”
Yes, Chane had slowly developed his “talent,” though such differed for each Noble Dead. At a guess, some abilities depended upon who the person had been in life.
He had lived on the fringe of Belaski’s gentry and nobility, where truth was to be guarded, an asset not shared except for advantage and gain. What had only recently manifested was his ability to sense deceptions and lies in spoken words, if he focused and let the beast of his inner nature sound its warnings to him. Many lies had passed in the main hall, though there was one that had made his inner self rattle its chains.
“Good place ... start,” Osha said, still struggling with his Belaskian. “Who lie to who ... and why?”
“Well, the duchess seemed to be taking a good deal upon herself,” Wynn said, “if she sent the message while Jausiff and Aupsha were in quarantine. Both letters that arrived at the guild were written in the same hand, and since Nikolas never mentioned anything odd in that, we can assume Jausiff wrote both of those. So either the duchess is covering for Jausiff or she somehow got the letters and sent them without the duke’s knowledge.”
“She did not send the letters herself,” Chane put in.
Wynn glanced up. “You’re certain?”
That was the moment the beast had stirred inside of Chane.
“When she told Karl that she sent them for Jausiff, she lied. Yes, I am certain.”
Wynn eyed him a moment longer and then nodded.
“That leaves Jausiff as the one who arranged for the delivery,” she said. “Somehow he found a way to send the letters through someone, but there’s another problem in that. We don’t know if that person was the one who went all the way to Calm Seatt ... or if the letters were handed off to another messenger. Anyone here traveling that far would be missing for so long as to be noticed. The duke would know that much by now, and he was certainly surprised by all of this.”
“And we do not know if a messenger has even returned,” Chane added, “be it one from the keep or a second one confirming the delivery. There is also the need to confirm if the messenger and infiltrator at Dhredze Seatt are one and the same.”
Wynn’s expression fell.
Chane was uncertain whether her sudden frown was for the whole tangled problem, or his merely stating it, or both.
He understood and shared her fears, for the messenger and/or would-be thief was the key to all this. Someone had breached the dwarven underworld, the realm of the Stonewalkers, even though the infiltrator had not reached the orb of Earth. There was the fear that an agent of the Ancient Enemy had learned where they had hidden an orb. If Jausiff was connected to such an agent, then he could not be trusted, and the master sage’s agenda had to be rooted out.