If Chap ever let such a memory slip out while Wayfarer was touching him ...
Leesil exchanged a worried glance with Magiere, and then he reached out to poke Wayfarer’s leg. Startled by that, she finally looked at him.
“Well, it could be a good thing,” he said wryly. “Chap can show you some things better than he can describe them with broken words pulled up from our memories. At least in that, the bothersome mutt has less reason to prattle in my head.”
Chap curled his jowls, and Wayfarer cast Leesil a reproving look—probably over what she considered to be his disrespect to a sacred majay-hì.
“I’m just saying,” Leesil added quickly, raising both hands in surrender.
Chapter Fourteen
When Wynn awoke the following morning, her dizziness was gone, but she still felt weak and tired, as if she hadn’t slept. She found Shade stretched out beside her on the bed, but facing the other way. Wynn sat up and stroked Shade’s head and noticed that Shade’s eyes were open and fixed on the room’s closed door. She wondered whether the dog had done that all night.
“No more time to lie about,” she said. “We have to make better progress after I messed things up yesterday.”
Pushing down the covers, Wynn reached for her sage’s robe on the bed’s end.
Jausiff would not get the better of her today. She knew his approach now: to go on offense and stay there. She could play that game herself. Once dressed, she tied her hair back, but when she went for the door, Shade growled softly, hopped from the bed, and cut her off.
Wynn was in no mood for this. “We have work to do. Now get out of the way.”
Shade didn’t budge, so Wynn stepped around her with almost complete certainty that the dog would not bite her and pull her back. She was thankful to be proven right. Though Shade snarled as she followed, Wynn stepped out and immediately saw something more was wrong.
In addition to a standard guard at each end of the passage, there was now a Suman guard in a long yellow tabard standing in front of Osha and Chane’s door.
What happened during the night?
With growing alarm, she walked up to the Suman blocking the second door along the passage. He was young and clean-shaven and stared straight over the top of her head.
“Please step aside,” she said. “I need to speak to my guards.”
He didn’t even look down, as well as acting as if he had heard nothing.
“You cannot keep me from my companions,” Wynn insisted. “Please move aside.”
He continued staring over the top of her head.
As Wynn looked around in frustration, her gaze stopped on the next door, the one to Nikolas’s room. She strode there, with Shade following closely, and knocked.
“Nikolas, may I come in?”
No one answered, and Wynn’s confusion and alarm grew. She tried the door’s handle and found it unlocked. Hesitantly she cracked it open.
“Nikolas?”
Again no answer, and she pushed the door inward to find both beds made and the room empty. Nikolas’s pack was still on the floor at the end of the far bed.
What was going on?
Turning around, she fixed on the Suman guard blocking Chane and Osha’s door. And she started toward him again.
Footsteps carried up the passage from the stairs, and then Nikolas stepped up and around the corner, with Aupsha right behind him. Both looked exhausted. At the sight of Wynn and Shade, Nikolas halted just short of Wynn’s room.
Looking over his shoulder at Aupsha, he said, “You have delivered me. You are dismissed.”
His tone was surprisingly cold, almost regal, and it left Wynn wondering what position Nikolas had played growing up here—perhaps not one of the nobility and yet not a servant. His manner was quite different from that of the young man she’d come to know at the guild.
Without a word or any visible reaction, Aupsha turned and left back down the stairs.
Nikolas walked right by the Suman guard and whispered to Wynn, “My room.”
Puzzled even more, she followed him in, and after Shade entered, she closed the door.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “Why is that Suman guard out there?”
Nikolas ran a hand over his face, and perhaps a bit of the old Nervous Nikolas resurfaced. “It seems Chane and Osha somehow slipped out of their room last night and went ... exploring. Chane was caught somewhere near the back of the keep, though not Osha, who came back on his own later. They are both in trouble.”
“Slipped out? Those idiots!”
Yes, Chane, always thinking he knew best, had a tendency to “go exploring,” but Osha should have known better. He’d understood that they could not give the duke a reason to throw them out—or so she’d thought. Then something else occurred to her.
“Nikolas ... how did you learn of this?”
“Sherie,” he answered, and then swallowed, looking miserable. “Try not to worry. She won’t let you be sent away—or at least she’ll do what she can. I did what you asked, and I tried to speak to her, but apparently Captain Holland was informed of Chane’s and Osha’s wanderings ... and he informed Sherie. There’s tension between the keep guards and these new Sumans, who’ve been here only a few moons.”
Wynn found that suspicious, but she had more important questions. “Did you learn anything else from the duchess, anything about how the message was sent and who carried it?”
Her persistence with that one question might soon be suspicious as well, but she had to ask.
“Not much,” Nikolas answered, with a shake of his head. “It’s all so strange. Either she doesn’t know or won’t tell me, but I get the impression she’s at a loss for how it was done.” He glanced away. “It’s ... difficult to speak with her, but at least she thinks I’m here to help Karl.”
“What else did she say?”
The pain in Nikolas’s face faded slightly as he frowned. “My father decided to send for me while he and Aupsha were in a self-imposed isolation. Apparently they’d gone into the villages to see if they could help. When they returned, Karl ordered the guards to open the gate for them, but then he had a fit. He was so angry that my father placed himself and Aupsha in a quarantine to end the matter.”
“So the duke didn’t know they had left the grounds ... or how?”
Nikolas shook his head again. “I would guess not.”
Wynn found that another odd puzzle, but, not wishing to interrupt Nikolas’s thoughts any further, she remained silent.
“While they were locked away,” he continued, “servants left their meals by the door. One night my father spoke through the door and asked a servant to bring Sherie. Of course she came, but when she arrived, she found a small paper-wrapped package outside the door. My father asked her through the door to take it to the north wall and throw it over.”
“Wait—what?—throw it ... ?” Wynn began, and then said, “Never mind; go on.”
“She did as he asked, but why would he ask this? It must have contained the message for me and the one for Premin Hawes, but how could anyone know it was there, outside the wall? The only people who could have were Sherie, my father, and perhaps Aupsha, since she was locked away with my father.”
Wynn sank onto the bed nearer the door. What she’d heard did explain how Jausiff got the message past the gate guards but not how it was retrieved and delivered to Calm Seatt. Aupsha had the right height for the messenger and the would-be thief who breached the Stonewalkers’ underworld. But there were others here of the same height and build, and she had been locked away with the master sage.
“I’m sorry,” Nikolas said. “I want to help my father with Karl, but that seems to be all Sherie knows.”