“I saw him the night the Path fell,” said Ielian.

“Then you know—ah, here’s what I’ve been looking for. There’s been a deer past here recently. Time to start the hunt.”

“Let’s explore the rest of the building before we start on this room,” Seraph told Hennea, surveying the main room of the library. At least she hoped it was the main room. It would take them a long time to look through, and she didn’t want to find any bigger rooms. “Wizards are a secretive lot. If they were working on something new, it might be in some obscure corner of the library, either high up or down in the basement.”

Hennea pursed her lips. “If we’re looking for something about the Orders, it won’t be in bound books anyway. Otherwise, we’d have found something in the mermori libraries. It will be in parchments or handsewn notebooks of some sort. Maybe in a laboratory or work area.”

“I’m glad I’m not a solsenti wizard,” Seraph said. “I don’t have the temperament to draw endless runes and mix potions in a laboratory. So, do we stay together or split up?”

“It’ll take half the time to look if we split up,” Hennea said, then she smiled. “Of course, if you are worried about being alone…”

Seraph snorted.

Hours later, Seraph was feeling as frustrated as any solsenti wizard.

She’d been right about the kinds of places wizards liked, and the section of the library that she’d found abounded in such places, small alcoves that were obviously private studies, laboratories with shelves full of jars and baskets of spell components, and slightly larger rooms where two or three wizards might have worked together. She’d walked leagues of mazelike halls that twisted and turned, with unexpected stairways and half stairways.

Everything as perfectly preserved as it must have been the day that they had left. She could not conceive of the power that had taken.

“You were here weren’t you, Isolde?” Seraph murmured to herself as she walked through yet another narrow twisting hallway. “I wonder what you saw and where you were going? Did you know what they were doing, those great wizards who created the Stalker? Were you one of them, or did you protest futilely?”

She trailed a hand on the wall until she came to another door. The room was mostly empty, though it still smelled of some sort of incense or tobacco.

“I wonder where the Stalker is,” she mused. “And why neither my Falcon nor my Eagle feels it anywhere.” It hadn’t struck her as odd until just that minute. Her sons could feel shadowing and, less reliably, the Shadowed, but they hadn’t said anything about the Stalker at all.

There was a small desk and a chair on one end of the room. Someone had carved two letters in the wood of the desk. Remembering the scolding she’d given Jes and Lehr for carving their initials into the floorboards at home when they were about Rinnie’s age, she smiled.

Some young person had sat here, she thought, brushing her hands over the chair, but keeping a lock on her talent for reading objects because she didn’t know how the wizard’s preservation spells would affect it. That didn’t stop her from speculating. A student had been sent here to work, perhaps, and had taken his eating knife and carved his initials here instead, finding a kind of immortality in the act. Look, he said, I was here, I left my mark.

She stepped out of the room and shut the door gently.

“Excuse me, can I help you?” said a male voice in softly accented Common.

Seraph spun on her heel and stared at the young man who stood in the hallway behind her.

Except for his clothes, he looked every inch a Traveler. Silvery blond hair, not two shades off her own, hung to his shoulders, where it wasn’t caught up in beaded braids. His eyes were a pale, pale grey, and he looked only a little older than Rinnie. He was naked except for a wraparound kilt of bright colors secured with a plain brown belt. Even his feet were bare.

“Who are you?” she asked, centering herself in case she needed her magic.

His small polite smile widened a bit, and he ducked his head without dropping her gaze. “You may call me Scholar. May I help you find what you need?”

Only then, when the first shock of fright had passed did she realize what her senses had been trying to tell her: this was not a human.

“Illusion,” she said, reaching out to touch him lightly. His skin was soft, warm, and gave beneath her touch as if he had been a real boy and not a magical construct. The magic felt very familiar—just like the mermori. “Hinnum made you.”

“Indeed,” he answered her politely. She found it impossible to look at the illusion and not designate him as male, though she knew it was foolish. “May I help you find something? You seem to be searching.”

“I need to find out about the Orders,” she told him. “My husband’s has been damaged, and I need to repair it.”

“You have many Orders,” the Scholar said neutrally.

“I am Raven,” Seraph said confused.

“You carry many Orders.”

Her hand went to the bag where the gems the Path had created lay. How had an illusionary construct sensed them? She narrowed her eyes at him. “I do. There have been many Travelers killed, and their Orders bound to gemstones so that solsenti wizards could use them. I have them here. I hope that if I find out enough to help my husband, then I can see these Orders are properly released as well.”

The boy said nothing, just waited in silence. His small smile was unchanged, and she suspected that she’d been mistaken when she’d thought it had widened earlier.

“Why were you left here?” she asked him.

“I am here to help others find information from the library.”

“You know what information is stored here?” Seraph felt a stirring of excited hope that the first sight of the library full of books had extinguished. If she and Hennea had to sort through the books for ones they could decipher, then read them, Tier would die of old age before they finished.

“I know what is in the library,” he answered.

“Good,” she said. “Do you know where Hennea is? My friend who came in here with me?”

This time the answer didn’t come immediately. “I know where the Raven is,” he said at last.

“Take me there,” she said. This was better than a notebook full of the scribblings of wizards.

Hennea had chosen to explore the basement. They found her seated at a table, a magelight hanging over a loose-bound sheaf of papers. Her hair was mussed, as if she’d spent time crawling under tables.

“Raven,” said the Scholar, before Seraph could announce them. “You are welcome here.”

Hennea marked her place with a finger and looked up with an expression of mild inquiry. She didn’t look at all surprised to find a stranger addressing her. Seraph had never admired her aplomb more.

“This is the Scholar,” Seraph said, wondering if Hennea would see what she had seen.

Hennea frowned and set the papers aside, shifting her weight in her chair as she stared at him. “You look familiar,” she said at last.

“No,” Seraph corrected her gently. “He feels familiar.”

Hennea straightened. “Hinnum,” she said.

“The Scholar is here to help people find information.” Seraph smiled. “Phoran said that wizards tend to be very well organized.”

The Scholar led them back to the main room, the first room they’d been in. “This is a good place to start,” he told them. “What would you know?”

“Tell us about the Stalker,” asked Hennea.

He bowed shallowly. “Pray have a seat, Raven.”

He was talking to Hennea as if he no longer noticed Seraph was in the room, his eyes locked on Hennea’s face. As she sat on the cushioned bench beside Hennea, Seraph wondered if it was some aspect of his creation that he paid attention only to the one who questioned him.

“There were once two brothers, twins born of the Eastern Star and fathered by the Moon. They were mirror images of each other, the light twin and the dark. We called them the Weaver and the Stalker, though those were not their names.”