It was the ache in my jaw that alerted me to the fact that I was clenching my teeth.

  “I am Zilran of Zonfar,” he said with a smile, revealing those ridiculously straight teeth all the islanders seemed to have. “I am Watcher here.”

  “I am Dunleavy Mallorough, and this is Shintaro Karish.”

  Zilran was polite enough, looking at me as I spoke, but he kept glancing at Taro.

  I wanted to glance at Taro myself, to see how he was reacting to this attention. I wouldn’t let myself. Because I really didn’t want to see how he was reacting to this attention, which he had been used to before we came to Flatwell, but had to have been starving for ever since.

  “We are looking for some family we think may have some connection to the circle,” I said. “A child was left here. Her mother, I understand, was called Nevress of Ara.”

  Zilran frowned as he thought about it. “That doesn’t sound familiar.”

  “The child would be twenty years old, or less. I don’t know when it might have lived here, but the story holder seems to feel it was placed here after Nevress died.”

  “I have been here only two years,” he said. He poked his head out the nearest window. “Saya!” he shouted out. “Please join us! She has been here over thirty years,” he told us.

  Finally, someone old enough to be of use.

  And then, Zilran turned his full attention on my Source. “You are from the North?”

  Obviously.

  Taro smiled back at him, and I looked out the window. “We are from High Scape,” I heard him say. “Have you heard of it?”

  “No, but it must be an exciting place.”

  And there was that tone. Playful, not flirtatious, yet an invitation that could be easily rejected without causing offense.

  Taro was supposed to ask why this gorgeous young fellow assumed High Scape must be an exciting place. And Zilran would then say, because someone as—pick the adjective—as Taro could only come from an exciting place. And they would take it from there.

  Taro said, “It is disturbed by a great many natural events. But we have seven Pairs in total, so we are able to keep it calm.”

  I looked at Zilran then, wondering what he was going to do with that.

  From the expression on his face, he was wondering the same.

  The woman I presumed was Saya walked in, and this was the lady I had been expecting. A heavily lined face, dark hair graying, her shoulders stooped with age.

  She still wore the scanty clothes and tattoos everyone else wore, though.

  “Watcher?” she said, and though her tone was respectful, something about her stance, her gaze, made me feel she didn’t like him.

  I wouldn’t like him, either. Not just because he was trying to flirt with my Source, but he seemed awfully young for his position. I wouldn’t like to be told what to do by someone a third my age.

  “We are looking for a child who was placed here within the last twenty years,” I said, and I felt really stupid asking the question. How the hell would she remember? “The mother was named Nevress of Ara, and she was hanged as a thief. The mother would have had some Northern blood.” Well, so would the child, but it might have been more evident in the mother.

  “Brought in during the last twenty years,” the older woman clarified, just to make sure I was really feeling stupid.

  “Kai,” I admitted.

  “Come with me,” Saya said, moving down a hall without waiting to be dismissed by Zilran. I wondered if that offended him. I hurriedly thanked the Watcher and Taro and I followed Saya. She led us along the curve of the building and then down a rickety set of stairs that took us down to a dank dark room below ground. She had us wait at the entrance while she lit a series of candles that lined the long walls of the room.

  The room was filled with stones. Truly. Black stones, flat and rounded, polished and each about the size of my palm. They’d had holes bored into them and had been strung onto some kind of slim rope. The strings of stones were hung from the ceiling and were left to dangle over the floor. A single touch had the stones clattering against each other. Perhaps out in the open air the sound would have been pretty, but down in the dark it was disquieting.

  “Every child who enters our circle has a stone,” Saya said, and her voice seemed to echo in the room. “We mark on the stone all the circumstances of the child’s life. Origins, why they came to be here, age, name and when and why they left. If the child was here within the last twenty years, then we may restrict our search to this portion of the room.” She gestured at a couple dozen strings, each with several dozen stones. Not an insurmountable amount, but more than I liked. There had to be a better way to do this.

  “The child may have had a tattoo,” I said. Then again, it might not. It didn’t make sense for the tradition to have been carried down that far. Would Nevress have had it done? Would she have known the significance of it? It would seem hard to believe, that she would willingly take the life of a criminal without crying out that she was descended from royalty.

  Then again, if the child didn’t have the tattoo, we wouldn’t be able to recognize it anyway, and that part of the family would be truly lost.

  “That is not unusual,” Saya said.

  “Putting tattoos on very young children?” I asked in surprise.

  “Kai.”

  “I haven’t seen any tattoos on children.”

  “I don’t know of the children you know,” said Saya. “But many people have their children marked at birth, so that their family is known should the child be lost. The mark is not usually made in a place commonly bared to view.”

  “Why not?” What would the point of it be, then, to keep it in a private place?

  “Some marks are well known. Their families are wealthy or strong. Children can be the prey of those who seek power. You steal a family’s child and seek advantage in exchange for return.”

  “I have been all over this island and I haven’t heard of anything like this,” I objected.

  “You are an offlander.” Saya shrugged. “Why would you know this?”

  Suddenly, I felt that I hadn’t learned anything about these people, in all the time I’d been on Flatwell. And that was sad.

  Saya picked out a stone and had Taro and I peer at it. It was a v shape with a horizontal bar through it. She told us it was the symbol for a female parent who had been hanged, and it was the only symbol she bothered to show us. When we found it on a stone, we were to call her, and she would interpret the rest of the symbols.

  There really wasn’t enough light to be doing such work, even though what light there was really seemed to bounce off the polished stones and reflect about the room. Fortunately, the symbols were deeply etched into the stones, and it didn’t take long for my fingers to become accustomed to the shapes of the grooves. But I really had to concentrate on what I was doing. If I let my thoughts wander, my fingers would glide over the surface of the stones without really feeling anything.

  It took hours. A distressingly large number of the orphans had had mothers who had been hanged. But only one had a mother whose name had been Nevress. Apparently, it wasn’t that common a name on Flatwell, thank Zaire. I’d already started imagining what it might be like to try to track down multiple possibilities.

  “A girl,” Saya announced. “Brought here in the second year of Avol of Rikin. Around ten years ago,” she translated. “But the name of the child is not written.”

  “What does that mean?” Taro asked.

  “That she had no known name when she was left here, perhaps,” said Saya. “Or that it was forgotten by the time the stone was carved.”

  “But if the child lived here—” said Taro.

  “She was not here long,” Saya interrupted. “She went missing shortly after she was brought here. And she was never found.”

  This was just ridiculous. We’d come all this way and gone through hell just to reach a dead end? “I understand you were working here when these events would have taken place.”

  “Kai.”

  “Do you remember this child?”

  “No.”

  Frustrating wench. “How can you not?”

  “Many children go fly and then are caught again. I have no time to linger over events ten years by.”

  I couldn’t decide whether I found that appallingly cold or just good common sense.

  “Are there any other such circles for stringless children?” Taro asked her.

  “Not on Flatwell.”

  Damn it, this was ridiculous. This couldn’t be the end of things. But that seemed to be all the useful information that was available at the circle. So we took our leave, with no appointment to meet up later between Zilran and Taro that I could determine.

  “We don’t know for sure that Ara had no other children,” I said once we were out in the open again.

  “The story holder told us she died having Nevress. He would have told us if there were others.”

  “We don’t know for sure.”

  “And where else are we going to check?”

  “The Bryants.”

  “You mean the farmers of brown rye,” he said in a tone of flat annoyance.

  “That can’t possibly be where she got the name.” Please, let that not be how she got the name.

  We headed to where the story holder’s apprentice had told us the Bryants lived, but there was nothing there. No crops, no buildings, no people. And the nearest neighbors couldn’t figure out who we were talking about.

  I didn’t know what the next step was going to be, but we’d burned enough of the day away. I was tired and hungry and frustrated. So we went back to the bunker to arrange for something to eat, and of course Aryne wasn’t there, the aggravating little brat. Seriously, I was going to kill that kid.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Aryne didn’t return before Taro and I went to bed. I assumed she was avoiding a confrontation, hoping we wouldn’t yell at her if she snuck in while we were asleep. She would have been wrong. I was well able to hold on to anger through a night’s sleep. Though I hadn’t noticed in her any serious reaction to our yelling, anyway.

  Then I woke up the next morning and learned that Aryne still hadn’t returned. I was furious.

  “Be reasonable, Lee,” said Taro as he tucked into a breakfast of fish and rice that I was too angry to eat. “She’s believed her whole life that she’s a slave, and that Golden Fields was something to fear above everything else. It’s not surprising that stewing in a room alone for hours on end might prove to be too much for her.”

  “So she goes out into the open where she can be caught?” I demanded. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Children often don’t, I’m told.”

  “No, she caught a faster ride up north.” And I should have been relieved about it. She really was a complication we didn’t need.

  “Then why did she leave all of her stuff?”

  My cup of tea—a poor substitute for coffee, really—halted on its way to my mouth. “She did?”

  “Kai.”

  I set the tea cup back on the table. “Then where the hell is she?”

  I didn’t know what to think. Maybe she liked being out all night. In the Academy, there had been those who seemed to think being out when they were supposed to be in bed was thrilling all on its own. Yet I hadn’t known Aryne to do anything simply for the pleasure of it.

  Which was sad, now that I thought about it.

  “We’ll have to go look for her,” I said. I didn’t know what was going on with her, but I’d felt awful about not looking for her the last time she’d gone missing, and I wasn’t going to repeat that mistake. This time I was going to find her. And shake her.

  Zaire, I was getting violent in my thoughts.

  I shouldn’t think so ill of her. She’d had a horrible life. And Taro was right. She’d believed her whole life that Golden Fields was a place to be feared. She couldn’t be expected to just put that fear aside, no matter what facts had been presented to her. She was just a child. And a Source. Feelings would always rule her.

  I just couldn’t understand why the medicine man would tell her such a tale. What could possibly be the point of it? Had he stolen the child from her family, like what Saya had been speaking about? If he had, wouldn’t he have returned her by now, and gotten whatever ransom or power he’d been looking for?

  Or perhaps it had nothing to do with Aryne at all. Perhaps he had his own reasons for fearing Golden Fields.

  Would he have disregarded his reasons, whatever they were, to come looking for her?

  Oh, tell me he hadn’t grabbed her.

  But she would know better than to stay away so long. As far as she knew, we’d just leave her. We still had another task to perform. She had no way to know we’d reached a dead end.

  Hell, there we were again, looking for someone. We were no good at this. Why were we always ending up with this sort of task?

  But at least we had a place to start. If it weren’t for the medicine man, I wouldn’t know where to begin looking. And if the medicine man had nothing to do with Aryne’s disappearance, well, we were all in a knot, because I didn’t know what our next step would be.

  We headed to the market. I didn’t expect him to actually be there, especially if he were responsible for Aryne’s disappearance, but other traveling merchants might know him, and might notice him if he had been in Golden Fields at all. But those merchants who did know of him said they hadn’t seen him.

  There was a traveling medicine man there. He refused to talk to us unless we bought something, which led me, for one, to believe he had something useful to say. So we bought a small bottle of something useless, and he told us he hadn’t seen Border. Border never came to Golden Fields. The parasite.

  I was all for dashing the useless potion to the ground right then, but Taro thought the bottle was pretty and wanted to keep it.

  “The livery,” said Taro.

  “What about it?”

  “If he was here, and he didn’t stop in the market, which he wouldn’t under these circumstances, than he had to leave his gear—what did he have, anyway?”

  I searched my memory. “A kind of stall, but it had wheels. So it could be dragged.”

  “By a horse?”

  “I don’t think I’ve seen a horse on this island. People seem to use mules or some kind of steerlike animal.”

  “All right, he’d have to leave that somewhere while he was looking for Aryne. And that’s probably the livery, because he wouldn’t know anyone who lives here if he’s avoided this place for so many years.”

  That made sense, so we got directions to the two liveries in Golden Fields. The first one we went to had had no one leaving a stall like Border’s during the past few days. The second one was on the outskirts of the settlement, and had held such a stall.

  The first piece of positive news. I almost went into shock.

  “He left yesterday afternoon,” the livery woman told us.

  “Did he have a young girl with him?” Karish asked her.

  “Kai,” the woman answered.

  For some reason, it felt like my heart was pounding right in my throat. “What did she say?” Because she had to have been saying something.

  “She was asleep. Or ill. He was carrying her.”

  My gods. Why hadn’t I heard about this from any of the market people? “Who did you report this to?”

  The woman stared down at me, jaws working as she chewed on the end of some kind of wheatlike stalk. “No one.”

  “A man comes here alone and leaves with an unconscious child and you don’t tell anyone?”

  “Told lots of people. Don’t think that’s what you meant, though.”

  No, that wasn’t what I meant. I couldn’t believe a man could carry away a child who clearly didn’t belong to him without anyone doing anything about it. Maybe that was what he’d done the first time, too. Though, clearly, he didn’t need to avoid Golden Fields because of it. “He didn’t happen to say where he was going, did he?” I asked without much hope.

  “He went that way,” was the response we got, as the woman pointed to the only road out of town.

  And he’d left the day before, damn it. “Do you have any horses?” I asked her.

  She snickered. “No.”

  Some livery. But it didn’t matter, really. We didn’t have enough money to buy a horse. But how else could we catch up with Border? He’d have to know we would figure out that he had taken Aryne, and there was only one road out. He would be driving his animal hard, and probably taking some weird turns.

  We ran back to the bunker to get our gear and pack up Aryne’s. We spared some time to buy some travel rations. And then we headed back out at a brisk walk, speeding up to a jog when we had the energy, slowing right down to almost a stroll when the midday heat hit.

  As predicted, Border left the road. Or so we assumed. There were other wheel tracks, though not many, and when they turned off it was to follow a path to a house or some other useful location. When a set of ruts turned off the road into untouched grass with no particular destination in sight, we took the chance that those wheels belonged to Border.

  We could be going in the wrong direction. We were assuming that Border was being really stupid, or that he thought we were really stupid and wouldn’t have the first clue how to follow him. And we didn’t, not really. We were lucky that we weren’t buried in the forested part of the island, which I thought would make following a person impossible, or that there had been no rain to wash away wagon tracks. And that we’d thought to look for wagon tracks at all was probably due only to the fact that we’d been traveling with the troupe and noticing the deep impressions their wagon left in the ground.

  Walking off the road was harder work, and it was harder to see the wagon ruts. At times, the tracks made sharp turns to the right and left, for no reason I could discern. I couldn’t imagine what Border’s destination was.