“So they’ll drug the water,” Parno said.

“And then?”

Parno shook his head slowly, mouth twisted to one side. “That depends.” He wished he felt more confident about what he was going to say. His Schooling had not included any drug Shora. “Dhulyn knows the Shora for the fressian drugs,” he said. Both the older Brothers looked up at this. Most Brothers chose not to learn those particular Shora. As well as being one more way to die in Schooling, it diminished any future enjoyment a person might obtain from drugs. “And the iocain, too; plus one other, I think,” Parno told them. “If they give her one of the drugs using those bases, Dhulyn will manage.”

“But how can they do this?” Hernyn burst out. “With Pasillon…” His voice trailed off under the steady looks of his Brothers.

“Pasillon was long ago,” Parno said. “There are no longer thousands of Brothers who would come to avenge us.”

“A better question is why do this,” Fanryn said.

Parno nodded, more in response to the tone than the words.

He’d have liked an answer to that same question, himself, if only to be sure that it wasn’t the thing he feared. But what else could it be? Since it wasn’t him isolated, it had to be Dhulyn they were after. He didn’t see how Lok-iKol could have found out, but he could easily see why such a man, a man with political ambition, would want a Seer, if he knew where to put his hands on one.

What else would be worth so much trouble and risk?

“Have you been out of the cell yet?” he asked, more in an attempt to change the path of his own thoughts than because it would be useful to know. When his companions did not answer right away, but exchanged looks out of the corners of their eyes, he feared he did not have to look far for more to worry him.

“Well…” Fanryn scratched her elbow. “We were taken unprepared.”

“Unprepared? How did that happen?” Parno kept his voice carefully neutral, though from the silence of the other three, he hadn’t quite managed to keep the censure from his tone.

Fanryn shrugged. “Have you never taken service in a House, Parno? Things can look a bit different, you know.”

“Different, indeed,” Parno agreed, “if it means you can end up in a cell without the means of freeing yourselves.” He shook his head. No point in being delicate about their feelings. If it came to that, he’d been caught himself. For years, he’d chafed under what he’d always thought to be Dhulyn’s unnecessarily strict discipline. After all, he’d been Schooled the same way she had; all Mercenaries were. The three Schools might have different philosophies, as befitted their Schoolers-the nomadic Dorian the Black, the mountain-bred Nerysa Warhammer, Bettrian Skyborn of the western plains-but the Shora were the same, as was the Common Rule. If this kind of slackness actually did exist-and three Brothers in a cell without lockpicks seemed to say it did-maybe Dhulyn Wolfshead was less fanatical than he’d thought.

“Hold, Brother,” Thionan said, her hands raised, palms out. “We know. ‘A lazy Mercenary is a dead Mercenary.’ Believe me, we know. That’s not a lesson any of us will have to learn again. But telling us what we should have done doesn’t get us out of this cell right now.”

Parno nodded. The woman was quite right. Recriminations didn’t solve problems. “How did you get taken, if you don’t mind the question?” They all three exchanged another look. “It might be useful for me to know,” he added.

“They put something in our food,” Hernyn said, glancing at the stew bowl Parno had scraped clean. “It was just after you and Dhulyn Wolfshead came in with the young woman, that same day. Wasn’t it?” He turned to the two women.

“It was,” Thionan said. “A day, no, two days ago now. It was at the midday meal. They managed it the only way they could have, they put the stuff in the common dish. For the Caids’ sake, Parno.” Something of what he felt must have appeared on his face. “We’ve been here fourteen moons. We work for these people. We thought we’d be safe enough if we ate from the same dish as all the rest.”

“They must have knocked out seven other people just to get us,” Fanryn pointed out.

“And to confuse things,” Parno spoke his thought aloud. “No one could tell where you had gone or why.”

“True,” said Thionan. “But according to the keeper who was talking to us before he was told to hold his tongue, one of the people at table with us didn’t get up. I don’t know what they used on us-Fan says something called cyantrine-but apparently they risked poisoning their own people, just to make sure they had us.”

“What else could they do?” Parno said. “You would have known we never came out.” All four Brothers looked at each other. The word Pasillon went unspoken, unneeded.

“You’ll get us out, though. Right, Parno?” Hernyn asked. Parno saw the boy had color in his face and had lost his hangdog expression. Though there was still something doglike and devoted in his eyes. At least he seemed to have taken Parno’s advice to heart, and was putting his indiscretions behind him.

“Don’t see why not,” Parno said. “But let’s not rush ourselves. Getting out of the cell is one thing-out of the House another. I can’t leave without my Partner, so my first concern is to find her. Are we agreed?”

Fanryn nodded. “You’re Senior, Parno, so even if we didn’t agree-”

“Which we do-” Thionan cut in.

“Wonderful,” Parno smiled back. “Help me get my boots off.”

Eight

“SO, THIS IS WHAT you did when you were living in Navra?” Mar raised her head from the poem she was copying. She couldn’t tell which of her two new cousins had spoken. Their voices were very much alike, and now they both wore the identical wide-eyed look of innocent interest. The three of them were sitting on stone benches set around a stone table topped with small colored tiles that formed a picture of a flowering tree. The morning sun was bright, the garden protected, and here against the south wall it was warm enough for cloaks to be laid aside. A hard embroidered cushion protected her from the cold stone she sat on.

The question sounded polite enough, but in the last two days Mar had answered many questions that had hidden stings in their tails. Still, it was easier to answer with the truth.

“No,” she said, dipping the end of her pen-a beautiful thing, carved from a single piece of inglera bone, with a real gold point fitted on the end-into the marble inkwell. “The Weavers didn’t own any books for reading. I kept the accounts for their business. You know,” she added, determined not to let them make her feel ashamed, “lists of inventory, of customers, and orders, estimates for work, records of bills. That kind of thing.”

“But why didn’t the clerk do this work?”

There it was, the sidewise glance from one set of blue eyes to the other as Nor-eNor and Kyn-oKyn exchanged a not-so-private look.

“I was the clerk.” Mar looked back at her work just in time to prevent a large drop of ink from falling to the tiled tabletop. She bit the inside of her bottom lip. At the Weavers’ house, it would have been a serious and costly offense to waste ink and spoil table, paper, or parchment. Here, it would probably go unnoticed. But Mar wasn’t used to being here, copying poems instead of doing accounts.

“Ohhh.” Nor’s tone of enlightenment rang archly false. “So these weavers weren’t working for you, you were working for them!”

“I’ve explained it several times,” Mar said as innocently as the growing lump of unhappiness in her throat would let her. “Was I speaking too quickly?” She moved her eyes back to her work and kept them there until the two girls had gone off, their noses in the air.

The knots of tension in Mar’s shoulders loosened a little. Her moments of solitude had been few and far between since she’d been whisked out of the presence of the Tenebroso-and away, incidentally, from her friends the Mercenary Brothers-and rushed away to bathe and dress properly in time for the midday meal. Her own clothes had been taken away to be “laundered,” and she’d since had to be very insistent to convince the lady page assigned to help her that she wanted the clothes back. She wasn’t sure herself why she wanted the clothing, worn and out of place here as it was, she’d only known that she’d wanted something familiar around her. As for her new clothes, Mar was still not used to the sheer amount of them. The hose, the chemise, the long gown with close-fitting sleeves covered by the loose tunic in the House colors that was so clearly unfashionable when compared to the tighter bodices of Nor and Kyn.