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It only took two blocks for Clare to grow irritated at the slow pace, and she wondered that he kept to the act despite the fact she had not seen a single soul about to witness it. Clare herself had none of the innate patience of the predator stalking her prey but managed, as she managed most things in life, by sheer stubbornness.
The lack of guards on their path made her suspect he knew their night patrols, because they traveled at least a mile into Lowtown before the man rambled into an inn. She counted the time in her head she estimated it would take him to reach a room, then circled the building, waiting for a magelight to flicker on in one of the windows. When it did, she was surprised to find the light on the second floor, having thought such a man would take a room on the first for ease of entry and escape. But perhaps he preferred the greater privacy afforded by the higher level.
Determined not to let a matter of height waste her evening’s work, Clare looked for a way up the smooth walls and found it almost immediately, for a drainpipe was secured next to his window ledge. She wondered at its ready availability—if he’d chosen his room because the pipe could provide a quick escape should he need one, or if he’d simply been careless. Or perhaps he hadn’t considered it too much of a risk, since it took a certain amount of practice and determination to shimmy up a drainpipe, and a fair bit more of both to do the task quietly. In short, it was a skill few sane people bothered to cultivate.
Clare Brighton knew all too well that she was not particularly sane. She shimmied up the drainpipe and out onto the window’s ledge, peering through a gap in the window’s curtains just in time to see the drunk, looking very much sober and collected, remove a slim silver tube—the item stolen from the duke’s nephew?—from his pocket and unroll a small slip of paper from inside. She could just make out red ink on the page.
The man read, and his lips twisted in distaste. He did not bother to re-read, as people so often did when they learned bad news, but simply rolled the paper back inside the small silver tube, storing it inside a cleverly hidden compartment of a leather case of men’s travel accessories.
Item hidden, he went to work with the case’s accessories. First, he removed the grayed beard on his face to reveal the smooth, unblemished skin of a man in his early twenties. The long, lank hair came away next, revealing a slightly shorter crop of silky black, untouched by gray, that fell just past his chin. And the eyes, when he wiped away the yellow staining beneath that had given his skin its dull pallor, were a brown dark enough to be nearly black.
His face, shorn of its disguise, was now completely at odds with the rest of his middle-aged body. This mystery lifted when he removed his shirt, the garment cleverly padded to give its wearer the appearance of added weight. His torso was lean and lined with the sort of subtle, practical muscle garnered from activities like shimmying up drainpipes.
Clare might have spent half the night staring into the room, retrieving more pieces of this interesting new puzzle, had the man not suddenly frowned and strode to the window, twitching the gap in the curtains closed.
Mercifully, he did not look out.
Quiet and nimble, Clare descended the drainpipe, wondering just what in Ferrian’s hells she had stumbled onto this evening.
Chapter Three
Kinthing
Rain pounded against the carriage window, stirring up the old ache in Verol’s left knee as the carriage thundered down the empty night streets. Marquin felt that ache, as if it were his own, through the heartstone that glowed red within the clutches of his ebony staff. He rolled the staff idly between his hands as Verol’s tension poured through it, Marquin’s own tension kept at bay by the ruthless practicality that had seen him through his forty-eight winters on this planet.
On the bench seat across from him, Verol let out a string of curses. It always surprised people that, of the two of them, Verol was the one with the filthy mouth. Marquin waited until Verol was finished with his litany of insults to the night and commented, wryly, “I thought I was supposed to be the pessimistic one in this relationship.”
Verol shoved a curtain of long silver-blond hair out of his eyes, and Marquin had a feeling he was on the verge of finally cutting it all off, like he’d been threatening to do for years. Hair out of the way, he leveled that look at Marquin, the one that said Quin was being intentionally obtuse. “It isn’t a matter of pessimism. She’s in danger.” The howling wind rattled the carriage, adding emphasis to the growl in Verol’s words.
“If she is, then we will reach her before it strikes.” Marquin’s voice held the calm born from thirty years of following where Verol’s instincts led. If Quin did not remain calm, Verol would lose all semblance of restraint.
“There is no if. She’s in danger.”
Through the heartstone, Quin felt the Kinthing roaring the certainty of that danger in Verol’s chest. It did not like the thought of the girl in danger, liked Verol speaking of it even less. In the Kinthing’s mind, the young woman Verol and Marquin had shared the last two weeks of their trip back to Veralna City with already belonged to its circle. She was the Kinthing’s to protect, and it would protect her. It had failed, once, to protect one of its children, and Verol had been too heartbroken afterward to hear the call of any others who needed him.
Until now. Until they had found a near-feral young woman on the edges of the Valedon Swamps, a woman whose eyes had at times seemed to bore right through him, as if she was made of fire and could set the world alight with a single touch. He’d watched her claw her way back to civility with each passing day of their journey, until she had gone from a barefoot, half-wild thing to someone who spoke and held herself as if she were the daughter of a duchess, someone who could make herself look regal in nothing but tattered clothes and Verol’s spare boots.
The effect had been…disturbing.
“I’m sorry,” Verol gritted out. “It hasn’t gripped me this strong since…” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to.
It hadn’t gripped him this strong since Marie. Twenty years dead and Verol still couldn’t speak the child’s name.
Marquin’s hand tightened on the heartstone staff, the deep black of the wood only the barest shade darker than his skin. The heartstone, held in place at the top by thin veins of silver, flickered again, this time with Marquin’s anger and concern.
He wished, not for the first time, that Verol had been born without the Kinthing inside him. Wished, with an uncharitableness he had not felt since he was a much younger man, that they had never met the woman at the edges of the swamp.
Ferrian’s hells. Verol wouldn’t survive another Marie.
“I never should have let her go,” Quin’s husband was saying. “I knew it wasn’t safe for her, I felt it.”
Marquin snorted. “Sympathetic as I am, a wall of horses could not hold that young woman if she did not wish to be held.”
Clare Brighton had been a force unto herself. Half the time when Marquin looked into her eyes it was as if something besides her looked back at him as well. Something dark and ancient and endless. Something Marquin was very much afraid he knew the nature of.
“I could have explained,” Verol insisted.
“Explained what? That you have a magic entity inside you that claims certain people as its hoard, and so now you cannot leave her alone until you are certain she is safe?”
