Oswin nodded, frowning. They walked together down the circling stairs and out to the street. Ingrey bade the divine farewell and turned his quickening steps down the hill toward Kingstown.

Ingrey could not muster much surprise when, after crossing the buried creek into the lower city, he rounded a corner and found Hallana’s wagon blocking his path.

The two stubby horses, dusty and sweaty from the road, were standing hip-shot and bored, and Bernan sat on the driver’s box with reins slack and his elbows on his knees. A riding horse, unsaddled, was tied on behind the wagon by a rope to its halter. Hergi crouched behind Bernan’s shoulder. Hallana was hanging off the front brace of the canopy with one hand, shielding her gaze with the other, and peering dubiously up an alley too narrow for the wagon to enter.

Hergi pounded on Bernan’s shoulder, pointed at Ingrey, and cried, “Look! Look!”

Hallana swung around, and her face brightened. “Ah! Lord Ingrey! Excellent.” She gave Bernan a pat on the other shoulder. “See, did I not say?” The smith gave a weary sort of head bob, halfway between agreement and exasperation, and Hallana stepped over him to hop down to the street and stand before Ingrey.

She had abandoned her loose and tattered robes for a natty traveling costume, a dark green coat upon a dress of pale linen, notably cinched in around the waist. Her shoulder braids were absent—traveling incognito? She remained short and plump, but trimmer, with her hair neatly braided in wreaths around her head. There were no visible signs of children or other trailing chaos.

Ingrey gave her a polite half bow; she returned a blessing, although her sign of the Five more resembled a vague check mark over her torso. “So glad to see you,” she told him. “I’m seeking Ijada.”

“How?” he couldn’t help asking. Presumably, she was once more in command of her powers.

“I usually just drive around until something happens.”

“That seems… oddly inefficient.”

“You sound like Oswin. He would have wanted to draw a grid over a chart of the city, and mark off sections in strict rotation. Finding you was much faster.”

Ingrey started to consider the logic of this, then thought better of it. “Speaking of Learned Oswin. He told me to tell you he has taken rooms for you all at the Inn of the Irises, across from the Mother’s Infirmary on Temple Hill.”

A slight groan from Bernan greeted this news.

“Oh!” Hallana brightened still further. “You have met, how nice!”

“You are not surprised to be expected?”

“Oswin can be terribly stodgy at times, but he’s not stupid. Of course he would realize we’d be coming. Eventually.”

“Learned Sir will not be pleased with us,” Hergi predicted uneasily. “He wasn’t before.”

“Pish posh,” said Oswin’s spouse. “You survived.” She turned back to Ingrey, and her voice dropped to seriousness. “Did he tell you about our dream?”

“Just a little.”

“Where is Ijada, anyway?”

The passersby all seemed ordinary folk, so far, but Ingrey declined to take chances. “I should not be seen talking to you, nor overheard.”

Hallana jerked her head toward the canopied wagon, and Ingrey nodded. He swung up after her into the shadowed interior, clambering over bundles and seating himself on a trunk, awkwardly adjusting his sword. Hallana sat down cross-legged on a pallet padded thickly with blankets and looked at him expectantly.

“Ijada is being kept in a private house not far from the quayside.” Ingrey kept his voice low. “Her house warden is Rider Gesca, for the moment, who is Hetwar’s man, but the house belongs to Earl Horseriver. The servants there are the earl’s spies, and Gesca’s discretion is not to be trusted at all. You must not go there as yourself. Have Learned Lewko take you, perhaps in the guise of an examining physician for the inquest or some such. That would give you an excuse to exclude the servants and speak privately with Ijada.”

Hallana’s eyes narrowed. “Interesting. Is Fara’s husband no friend to Ijada after all—or too much the reverse? Or is it that wretched princess who is the problem?”

“Fara is a tangle of problems, but Wencel’s interest in her handmaiden was not the simple lechery she had imagined. Wencel has secret powers and unknown purposes. Hetwar has just set me in his household to spy upon him in an effort to determine those purposes. I don’t want the waters there muddied worse than they are already.”

“You think him dangerous?”

“Yes.”

“To you?” Her brows went up.

Ingrey bit his lip. “It has become suspected that he bears a spirit animal. Like mine. This is… true but incomplete.” He hesitated. “The geas we broke in Red Dike—he was the source of it.”

She huffed out her breath. “Why is he not arrested?”

“No!” said Ingrey sharply. And at her stare, more quietly, “No. In the first place, I have not determined how to prove the charge, and in the second, a premature arrest could trigger a disaster.” For me, at least.

She blinked up at him in a friendly way. “Oh, come, Lord Ingrey. You can tell me more.”

He was sorely tempted. “I think… not yet. I am at the stage of things… I don’t yet… I am still driving around in circles waiting for something to happen.”

“Oh.” A look of sympathetic enlightenment crossed her features. “That stage. I know it well.” After a moment she added, “My condolences.”

He ran a hand through his hair. It was growing again around the stitches, which were surely ready to come out. “I cannot linger. I must catch up with Prince Biast and Princess Fara. Your husband was at Ijada’s inquest this morning, and can likely tell you more of it than I can. Lewko knows something as well. I wonder”—Ingrey faltered—”if I can trust you.”

Her head came up, cocking a little to one side. She said dryly, “I assume that was not meant as an insult.”

Ingrey shook his head. “I stumble through a murk of lies and half lies and stranger tales right now. The legal thing, the obvious thing—like arresting Wencel—may not be the right thing, though I cannot explain it. All feels fluid. As though the gods themselves hold Their breaths. Something is about to happen.”

“What?”

“If I knew, if I knew –” Ingrey heard the rising tension in his own voice, and yanked it to a stop.

“Shh, hush,” Hallana soothed him, as though calming a nervy mount. “Can you trust me, at least, to move cautiously, speak little, listen, and wait?”

“Can you?”

“Unless my gods compel me otherwise.”

“Your gods. Not your Temple superiors.”

“I said what I said.”

Ingrey nodded and took a breath. “Ask Ijada, then. She is the only one I have trusted with everything I know so far. The others have only bits and pieces. She and I are bound together in this by more than”—his voice stumbled, choked—”more than affection. We have shared two waking visions. She can tell you more.”

“Good. I will go to her discreetly as you advise, then.”

“I am not sure if the gods and I seek the same ends. I am absolutely sure the gods and Wencel do not seek the same ends.” His brow wrinkled. “Oswin said you shattered. In your dream. I did not understand what was meant.”

“Neither do we.”

“Would the gods use us to destruction?” She had not brought her children—for speed, for simplicity? Or for safety? Theirs. Not hers.

“Perhaps.” Her voice was perfectly even, delivering this.

“You do not reassure me, Learned.”

Some might call her return smile enigmatic, but Ingrey thought it more sardonic. He returned her a salute in the same mode and glanced out the wagon back for witnesses. He added over his shoulder, “If you go at once to Lewko, you might find your husband still there. And possibly a red-haired islander whose tongue is lubricated by either vile liquor or holy kisses from the Lady of Spring, or both.”