“What is this?” she asked.

“I’ll bring the prisoner to you, ma’am,” the sergeant said patiently. “With another guard. The gate at the front won’t be unlocked again until he’s back in his cell.”

“Oh.” Miriam sat down, feeling stupid, and waited nervously as the guard disappeared into the basement tunnels beneath the castle. The dungeon. I put him here, she thought apprehensively. What must it be like?

A clattering outside brought her back to herself, and she turned around to watch the door as it opened. The sergeant came in, followed by another soldier, and, a hunched, thin figure with his arms behind his back and a hood over his head. He’s manacled, Miriam realized.

“One moment.” The guards positioned the prisoner against the wall opposite Miriam’s table. The guard knelt, and Miriam heard something click into place—padlocks. “That’s it,” said the sergeant. He pulled off the prisoner’s hood, then he and the other guard withdrew to stand beside the door.

“Hello, Lin,” Miriam said as evenly as she could. “Recognize me?”

He flinched, clearly terrified, and was brought up short by his chains. Shit, Miriam thought, a sense of horror stealing over her. She peered at him in the dim light. “They’ve been beating you,” she said quietly. The things on the gatehouse walls—no, she didn’t want to be involved in this. It was all a horrible mistake. Multiple contusions, some bleeding and inflammation around the left eye. He stared past her left shoulder, shivering fearfully, but didn’t say anything. Miriam resisted the urge to turn around and yell at the guards. She had a hopeless feeling that all it would do was earn the kid another beating when she was safely out of the way.

Her medical training wouldn’t let her look away. Up until this moment she’d have sworn she was angry with him: But she hadn’t expected them to treat him like this. Breaking into her house on the orders of someone placed in authority over him—sure she was angry. But the real guilty parties were a long way away, and if she didn’t do something fast, this half-starved kid was going to join the grisly carcasses displayed on the gatehouse wall, for the crime of following orders. And where was the justice in that?

“I’m not going to hit you,” she said.

He didn’t reply. His posture said he didn’t believe her.

“Fuck!” She pulled one of the chairs out from the table, turned it around, and sat down on it, her arms folded across the back. “I just want some answers. That’s all. Lin of, what did you call yourself?”

“Lin. Lin Lee. My family is called Lee.” He kept glancing past her, as if trying to conceal his fear: I’m not going to hit you, but my guards—

“That’s good. How old are you?”

“Fifteen.” Fifteen! Holy shit, they’re running the children’s crusade! A thought struck her. “Have they been feeding you? Giving you water? Somewhere to sleep?”

He managed a brief, painful croak: Maybe it was meant to be laughter.

Miriam looked around. “Well? Have you been feeding him?”

The sergeant shook himself. “Ma’am?”

“What food, drink, and medical attention has this child had?”

He shook his head. “I really couldn’t say, ma’am.”

“I see.” Miriam’s hands tensed on the back of the chair. She turned back to Lin. “I didn’t order this,” she said. “Will you tell me who sent you to my house?”

She saw him swallow. “If I do that you’ll kill me,” he said.

“No, that’s not what I’ve got in mind.”

“Yes you will.” He looked at her with bitter certainty in his eyes. “They’ll do it.”

“Like you were going to kill me?” she asked quietly.

He didn’t say anything.

“You were supposed to find out if I was from the Clan,” she said. “Weren’t you? A strange new woman showing up in town and making waves. Is that it? And if I was from the Clan, you were supposed to kill me. What was it to be? A bomb in my bedroom? Or a knife in the dark?”

“Not me,” he whispered. “One of the warriors.”

“So why were you there? To spy on me? Are they that short-handed?”

He looked down at the table, but not before she saw shame in his eyes.

“Ah.” She glanced away for a moment, trying desperately to think of a way out of the impasse. She was hopelessly aware of the guards standing behind her, waiting patiently for her to finish with the prisoner. If I leave him here, the Clan will kill him, she realized, with a kind of hollow dread she hadn’t expected to be able to summon up for a housebreaker. Housebreaker? What his actions said about his family, that was something she could get angry about. “Hell.” She made up her mind.

“Lin, you’re probably right about the Clan. Most of them would see you dead as soon as look at you. There’ve been too many years of their parents and grandparents cutting each other’s throats. They’re suspicious of anything they don’t understand, and you’re going to be high on any list of mysteries. But I’ll tell you something else.”

She stood up. “You know how to world-walk, don’t you?”

Silence.

“I said—” She stopped. “You ought to know when you can stop holding it in,” she said tiredly. Thinking back to Angbard, and how she’d managed to face him down over Roland: Don’t look too deep. Everything on the surface. The familes all worked that way, didn’t they? “Nothing you say to me can make your position worse. It might make it better, though.”

Silence.

“World-walking,” she said. “We know you can do it, we got the locket you carried. So why lie?”

Silence.

“The Clan can world-walk too, you know,” she said quietly. “It isn’t a coincidence. Your family are relatives, aren’t they? Lost for a long time, and this shit—the killing, the feuding, the attempts to reopen old wounds—isn’t in anyone’s interests.”

Silence.

“Why do they want me dead?” she asked. “Why are you people killing your own blood relatives?”

Maybe it was something in her expression—frank curiosity, perhaps—but the youth looked away at last. The silence stretched out for a long moment, lengthened toward a minute, punctuated only by the sound of one of the guards shifting position.

“You betrayed us,” he whispered.

“Uh?” Miriam shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“In the time of the loyal sons,” said Lin. “All the others. They abandoned my ancestor. The promise of a meeting in the world of the Americans. Reduced to poverty, he took years to gain his freedom, then he spent his entire life searching for them. But never did they come.”

“This is all news to me,” Miriam said quietly. “He was reduced to poverty?”

Lin nodded convulsively. “This is the tale of our family,” he said, in sing-song tones. “That of the brothers, it was agreed that Lee would go west, to set up a trading post. And he did, but the way was hard and he was reduced to penury, his caravan scattered, his goods stolen by savages, abandoned by his servants. For seven years he labored as a bond servant, before buying his freedom: He lost everything, from his wife to the first talisman of the family. Finally he forged a new talisman, working from memory, earned his price, and bought himself liberty. He was a very determined man. But when he walked to the place assigned for meeting, nobody was there to wait for him. Every year, at the appointed day and hour, he would go there; and never did anyone come. His brothers had abandoned him, and over the years his descendants learned much of the eastern Clan. The betrayers, who profited from his estate.”

“Ah,” said Miriam, faintly. Oops, a betrayal-for-a-legacy myth. So he accidentally mangled the knotwork and ended up going to New Britain instead of—she blinked.

“You’ve seen my world,” she said. “Do you know, that’s where the Clan have been going all along? Where you go when you world-walk, it’s all set up by the, uh, talisman. Your illustrious ancestor re-created it wrong. Sending himself over to, to, New Britain. For all you know, the other brothers thought that your ancestor had abandoned them.”