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I know one voice well, years of hearing him approve my tenure, grant my requests, ask me once what I intended to do about my dead assistant and listen to me lie about it. Lair Caranthis.
But the other voice I don’t know.
It’s low and deep and the accent is from further west, somewhere closer to the holy city. There is a quiet in it that comes from being listened to without having to raise the volume.
“He rushed off fairly quickly,” that other voice says. “Usually he’s on the last ferry, is he not?”
“Mmm he did seem somewhat bothered by something after the Trial.”
The other voice is silent for a beat. Then it says, “He’s been looking at things that are not his to look at.”
“We know.”
“The question is how close will you let him get?”
“We’ll know it when we see it,” Caranthis says.
“He’s not thinking clearly. This Greythorn girl…it’s a complication. He should know better than that.”
Against my chest Saturna goes very still.
“What do you want done?” Caranthis asks.
“Nothing yet. We watch. Give him a week. Then we will see.”
“And the girl?”
“She is a separate matter.”
“I will manage her.”
“You’ve been managing her for a while.”
The two sets of footsteps resume and I suck in my breath, praying they don’t find us. They pass the mouth of the service corridor without turning in, then go another twenty paces and turn into another passage and are gone.
The corridor goes quiet.
I don’t move for a long time. She doesn’t either. We stand in the darkness while I listen past my own pulse for any sign that they’re coming back, and when I’m sure they aren’t I let my arm come down from the wall and look down at her.
“Did you see them?” I say, barely audible.
She shakes her head slowly. “That one voice sounded familiar, though.”
“Which one?”
“The one that isn’t Caranthis.”
“Do you know where you know it from?”
“I don’t know yet. Somewhere.” Her brows knit together delicately like she’s trying to put it together but then they collapse in frustration. “I’ll know when I remember.”
“We can’t talk here,” I say. “I need to walk you to your room.”
“I’d like that.”
“We should go up the back way,” I tell her, taking her hand. The cold has come back into my body in the time we have been in the alcove and this time the cold is useful and doing some of the work the kissing had undone. It makes my brain just a little sharper. I take us out of the service corridor and up the back staircase in the near-dark, moving fast. She keeps up easily, her slippers slapping softly on the stone. Thankfully we don’t pass anyone on the way to her room where we come to a stop outside her door.
We’re both silent for a moment. Now that the adrenaline is starting to wear off, I know I’m trying to make sense of what happened…and then what happened again.
