“Quiet—all of you!” Brot’an whispered.
Leesil rose with Leanâlhâm, who peered wide-eyed around him toward the door. Chap turned to find Brot’an poised there, listening. Shouting grew louder outside, as if the crowd had followed into the alley.
“Where’d it go?” someone called.
“I don’t see it. Maybe—”
“Who chucked that pigeon crate?”
“Never mind! Some of you get back to the street. Block the alley ends and check the cutways. That beast can’t have gotten out of here.”
The voices continued longer amid grumbles and arguments. In the momentary respite, Chap’s numb relief at being rescued faded. All he had gained was of little use. Wynn was a prisoner. There was an undead in this city. And Shade had been very close to it.
As the shouting outside began to fade, Leesil headed for the stairs, urging Leanâlhâm along and up to their room.
“What did you do to cause all that?” he whispered.
Chap snarled at him this time. Leesil was no one to talk when it came to causing complications. And what good had his filthy excuse for a disguise accomplished?
A pigeon feather suddenly fell off Chap’s head and down the bridge of his muzzle. He wanted to bite Leesil—bite him hard!
Én’nish landed silently on the inn’s roof, and heard voices coming from an open window. She moved as close to the roof’s edge as possible and flattened her body to listen. She spoke fluent Belaskian. Her first master had been an excellent teacher.
“All right, you. What went wrong?”
Én’nish stiffened, but not at the anger in those words. She knew that voice.
Hatred for Léshil took all of Én’nish’s reason. Grief for her lost Groyt’ashia filled her with cold shudders. She breathed slowly through the pain and the maddened sickness it brought.
If only Léshil were alone ... if only she could kill him, here and now.
She willed herself to focus only on her purpose. While she may have missed a chance to take the majay-hì to Fréthfâre, she had gained something far more important. She had found where their quarry was hiding.
A moment of silence followed Leesil’s question.
“Did you learn anything about Wynn?”
That voice returned the rest of Én’nish’s clarity. It was the monster, the one called Magiere. Three low barks answered her.
“You don’t know?” Magiere returned sharply. “Leanâlhâm told me you saw her up in a window.”
“She did?” Leesil asked.
Én’nish lost the next few sentences, for their voices grew too faint, but her body twitched slightly at that name: Leanâlhâm. Gleann’s mixed-blood descendant was here. But how? Was she the one who had accompanied the other majay-hì into the guild’s castle?
“Is Wynn a prisoner?” Leesil asked.
Én’nish focused on that question. She knew of the female sage only too well, had once even been forced to help guard the deceitful human through her people’s forest. She had hated the little human even more upon learning that the sage knew their language. No human should be able to speak the language of her people.
Another silence followed, and then Chap uttered one low bark. So far, Brot’ân’duivé had not said a word, and neither had Leanâlhâm, if she was in there.
“All right, that’s it,” Leesil said. “No more skulking about. We’re getting Wynn out of there.”
“Finally,” Magiere put in.
“Agreed,” came a deeper voice.
Én’nish flinched at the sound of Brot’ân’duivé. Her hatred of him, traitor that he was, almost matched her bloodlust toward Léshil, but she also feared him.
“We need more information,” Brot’ân’duivé went on. “Anything about the interior of the grounds and layout of the keep, and a sense of guard positions and movements.”
A new voice broke in, male, lowly murmuring something in Elvish. Én’nish was tempted to hang over the eaves to hear more. She strained to listen, but the words were too soft.
Brot’ân’duivé had someone else with him.
Én’nish could not place the voice, but there had been an archer aiding the traitorous greimasg’äh in the skirmish last night. Who among the Anmaglâhk would serve Brot’ân’duivé? Another dissident, likely. Before she even completed that thought, someone closed the window, and all the voices became too muffled to hear.
Én’nish lay there a little longer, pondering. Magiere and Leesil had returned to get the sage after wherever they had been gone for so long. Wynn Hygeorht was now a prisoner among her own kind, and this small group’s next purpose was to free her. As long as they followed this course, they—including Magiere—could be taken in the open at night, either before or after retrieving the sage.
It would not be a happenstance encounter this time. Én’nish and her comrades would be able to watch and wait, prepared. And Magiere would not be the only one out in the open. Léshil would never let his love go anywhere without him. If not for Most Aged Father’s wishes for that monster ...
Én’nish sank into grief again, where lost love bred only hate and bloodshed. It would be a far greater vengeance if Léshil had to watch his love die before she killed him. She ached to give him even one instant of the torment that he had given her for a lifetime ... before he died.
The inn’s back door opened again.
Én’nish slid back up the roof’s slope until only her eyes breached the edge and looked down.
Brot’ân’duivé and Léshil exited into the alley, and she silently crawled along the roof to watch them head out along the cutway into the street. Brot’ân’duivé stopped cold, looking around, and Én’nish quickly pulled back and lost sight of them.
Had he heard or somehow sensed her? She did not look over the edge again, and instead crawled across the roof. She rose to a crouch and listened, but amid the sounds of the street, she could not tell which way they had gone. Rising, she ran. Her steps made no more sound than autumn leaves falling upon the shingles. As she leaped to the next rooftop, she never faltered in her flight to return to her own and report all that she had learned.
Though her hatred of Leesil and Brot’ân’duivé still poisoned her heart and mind, Én’nish was loyal to the Anmaglâhk first—and always.
Dänvârfij and Fréthfâre sat at the small table, discussing the watch schedule now that Magiere, Léshil, and the majay-hì had been spotted. But their numbers had dwindled, and their people needed sleep at some point.
Rhysís and Eywodan lay on the floor, resting for a quarter day, but both had been up all last night and through the morning. Tavithê and Owain were doing separate sweeps of the city, hoping to spot something. Én’nish was watching the guild’s castle.
All of this had left the port unobserved, which made Dänvârfij uncomfortable.
“We could omit shifts at the port,” Fréthfâre suggested. “We no longer need to spot arrivals now that our quarry is here.”
“But if they decide to flee, a ship would be an option,” Dänvârfij countered. “Sea travel is the most difficult to follow, and the easiest way to move a group. The greimasg’äh knows this. We must know if and when they make a move toward port to cut them off.”
“If they are spotted there,” Fréthfâre replied, “what good would it do? We would not be able to gather quickly enough to cut them off, especially if they do so in daylight. And Brot’ân’duivé will try to take the monster away in daylight, to throw us off.”
“That would be risky.”
“Which is why he would do it,” Fréthfâre shot back. “It is the least likely option for the best way out. Unless we can find them in the city, we will never know when or how they move.”