"Those are it?" Tarrin asked over them, making Keritanima jump.

"Don't do that!" she said with a nervous laugh, putting her hand to her chest. "You scared me out of my pelt!" She touched her face. "If I start shedding, it's going to be all your fault!"

"These are," Jenna answered. "Two missing. The one Jula used, and the one whoever it was used on you."

Tarrin reached down and picked up one of the tiny vials, inspecting it. It had a mark of warning on it-the mark of death, actually-telling anyone who picked it up that what was held within was a substance of incredible danger. He could sense the magic of the blood within, his blood, blood he had shed fighting the Wraith. They had picked up his frozen fingers and other pieces of him lost to the icy touch of the Wraith and milked the blood out of them. Why they did such a thing, why they found the need to keep something so dangerous, was completely beyond him.

"Any clues?" he asked.

"Only one," Sapphire said, reaching down and picking up the lid, then turning it over and showing him the underside, where the nails stuck out from it. She pointed to the edge of the lid, and Tarrin peered there.

He could see them. Four small depressions in the wood, small lines, looking like where a tool of some kind had been used to pry the lid free of the crate. They were straight and rather close together, but they had caused some very minor flaking of the wood. Whatever it was that they used had had some force behind it.

"That rules out the females," he said grimly. "They'd just use their claws."

"If they wanted to be found, sure they would," Keritanima said dismissively. "Whoever did this used a tool. Look, here's where they put in a crowbar," she said, pointing to a depression on the lip of the crate. The depression was strangely narrow, and was deeper along the edges than it was in the middle. "See how they rocked it back and forth to pry the lid up?"

"I doubt any of the females would have done that," Allia mused. "As strong as they are, it would have been nothing for them to pry the lid with a crowbar. Rocking would have been pointless." Allia looked down at the crate, then her eyes seemed to focus on the floor by it. She knelt quickly and pushed Keritanima out of the way, then put her finger on the flagstone of the floor delicately. "There is a scratch here," she said. "It is fairly fresh, but not made today."

They all peered at the scratch. It was visible, but it was very faint. It was about a finger long, deeper at one end than the other, as if something had been pushed along the floor that had dug into it and slowed the object to a stop. Allia's eyes peered in scrutiny at the floor. "There's another here, much lighter, and another here," she said, tapping the floor to the left of that scratch, but Tarrin's eyes could barely make those out. Only Allia's exceptional vision, that would let her read a book from across an open field, could make out such minute details. Allia put a finger on each scratch, and Tarrin saw immediately that they were roughly the same distance apart, about half a finger, and the scratches were deeper towards one side of the trio. That really didn't mean anything, but it did jump out at him.

"Your eyes are very sharp, Selani," Sapphire said intently. "Tell me, what else do you see that we cannot?" She motioned them away. "Step back, let her inspect without interference."

That was a good idea. Allia's vision would pick out things all of them would miss, and giving her unrestricted access to the crime scene would let her study things carefully. They all stepped back and let her do her work, and Allia bent to the task quickly and quietly. She looked at the outside of the box, then the inside. She reached in and adjusted the six remaining bottles carefully, fingering them and looking at the cushion upon which they rested. "Did any of you disturb anything within the box other than Tarrin?" she asked.

"We pushed the packing material out of the way," Keritanima replied.

Allia nodded and started rifling through the packing material, a kind of shredded plant-like material that looked like straw, smelled like flax, and was quite curly and springy. She pulled it out of the box and searched through it meticulously, and they all watched on in uncertainty, not sure what she was looking for. Keritanima finally broke the silence. "What are you looking for?" she asked.

"Hair," she answered. "We all lose hair, sister. It falls out all the time, and I am forever seeing it on the floor. I was going to look for it on this floor, but you swept the dust away, and now I will have to pick through the dust piles. This is much cleaner, much faster, and we know that any hair we find within had to come from whoever did it. It is the only way it could get inside the box."

"That's damn clever," Keritanima said appreciatively.

"Most people do not think about hair," Allia said. "Only when it falls out over one's eyes or they find it on their clothes does one really consider it. Whoever did this was very careful to cover his tracks, but I do not think that even he considered that such a thing may be traced back to him. If we can find but one hair, we have a solid lead on our target, and maybe magic can supply us the identity of its owner."

"I am impressed," Sapphire said honestly. "You are a formidable woman, Selani."

"I am but my father's daughter," she said modestly, continuing to carefully sort through the packing matieral.

Allia had struck on idea that was marvellous in its elegant simplicity. Tarrin was certain that she was right, that whoever had done it had never thought to check the box to make sure his hair hadn't fallen inside. He, like Keritanima, and even Sapphire, put a paw to his head and patted it. All his hair was bound up his his braid except for his bangs, which hung over his face, so it would be hard for him to leave any hair behind that didn't come from that one place. But not everyone wore a braid, and besides, his arms and legs were absolutely covered with hair. Fur, actually, but it was hair. He pinched his bangs and pulled very, very gently, feeling the hair slide between the pads on his fingers, and when they came free, a single blond hair had come away with them. He looked at it intently for a moment, seeing the little root at the end, then he reached aside and dropped it to the floor deliberately.

They watched on in breathless silence for what seemed to be half of forever, as Allia methodically and painstakingly sorted through the flaxen-seeming packing material, shredded plant material that had dried out to be springy and voluminous. She stopped, and then tensed, and that made all three of them take an impulsive step forward. "Ah, here we are," she announced in a delicate, quiet voice, pulling her hand out of the box.

She came out with a single hair. It was quite short, rather thick, and looked rather tough and resilient. Tarrin looked at it for a long moment, and a growing horror began to sink into the pit of his stomach.

The hair was white.

Looking down, he set his foot against the floor and dragged it. It left behind a quartet of deep scratches in the floor, the scratch made by his big toe respectably deep while the the one made by his smallest was barely more than a skim on the gray slate. They were set at regular intervals apart, and those intervals were more than five times wider than the scratches Allia had found.

Tarrin felt his knees weaken, and he staggered back until a tall stack of crates kept him from falling over. He stared at that little hair in absolute horror, his heart pounding. It all fit. It fit! The purging spell, the scratches, and that was the key, that one little hair.

Not hair. Fur.

With a dreadful click of things, things in the present, things in the past, it all fell together, and it all fell together neatly and perfectly. His expanded memory let him go back over every moment of it again and again, read the inflections within the words, the set of shoulders, the hidden meaning behinds questions and statements. It made his mind whirl, and he nearly felt like he was going to black out for a moment. Shock, outrage, and fury clashed with other feelings, feelings of protectiveness, of love, of gentleness. They warred in him openly as his outrage contended against one of the few things within him that could stand up to it.