"Hmm, that will make it a bit harder," she hummed. "But I'm sure we can work with it. No matter what, a visit to our local cathedral is very high on our list of priorities. My soul is feeling very unclean. I feel the need to absolve it."
"And I think that tells me exactly what I should feel so angry about," Tarrin said with a slight smile. "Just as soon as I figure out a way to get around it."
"What?"
"The Ward," he replied. "Jesmind said she could penetrate it. Well, I'm going to find out how she did it."
"That could be handy. They'd never dream that you could get around their cage."
Just the sound of that word made him visibly bristle. "Nobody holds me," he hissed.
"Fine. Tell that to someone that can do something about it," she said with deceptive mildness.
"Sorry," he said after a moment.
"Not a problem," she said with a toothy grin. "I think I can look past your faults. You are a friend, after all."
"You're so kind," he drawled.
It didn't take Tarrin long to explain the plan to Allia, just as it didn't take long for her to understand and accept it. She was a bit put out with him for meeting with Keritanima alone, but he knew that she had been up almost all night, standing at the door while Jesmind was in the room. That he did as soon as getting back to the room, bathing, and dressing for another day of being frustrated. He explained things to her as she braided his damp hair, back in his room.
"I should have been there, deshida," she admonished him as she yanked on his hair, pulling it against his ears.
Tarrin winced and bent his head back to take the pain out of it. "I'm sorry, but you needed to sleep," he replied. "I may have been busy with Jesmind, but I could hear you at the door."
She didn't blush in the slightest. Things between him and Allia were always completely open. "I am Selani, my brother. I can go with a night's lost sleep easily. You don't have to protect my well being."
"Well, I will anyway," he said bluntly. "You're one of the few people I have here, my sister. I have to keep my eyes out for you."
"It's so nice to be appreciated," she said with a warm smile, beginning the braid. It had grown back even longer than before, much to his irritation. He was almost afraid of how much it would grow if he lost his braid again.
"The way Kerri talked, she expects to run," Tarrin told her.
"That's not a problem, my brother," she said easily. "My tribe will protect us, and not even the Keeper herself would dare refute the commandments of my chief. If she did, the Selani would call council." Calling Council was a Selani term for declaring war. And not even the Keeper was insane enough to provoke the Selani, who were, by no doubt, the most devastating fighting force in the entire world. The Selani could possibly conquer the entire west, but conquest and spoils weren't important to the desert-dwelling nonhumans, just as leaving their precious desert was something no Selani would do without serious motivation. Allia was the first of her people to willingly leave the desert since the war with Arak.
"I hope so, Allia," he sighed. "If we run, it's a good bet that we'll have a sizable army on our tails. We'll need somewhere to go that's safe, because we certainly can't hide."
"Hide? A Were-cat, a Selani, and a Wikuni, hide?" Allia laughed. "I would think not."
"Exactly," he said with a wry chuckle. "Maybe your father's camp is about the only place in the world we can go that puts us beyond the Tower's reach. They're probably one of the few peoples that the Tower would have reason to fear."
"It's not of any worry to us, my brother," she assured him. "Let's speak of your idea to invade the cathedral of Karas."
"Later," he told her. "We're almost late for class."
Allia snorted. "You mean for imposed torture."
"That's about the way I feel about it," he agreed with a grunt. "Maybe we'll get lucky and do it today, because they're supposed to reform a class once all the Initiates can touch the Weave. I won't have to stare at walls again."
"Maybe so," Allia hummed. "But let's worry about today more than next ride."
Alert, tense, wary, Tarrin jumped onto his very cramped window sill and prepared for the tricky negotiation through the open space and down the wall. Much as he realized when first looking around the room, the window gave him the perfect way to get in and out without being seen. It was on the third floor and was too narrow to squeeze through, so nobody would associate it with being an exit. But Tarrin's small cat form easily fit through the small opening, and Tarrin had a need for using it.
After another exhaustive day of aggravation, Tarrin went to bed early that night to put off anyone keeping tabs on him. For this, he didn't want an audience, because if he was successful, he'd not want others to know what he was doing. He was going to figure out how Jesmind got off of the grounds. He wasn't quite sure how to do it, but he had to start somewhere. He figured that the best place to start would be at the Ward itself, and to do that, he'd have to go take a look at it. He knew it was too much ground to cover to look at every span of the ward, but Jesmind's scent was still fresh on the ground, and he could easily track her movements to find where she had crossed through the ward. But first thing was to get out of his room.
Backing out of the window, he lowered himself over the sill and carefully backed his forepaws off the window. It was much too precarious a position to attempt to shapeshift, so he simply let go and began to fall. Shapeshifting in midair, he drove his claws into the stone of the tower wall, expertly hitting a seam between the blocks, and stopped his downward momentum. He quickly climbed down to the ground, changed form, and then faded into the shadows like a ghost.
Finding Jesmind's scent was easy. Trying to figure out why it went into the main Tower was not. He puzzled at what she would need from there, and instead picked up her scent from the door from where she both entered and exited, then began tracking her across the grounds. Jesmind's scent was faint, but its striking uniqueness when compared to the multitude of humans, dogs, cats, mice, and horses made it easy to follow. There had been no rain to wash it out, and it was too warm still for dew to form. He followed it through the shadows and between buildings, noticing that she kept herself out of the open whenever possible. From the smell of it, she stayed in her humanoid form instead of relying on her cat form to cross the open areas. That spoke alot about her ability to hide. Or perhaps she simply didn't care about who saw her.
Stalking across the grounds, Tarrin skulked along, keeping his nose to the grass and his ears alert for any roving patrols. He doubted they'd pay attention to him, for he looked just like any of the large numbers of other cats that roamed around the Tower's grounds. More than once, the scent of a mouse attempted to distract him into a little hunting, but he kept his mind and his nose on the job and promised to attend to the hunting after he was satisfied that the work was done for the night.
It took him almost an hour to track across the expansive area enclosed by the fence, following a fading trail laid down by his bond mother the night before. It took him to a section of the fence deep in the dark shadows between the torches and lamps of the city beyond, a place very well suited for a lone figure to slip over the fence. The street past the fence was large, an avenue of some kind, but it was also deserted. The smells of the city, the foul miasma of human waste, decay, and sweat, were strong in his nose as the evening breeze wafted them in from the cobblestones beyond. The slender iron fence was directly before him, and Tarrin paced back and forth with an eye out for patrols and a mystery forming in his mind.
Jesmind's scent went right up to the ward. From the smell of it, she didn't backtrack to give herself enough of a running start to jump over the fence. She somehow walked through the fence without touching it. He hadn't been born with his nose, so he could be wrong, but he didn't detect the faint layering of scent that would have hinted at her laying scent over the same ground again.