With a sudden urge, for she had no vocabulary to express the deep unsettled thoughts behind such questions, Miss Temple stepped up her pace and took Elöise's restless hand in hers.

“We must be careful,” she said, looking down at her boots and away from the surprise on her companion's face. “Never having been acquainted with the late Mrs. Jorgens, it is strictly possible the hair is hers…”

Elöise nodded. Miss Temple took a breath and went on. “But I have a memory, upon the airship, that the Contessa carried… well, a vicious sort of spike upon one hand—and you see, it is how they have described the wolves, the woman's throat torn out”—Miss Temple's voice went hoarse, to her great frustration—“with such slashes. I simply cannot forget poor Caroline Stearne's forlorn face above the wound… any more than I could forget the Contessa's smile.”

Elöise squeezed Miss Temple's hand. “There is our cart, Celeste. You were correct, our man has waited.”

Miss Temple looked back to the cabin. “We are fools,” she said. “I am sure we might have availed ourselves of some weapons from the house.”

“Not to worry,” whispered Elöise. For the first time Miss Temple noticed the tight bundle in the woman's other hand. “I have borrowed a pair of Mr. Jorgens’ knives.”

IT WAS another hour before the trees began to thin and one more after that before the land changed to brown and tangled meadows, full of stones and rising gently to a line of hills whose rocky tops looked as if they had been blackened by a flame.

Through some of this Miss Temple had managed to sleep, and she woke, blinking, surprised by the flat open light around her, now that the trees had gone. The cart had stopped, and she saw their driver walking into the grass to relieve himself.

“Do you know where we will rest tonight?” she asked Elöise, who had used the man's absence to unroll the cloth she'd removed from the cabin.

“I was told it is an inn,” she replied. “A mining town within the hills.”

She looked up to see Miss Temple's attention on the knives. One was three inches long and perhaps one fat inch across, razor sharp on one side and dull on the other, with the blade curving quite as much as a Turk's scimitar.

“Might it be for skinning?” offered Miss Temple.

The other knife was slightly longer, stabbing to a needle-sharp point, with a heavier blade than its length would seem to warrant.

“I would hazard this one serves to strip meat from a bone,” answered Elöise. “Mr. Jorgens may have been a hunter.”

“I have no pockets,” Miss Temple announced crisply, and reached for the longer, straighter blade. “But this will easily slip in my boot.” She glanced once at their returning driver, then settled the weapon neatly alongside her right instep.

Elöise palmed the other and balled up the cloth as the cart shifted, their driver swinging himself into his seat. He peered at them with the sour expression of a man unjustly burdened, spat a brackish jet of tobacco juice, and snapped the reins.

FEELING AFTER another rest nearly her peremptory, impatient self, Miss Temple nevertheless did not speak of the matters most pressing to her mind. Instead, she plied her companion with the polite questions there had never been time to ask before—where her people were from, her preferred blend of tea, favorite fruit and color of sealing wax. This led naturally enough to Elöise describing her life as tutor to the Trapping children. She spoke not at all of the Trappings themselves, or the two Xonck brothers (Mrs. Trapping's powerful siblings—the older, Henry, as mighty and distant as the younger, Francis, was cunning and wicked), as if Elöise's position in life had no relation whatsoever to the adventures that had swept her up like a rising tide in the past weeks, nor to any urgent questions that might still face them.

A lady of property, Miss Temple had been well trained for conversation about family and social ritual (for amongst her social peers, such talk was a currency vital as gold coin), and so she nodded and smiled in turn as Elöise described in suffocating detail the parkland cottage of her uncle, with its stone wall lined with yellow rosebushes that had been tended by her mother as a girl. Yet it was ultimately of no use, for Miss Temple's tender mind, like a mill trembling with the motion of turbines and wheels, simply contended with too many forces to permit distraction.

Elöise had just confessed her love for the opera, despite the difficulty of securing tickets, and was offering an account of a particular favorite from some seasons ago, Les Jardins Glacé, an apparently wandering adventure from the mountains of deepest China. Upon reaching a point of pause where Miss Temple might inquire politely about the music or the scenery, Elöise instead found the young woman's grey eyes fixed on the scrub-filled meadows around them.

“Celeste?” Elöise ventured, after the silence had taken full root.

Miss Temple looked at her and flicked up the corners of her mouth in a smile.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I had a thought.”

Elöise put away her neglected story of the opera and smiled gamely. “What thought?”

“Actually several thoughts, or several that make one large thought clustered together—like chairs around a table, don't you know.”

“I see.”

“One of those cunning tables one can extend.”

“What thoughts, Celeste?”

“I was thinking about killing.”

“Killing?”

Miss Temple nodded.

“I'm sure it is a subject to weigh upon us both,” began Elöise, with a careful air. “We have seen so much of it in so short a time—the killings at Tarr Manor, people hunted through the hallways of Harschmort, the truly savage battle on the rooftop before the airship could fly, and then death after death once we were aloft—and for you an even more difficult and sensitive question, in your unfortunate and foolish and corrupted former fiancé.”

The cautious deliberacy of her words was mortifying. Miss Temple waved her hands. “No no—it is not that at all! I am occupied with our present business! We are miles away, and it is all my mind can hold—certainly there is no room there for a wolf! If we are to help the Doctor and Chang, who must have become caught up in these same events—”

“But these recent deaths,” protested Elöise, “we know very little—”

“We can extrapolate!” cried Miss Temple. “We are not fools! If one has studied dogs, one then knows how to lead a pack of hounds! If we assume the three incidents are part of one tale—”

“What three incidents?”

Miss Temple huffed with exasperation. “In the fishing village! The grooms killed in the stable, the fisherman dead in his boat, the Jorgenses in their cabin! By stitching them together we will see whether the resulting narrative reveals the raw hunger of a beast or the calculated actions of a villain. We can then determine where next—”

“How can we? Not having witnessed the incidents, not having seen the stable or the boat, not knowing how the bodies were disposed—”

“But you must know! Doctor Svenson must have told you—”

“But he did not.”

“We at least know in what order the killings occurred, and at what times.”

“But we don't. We know only when the bodies were found, Celeste.”

Miss Temple did not enjoy others referring to her Christian name at whim, and enjoyed it even less as punctuation to a thought she was supposed to find self-evident.

“Then perhaps you will tell me when that was, Elöise.”

After a wary glance at their silent driver and another sigh of resignation, Elöise shifted closer to Miss Temple and spoke in a voice barely above a whisper. “The two grooms were discovered first, after the storm. The wind was still quite high, but the rains had eased enough for folk to leave their homes. Several horses were found roaming free. When they were led back to the stable, the doors were found open and the grooms, dead. The Doctor and Chang were both there. I was tending to you, not that I regret being deprived of the sight.”