“What man?”
“Old, grey hair. Mustache.”
“White robe?”
He nods.
Cyrus. “Pretend you’re looking for something on the floor as you’re talking to me.” I kneel with him. “What did they say? Quick, spit it out.”
“I don’t know. Something about the journals, about being careful who sees. He told her to ‘keep it hidden.’”
I wish Quinn weren’t mad at me because we’re going to need to do something about her father. It’s always the ones you most suspect. “Keep what hidden?”
“I don’t know! I swear I don’t know. I’m just an apprentice. I haven’t even been here a year yet.”
Damn, so there is something to be found here, but I don’t even know what it is. How the hell am I supposed to find it in the time it would take to find a missing ring?
I have to push him a little more. Sorry, kid. I absolutely don’t intend to hurt you, but lying to you will only strengthen me. “You have ten seconds to tell me where the Guild Mistress would hide something important in this place. Ten, nine, eight…”
“Oh gods, I don’t know. I don’t know! Please don’t hurt me.” He trembles, his face going pale. And then his eyes dart towards the dagger and the door.
Fuck, I’ve gone too far. He’s so scared, he’s going to run. “Take a guess, and I won’t hurt you. I won’t tell anyone you told me.” In reality, my conversation here hasn’t gone unnoticed, and they’re likely to question the boy even if I’m not successful. But I’m sure Ronan can find him an apprenticeship in the palace if it comes down to it.
“Her chambers. It would be in her chambers.”
It seems unlikely to me that she’d hide something important enough that the Grand Vizier wanted it hidden in such an obvious place, but I won’t have time to search the entire building, and I’m certain that her chambers are currently unoccupied.
And if we’re caught, we can say we got lost trying to find our way around this place, which is certainly believable enough. “Lead the way.”
“I can’t. I don’t have access to them. No one does except the highest-ranking wardens.”
“But you know where they are.” He nods. “Then take me there, and you can get back to work. But when you do, you will not tell anyone what I asked you or what you told me. Believe me, you donotwant to make an enemy of me.”
“Yes, ma’am. I won’t tell anyone, I swear it.”
I tilt my head at Taran, and he joins us as I follow the apprentice from the room. I don’t ask the boy his name or offer mine, figuring he’d be better off not knowing it. He leads us for a time in the direction Ronan and Hypatia were heading, which worries me, but eventually we turn off down a narrow corridor and climb a spiral staircase into one of the Guild’s pair of white towers.
We pass several floors of rooms, the central common areas occupied by young apprentices that give us little notice as we pass. “I take it we need to go higher to find the Guild Mistress’s chambers?”
Our young guide nods. “The higher you go, the higher the ranks.”
I groan, realizing the Guild Mistress’s chambers must be at the very top of the tower. There’s no good reason for us to be here. If we’re caught, I’m going to have to claim that I’m acting on Ronan’s orders and hope it doesn’t hurt his relationship with the Guild too much.
“I can’t go up there,” says the boy when I point him in the direction of the stairs. “Please, I took you this far. Can’t you just go on your own?”
There’s nothing more he can do for us at this point. He doesn’t have access himself, and if I do find something, I’d rather he doesn’t know about it anyway. “Go on,” I say, and he scurries back down the stairs as if he’s being chased.
“We could go back,” suggests Taran when we’re alone. “Find Ronan and tell him what we know. He can order Hypatia to help us find…whatever it is they’re hiding.”
I’ve thought of that, but it won’t work. “If she knows about whatever Zara was hiding here, there’s no guarantee she won’t try to hide it herself. I don’t trust her. We need to find it without them knowing we’re looking. After what I just told that apprentice, they’ll be onto us. We may not get another chance before they move it.”
“We don’t even know what it is,” says Taran. “How are you going to find something when you don’t know what it is, what it does, why it was hidden, or if anyone alive even still cares about it?”
He has a point. “Admittedly, it’s not much to go on.” I sigh. Ronan asked me to come here to help him, and I don’t want to let him down. “What do you suggest?”
“We go back to the palace and ask Cyrus what he knows, since it’s clearly more than he’s admitted to so far.”
“Fine. Butafterwe at least poke around in the Guild Mistress’s chambers. Even if we can’t find whatever Zara was hiding, it would be good to know if Hypatia is conspiring against Ronan.”
