did.
“What was stolen?” she asked Evanton as she rose. Her voice fell into a regular Hawk’s cadence—all bored business. And watchful.
“A small and unremarkable reliquary,” he replied. “A red box, with gold bands. Both the leather and the gold are worn.”
“What was in it?”
“I am not entirely certain,” he replied, but it was in that I-have-some-ideas-and-I-don’t-want-to-tell tone of voice. “The box is locked. It was locked when I first arrived, and the keys that were made to open it … It has no keyhole, Kaylin.”
“So it can’t be opened.”
“Jumping to conclusions, I see.”
She grimaced. “It has to be opened magically.”
“Good girl,” he replied softly.
“This isn’t really Hawk work—”
“The Hawks don’t investigate thefts?”
“Ye-es,” she said, breaking the single syllable into two. “But not petty thefts as such, and not without a better description of the value of what’s been stolen.”
“People will die,” he told her quietly, “while the reliquary is at large. It exerts its power,” he added softly, “on those who see it and those who possess it. Only—” He stopped. His face got that closed-door look that made it plain he would say no more. Not yet.
“There were two people here,” she said at last.
“Yes. Two. An unusually large woman, or a heavyset man, by the look of those treads, and an unusually small one, or a child, by the look of the second.” He met her eyes.
And she knew who the child had been.
The shop seemed more mundane than it had ever seemed when Evanton escorted them back into it. His robes transformed as he crossed the threshold and the power of wisdom gave way to the power of age and gravity as his shoulders fell into their perpetual bend.
He was once again the ancient, withered shopkeeper and purveyor of odd junk and the occasional true magic. And this man, Kaylin had chattered at for most of her adolescence. If Severn was circumspect—a word she privately hated—she had no such compulsion.
“You think there are going to be murders associated with this theft.”
He didn’t even blink. “Indeed.”
“Or possibly already have been. When exactly did you notice this disturbance?”
“Yesterday,” he replied, his lips pursed as he sought his impossible-to-miss key ring.
“But you don’t think it happened yesterday?”
“I can’t be certain, no. As I said, I’ve sponsored a bit of a contest—”
She lifted a hand. “Don’t give me contests I can’t enter.”
He lifted a brow. “Oddly enough, Private, I think you’re one of the few who could. Possibly. You make a lot of noise, on the other hand, and it may—”
“Evanton, please, these are people’s lives we’re talking about.”
“Yes. But if I am to be somewhat honest, they are not lives, I feel, you would be in a hurry to save.”
“You’re dead wrong,” she said, meaning it.
“About at least one of them,” he said softly. “But if I am not mistaken, she is not—yet—in danger. I feel some of the mystery of their entrance can only be answered by her.”
“By a child?”
“You might wish to fill the corporal in on what you saw,” Evanton told her.
“It’s not necessary,” Severn replied, before Kaylin could. “I have a good idea of what she saw.”
“Oh?”
“She gets a particular look when she’s dealing with children in distress.” He paused and then said, voice devoid of all texture and all emotion, “Kaylin has always had a weakness for children. Even when she was, by all legal standards, a child herself.
“And that’s not a look she gets when the child is happy or looks well treated,” he added softly. “Then, she’s only wistful.”
Evanton nodded as if everything Severn had said confirmed what he already knew. “Very well. You make a good team,” he told them both. “He’s much better for you than those two Barrani slouchers.”
Kaylin sidestepped the question in the old man’s words. Remembered the brief touch of Severn’s palms on her cheeks. But that was personal. This was worse.
“What will the manner of death be?”
“That, I cannot tell you. It is very, very seldom that I invite visitors into the elementarium, and with cause. You felt compelled to touch nothing and take nothing, because that room had nothing to offer you.”
“I felt compelled—”
“Yes, but not to take, Kaylin. Not to acquire. And I cannot yet tell you why the water chose to show you the girl. I can only tell you that what you saw was in some fashion true.”
“She called me by name.”
He spun so fast she almost tripped over him and sent them both flying—which in his case would probably have broken every bone in his frail body. She managed to catch herself on the wall.
“By name?” he asked, one brow melding with his receding hairline.
She nodded.
“Ah, girl,” he said, with a shake of the head. He turned away again. “If I had found you first—”
“What does it mean?”
“I cannot say for certain,” he replied. “But this much, I can guess—she touched the heart of the elemental water, and woke some of its slumbering intent. It wants you to find her, Kaylin.”
“And that’s a bad thing.”
“It may well be,” Evanton replied. “But if I told you—if I could honestly tell you—that it would mean the end of the Empire itself were you to pursue it, you’d pursue it anyway.
“Water is canny that way. It sees into the deeps that we hide.” But he turned away as he spoke.
“Evanton—”
“Old man—”
He stopped as Severn and Kaylin’s words collided, but did not look back. “If you’re about to accuse me of knowing more than I’ve told you, stand in line and take a number,” he said in a voice so dry a little spark would have set it on fire. “I’m a very busy
