"You proposed?" Tarrin asked in surprise.

"Not yet," she admitted with a slow smile. "And don't you dare warn him. I don't want to give him any chance to run away."

"We wouldn't dream of it, but why Allyn?" Tarrin asked. "He's not even remotely Selani."

"You and Kerri have shown me that there is strength in diversity," she said simply. "With the Selani strength and the Sha'Kar magic in their blood, our children will be powerful. And I like Allyn, brother. He's very attentive to me, he makes me laugh, and I know I can depend on him when I need him. He'll make a fine husband, even someone my clan can accept after I've suitably trained him."

"He's a bit soft for the Selani life, sister."

"Don't let Allyn's demeanor fool you, brother. He has steel in him. His is a Sha'Kar upbringing, but he has the soul of a Selani inside. There's more to him than you realize. Even I'm surprised by him from time to time."

"As long as you're not thinking with something a little south of your brain," he told her bluntly.

"That had a say in it," she said with a smirk.

"It would," he accused.

"We knew this would happen," Keritanima told her.

"What?"

"That you'd whip him into shape," she said with a grin. "I knew you were too much man for him."

Allia looked at her, then laughed brightly. "I'm too much woman for him, you mean," she corrected.

"Humans call it henpecked," Tarrin said dryly.

"We call it sensible," Allia said. "He'll learn that my way is the only way. If he doesn't, he'll have a very unpleasant marriage."

"No wonder she doesn't want to give him the chance to run away," Keritanima teased, giving Tarrin a bright, mischievious smile.

"Allyn won't be easy to tame," Allia admitted. "But I'll enjoy the challenge of it."

"Well, we forgot to say congratulations, so congratulations, sister," Tarrin told her.

"Yes, congratulations, sister. Now we're all married," Keritanima said with a smile. "Or at least something approaching it. Now we can sit up all night and gossip wickedly about our spouses."

"We do that already," Tarrin shrugged.

"But at least now some of us aren't left out," Keritanima said with a bright smile.

"That was your fault. We couldn't help it if you were a virgin," Allia told her frankly. "We could have fixed that for you any number of times, you know. There were any number of suitable men handy, but you were stubborn about keeping your royal chastity. So don't complain if you missed out."

Keritanima's face poofed out as all the fur on her face stood on end, then she laughed helplessly. "And I thought I was dirty-minded!" she admitted. "I submit to your even dirtier mind, fair sister," she said with a mocking smile. "I'm yours to train in all those kinds of things."

"If you want training, talk to Miranda," Tarrin told her bluntly. "She's more corrupt than all three of us put together."

"That's certainly saying something," Keritanima chuckled. "I'm not sure it's a good thing, but it's certainly something."

Bantering with his sisters had done much to leech off the majority of his blinding anger, but it didn't totally vent it. He was still plenty angry, but it was again the cold, calculating anger of the human in him, the anger that would allow him think rationally without losing his ire. Vengeful anger, his father Eron would call it. A kind of anger he'd always warned Tarrin not to cultivate in himself, for good things rarely came of it. It allowed him to approach the problem before them with more than a driving need to hunt down and chastise someone-anyone-in the most vicious manner possible. Now he could follow leads, think calmly, and then let that blind fury go when he was sure of who did it.

They met Sapphire and Jenna as soon as he returned to his room, where the two Knights still stood silent vigil. They came out as soon as he approached the two armored men, and Jenna was swept up in the arms of Keritanima and Allia both when she reached them. Tarrin had his memory back, and he knew intimately well now just how close Jenna was to his his adopted sisters. Allia had become close to her before they left the Tower, and Keritanima had done so after they had returned to the Tower while Tarrin was in the desert, after Keritanima herself had returned from Wikuna. Keritanima and Allia were accepted by his parents as an intimate part of his immediate family, and his mother often absently called them both daughter. Sapphire still looked incensed, but at least lightning wasn't flying all over the place.

"Are you ready, little one?" she asked in a tightly controlled voice.

"Let's go," he said. "Allia and Kerri are going with us. Both of them are very observant. They may catch things we miss."

Sapphire looked profoundly skeptical of that notion, but sniffed indifferently and swept in the direction that Jenna pointed.

Where they kept that blood turned out to be the destination of a very long trip. It took them nearly a half an hour to get there, a cellar in a part of the lowest basement as remote as one could get in the Tower. It was a hallway he hadn't even known was there, and that was saying a great deal, because he and Dar and Auli had explored what they thought was absolutely everything. He was surprised that they'd missed something, but they obviously had. It was a large room filled with a very thick layer of dust, and under the dust was contained boxes upon boxes upon boxes. They were stacked on the floor. They were stacked on old, old tables. They were stacked on heavy stone shelves carved directly out of the rock of the walls themselves. They were piled to the very top of the low ceiling in the far corner. And every single box had not a single mark on it to discern it from any other box. All the boxes were uniform, made of wood slats nailed together, and all their dimensions were proportional. Some were larger, some were smaller, but they all appeared identical to one another in that all of them looked to be perfect cubes or long rectangular boxes.

Tarrin stared in dismay, Keritanima sneezed, and Sapphire glared at the room as if it was the room's fault that it looked that they were going to have to undergo a rather exhaustive search just to find out in which box the blood was stored.

"Hold," Sapphire said quickly, holding an arm out to stop Jenna from entering the room. "The dust itself is a clue."

"It is uniform," Allia announced. "Whoever came was careful to upset the dust so it would resettle and hide evidence of their visit."

Tarrin's eyes scanned the thick dust, and he had to agree. It was of an even thickness on the floor and on the boxes, giving no hint as to where the culprit had looked, or where the culprit had gone in the large storeroom. Without giving it much thought, Tarrin wove a quick spell of Earth, Water, and Divine, a spell that lifted up faded scents and made them glow with a ruddy light. To his surprise, not only did the spell fail to locate any recent scents, it failed to find any scent at all except dust, stone, and wood.

Tarrin's ears laid back slightly, and his eyes narrowed. Whoever had done it knew that someone was going to try to find out who they were, and more to the point, had known a Were-cat would be involved. Whoever it was had absolutely erased every trace of scent in the room, scouring it completely clean, making it as if the room had never been entered by anything larger than an insect.

"What's the matter?" Keritanima asked him.

"The room's been purged of scent," he replied. "Totally. There's not even any old traces of the workers who cut the stones."

"So whoever came along before us knew someone was going to be looking," Keritanima concluded grimly. "And they were familiar enough with your kind to take steps."

Tarrin turned the spell into the hallway, turning as he moved it, and again he was set back. The only scents laid into the passage were their own. But Tarrin realized that the purging only went in one direction in the continuing passageway, as if the culprit hadn't thought to do both sides to cover his passing, or perhaps didn't bother to think that purging in both directions would make a difference. It did make a difference, however, because now Tarrin had a trail to follow, a trail of anti-trail, for the purging itself marked the passing of the guilty party indirectly.