With the matter of the soldier for the moment resolved, Hytham and I rode onto the forest path. He had a rough idea of where the attack was supposed to have occurred and suspected we would find the area much as it had been upon Bansaerin’s arrest. “Though there is a large company in Shakerton, the other heralds have been occupied with tending to the fields and collecting the tithe, especially as our tenure here is likely to be shorter than originally planned.”

  Hytham quickly corrected himself after my look of alarm. “I speak of as far as they know since our actions are, at present, a secret.” He cleared his throat and glanced uneasily at me. “I may need to ask for thy help in keeping them that way.”

  A chill wind whipped through the woods, distracting me from inquiring what he meant.

  “I do not wish to offend thee,” Hytham continued, “but because it has been left untended, it is likely the scene we will come upon is rather gruesome.”

  I studied the grip of the reins in my hand. “In what way?”

  “Well, though there were some efforts to laying the men to rest, erm—” He cleared his throat, looking away from me. “Not all the parts of all the men were recovered.”

  I frowned as I parsed through his meaning. Missing body parts certainly spoke more of a mournling attack than of what Bansaerin could have done on his own against a handful of soldiers especially one so skilled and decorated as the sheriff.

  The other sort of mournling attack—where they remained silent and disappeared without a trace—were in some ways more terrifying than those in which they brought chaos and carnage. At least in the latter, there was evidence of what had transpired. The true horror of the mournlings, in my mind, was that they were capable of either path. But what I could still not understand was why the Hume blamed Bansaerin if the evidence clearly pointed toward mournlings. Were they so unfamiliar with the creatures’ presence that they couldn’t recognize their signs?

  While we rode, Hytham began to tell me his own story of arriving in Shakerton. It was only recently he had been appointed to Herald Devrim’s service. Before then, he had been in cloister—an Order term for training while holding oneself at a remove from others—in his home in Roane.

  Part of his appointment stemmed from his familiarity with the Lifkin tongue. He asked my permission to practice with me in Lifkin which I feared, at first, had to do with my accent in Breolish, but he assured me that was far from the case. As we spoke, I came to believe it emerged as well from his desire for me to be at ease around him.

  “Now that I have told thee something of myself, it is natural for thou to answer in kind.”

  This seemed fair. “As you wish. What would you like to know?” At some point in our journey through the forest, I planned to steer our conversation to ask after his speech in Breolish—the clergyman in Shakerton had spoken in the formal dialect as well, but I was surprised Hytham chose such a respectful address with me.

  “What did the prisoner—Bansaerin—say to thou?”

  I frowned before answering. Knowing now that he spoke Lifkin, he easily could have overheard us. Was this another test of my honesty? “I have told you much of what he said already.”

  Hytham addressed me in Lifkin, “Tell me again, please.”

  I repeated my conversation with Bansaerin, how he’d said the herald had forced him to confess to the murder of the sheriff when it wasn’t true. “I don’t even know how Bansaerin would have gone about such a feat.”

  “Through Lifkin witchcraft, surely?”

  I whirled about in my saddle to study Hytham’s expression to see if he spoke in jest. “Our magic does not do that. And besides, Bansaerin isn’t magical.” We were tiptoeing into territory I did not wish to enter. “But is this something most heralds can do? Force someone to confess to a crime? Imagine the implications for the judicial system—”

  “No, no.” Hytham shook his head. “What you are suggesting is impossible.”

  It couldn’t be impossible since it was true. Bansaerin had told me so. “Just because you don’t know about it doesn’t mean it cannot be happening.”

  “But it does.”

  It was my turn to frown at the Hume. “How?”

  “I would know.”

  “You would just . . . know that a magic existed or didn’t?”

  He huffed and adjusted his seat in his saddle. “Let me think how I can explain this.” Hytham pursed his lips as though scrunching the expression of his face would allow him to happen upon the words more quickly. “Tell me about a friend.”

  “Bansaerin is my friend.”

  The adjudicator raised his eyes to the sky but suppressed his sigh. “This example will not work in that regard. Could you tell me of another friend?”

  I chewed my lower lip, yet another of Bansaerin’s warnings echoing in my memory. But Hytham was trying to help me. “Mirdal. My closest friend is named Mirdal.”

  Hytham nodded. “Good. And what does Mirdal do?” His Lifkin accent was pleasing to hear—a bit stilted, but already he was warming in his address.

  “He’s an apothecary.” Thinking of Mirdal brought a mote of warmth close to my heart. “He’s been hard at work on a love potion lately.” I smiled, thinking of the gleam in his eye as I handed over the lavender oil. Had he found an opportunity to test it?

  “What interesting company you keep.” He said it with a note of concern more than of judgement, but I was certain my company was far more normal than the sort he’d kept in cloister and after. No one I knew was evicting others from their homes or forcing them to confess to crimes they hadn’t committed.

  “This example will do nicely,” Hytham added. “So, your friend. He keeps his supplies upon an apothecary . . . table. Yes?”

  “He does.” I was curious to see what Mirdal’s table had to do with the Herald’s twisted magic and Hytham’s magical senses but was willing to find out.

  “And he has this table arranged in a particular way to aid his working?”

  “Yes, he does have a particular arrangement he prefers.”

  “And with this arrangement, he would know if something were out of place or if there were something somewhere it didn’t belong.”

  The supposition seemed reasonable enough to me though I hadn’t ever heard Mirdal report such an occurrence. “Yes, I believe so.” He would certainly read into an alteration of the sort Hytham described. No doubt he’d see it as an action taken by a secret admirer desperately trying to win his affections.

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  “Well in the same way that he would know if something were amiss with his table, I would know if there were something off about the herald’s magic.”

  And immediately his hope of his example making sense to me was lost. The one dwelt in the realm of the physical senses, the other, the realm of spirits. They could be sensed but not wholly. Seen, so long as they wished to be by one trained and able to see them. For most outside the realm of spiritspeakers, they were more an energy to perceive. I knew saying as much would raise his suspicions toward me even further. I repeated the comparison back to Hytham to ensure I hadn’t missed a crucial piece.

  He beamed back his affirmative as though all was settled between us in the matter and then a shadow crossed his expression.“Saying as much aloud, it makes me wonder about how I came to hold this post. There was . . . strange magic at work in that instance as well.”

  “What do you mean, ‘strange magic’?”

  “Herald Devrim has a fearsome reputation, though he’s one of the fastest-advancing heralds in all of the Order. I am, well, young for an adjudicator, but it’s what I’ve been training for my entire life. I knew the herald wasn’t a man to be crossed. It wasn’t until I arrived in Grimcross from cloister in Roane that I began to suspect something was amiss.”

  Roane was a large city to the south, near the capital of Breoland. By contrast, Grimcross was a port town a half-day’s ride from Dust. They oversaw most of the water trade for the baron’s city and sent caravans of goods into Dust itself.

  Hytham continued, “Once I arrived in Grimcross, I began to suspect that my predecessor had died under mysterious circumstances. My transition from cloister in Roane to Grimcross was made with haste, giving me time enough to sit with my predecessor’s body in vigil before taking my vows.” He glanced away from me, ruffling his hair as he scratched at the back of his scalp.

  “I had a . . . strange feeling about the whole situation and resolved to do something about it. When no one was looking, I peeked beneath the shroud that had been placed over him.” Hytham’s shoulders jolted from an involuntary shudder. “The adjudicator’s lips were blue, which could have been a symptom of a weak heart and him passing in the night if that had been the only symptom.”

  “But it wasn’t,” I whispered. Even the woods around us had quietened for Hytham’s tale.

  “It wasn’t. The former adjudicator had gouge marks all down his neck.” Hytham mimed scratching at his neck with his fingernails. “He’d torn through his flesh and drawn blood.”

  I watched him with my mouth ajar. So much of what he’d just revealed was unbelievable, impossible. “I don’t understand. Why would they tell you he’d died of a weak heart when it was clearly something else?”

  Hytham’s mouth thinned into a line. “It’s the nature of the something else that prevented them, I believe.” He shook his head. “As I told you, I knew Devrim’s name and reputation before my appointment. The stories I’d heard of him alternated between someone of great power and learning as well as someone . . . harsh. But after seeing the body of his former adjudicator, I grew more concerned.”

  I chewed my lower lip. What Hytham suspected he’d found, the implications for both him and Bansaerin . . . “You believe the herald killed his former adjudicator.” I paused, not wanting to say the rest, but then I realized he needed someone to. “And no one among the Order is doing anything to hold him to account.”

  “Not as far as I can tell, no.” He glanced about the woods around us before dropping his gaze toward his horse’s mane. “I sleep in his bed now.”

  I shivered—death’s chill would still hover all about the chamber, especially after so gruesome a demise. Hytham was lucky a mournling had not manifested and attacked him in the middle of the night.

  “My first evening, as I laid back to rest my head, I found letters carved into the wooden bedside—D V L.”

  I repeated the letters aloud, trying to puzzle them out, but they weren’t the basis of any Breolish code I knew. The first could obviously pertain to the Herald’s name, but the rest? “What do you think it means?”

  “Devrim. Villain.” Hytham mimed a man clawing at his own throat with one hand and scratching out a message with the other. I wasn’t so sure about his interpretation of the order of events. His predecessor would have had little time and have needed a great deal of presence of mind.

  I tugged my cloak tighter about my shoulders. “Shouldn’t someone else have noticed?” I prodded. “Either the markings in the bed or . . .” I didn’t want to say it, but as he had been so honest with me, there seemed little point in skirting the issue. “Or, umm, looked at the body?”

  Hytham nodded, his lips a thin line. “One would have thought.”

  “Those are not the symptoms of a weak heart,” I prodded repeating the official explanation he’d been given.

  “No.” His voice was distant thunder. “No, they are not.”

  As frightening as Hytham’s circumstances were, he did not shrink in fear before them. There was a resoluteness to his seat in his saddle, to the set of his shoulders.

  “What do you think he’s doing now, your herald?”

  Hytham lowered his gaze, avoiding mine. “Being harsh.” The soft rumble of his voice, the crunch of a hoof on wet gravel, belied all he did not wish to say, what he sought to spare me from.

  A hurt from which I could not protect Bansaerin.

  I slumped over on my saddle, arm clutched against my stomach to hold in the sob that threatened to claw its way out of my throat. Stinging tears blurred my vision and fell into the braids that had slipped free from behind my shoulders.

  This was my fault.

  “Have I said something to upset thee?”

  My lips trembled as I met Hytham’s gaze. How could he not know?

  He stared back at me so earnestly—I couldn’t help but to confess. “It’s my fault that Bansaerin was captured.” I bit my lips back together to stop their twisting. The tears continued to paint their rivulets down my cheeks, sticking in my lashes.

  “I am certain that is not true.” His conviction bore the same courtliness as his other dealings with me. Likely the Order had taught him that such a confession was an inappropriate providence for a woman and so could not possibly hold true.

  But I knew better. I nodded, gripping Gwinny’s reins more tightly in my fists so that the leather bit into my hands. “I stopped him. The night we heard you were coming, he wanted to leave to find help—”

  “Help?” His confusion was so genuine I couldn’t find in it a manipulation. “Why would thou have sought help?”

  My lips parted, but I could not answer so daft and obvious a question. Why did one fight back when an enemy held a knife to one’s throat?

  Better leave it be. “But I asked him to wait,” I continued as though he hadn’t interrupted. “The woods are dangerous, especially after truedark. We had no idea you could have arrived so quickly. But if I hadn’t stopped him, he wouldn’t have been in the woods when the sheriff was returning to Shakerton. They wouldn’t have caught him. The herald wouldn’t—” My voice broke again, and I couldn’t go on.

  For a moment, no sound passed between us beyond the sighing of the trees and the clomp of our horses’ hooves.

  Hytham addressed me in Lifkin rather than Breolish, speaking slowly. “I want you to listen to me.” Again the soothing tone, like a lullaby to a child, only it came from the mouth of one who should have been my enemy. “Despair will not help your friend. You will need to be determined and strong, and we will push through whatever obstacles present themselves for the glory and the light of Ilona.”

  I wetted my lips, recalling that last conversation I’d had with Bansaerin in our home. The flecks of green in his eyes as he stared down at me, the way he’d dropped his gaze, frustration bowing his shoulders. He had been so desperate to fight, to do something. And I had stopped him.

  That man had still been there when I found him in the prison beneath the church. Of course they kept prisons beneath their churches. The Bansaerin I knew had been hidden, held back, withdrawn so that man and body might survive whatever the Herald was doing to him. And he’d been scared for me—that they would catch me with him, either use me against him or hurt me for their own amusement. I knew all of this. But I wanted to find that man, the true one, and set him out into the wilds. If anyone could find the Umbral Wolves and tell them of our plight, it was him.

  I straightened in my saddle. “I can do determined and strong.”

  “For the light and glory of Ilona,” Hytham repeated, a cautious grin twitching at the corners of his lips. The words sounded strange in Lifkin, but Hytham seemed encouraged by them nonetheless.

  I shook my head. “Determined and strong.” There was nothing I would do for such a cruel goddess who abandoned and punished and who encouraged others to punish in her name. There was no need for such a figure in our world—a world already beset with darkness. I felt no ire toward the soldier-priest beside me, he who wished to aid me and to save himself from the grave danger his herald presented. But for his goddess, I had no shortage of rage. That was the true difference my years of reading, of listening, had made.

  Bansaerin believed it was the Hume who tormented us. Their Order was cruel and would have seen us eliminated if they could have.

  But I knew the true evil in our world—she disguised herself as a goddess of light and promised salvation from the darkness she had created. Was there any separating her from the Order that served her whims? My people had already suffered her judgment and nearly perished one and all for it.

  One day, someone would stop her and her Order. The Hythams of the world would be free to find the goodness in themselves.

  And I would share no promise of glory or light with a cruel, dark goddess.