over the lawns and cobbled walks, and the sun was a pale disk behind a low vault of clouds. Starlings and swallows clustered on the domes and spires, occasionally scattered by an encroaching hawk or raven. Voices rose up all around as students crowded the paths and converged on vendors’ carts for their noon meals. A protest gathered across the square.
“Let’s find something to eat,” Isyllt said, “and you can tell me your news. What do you want?”
Dahlia shot her a sideways glance. “Calamari?”
Isyllt snorted. “You missed the first part of my lecture, about the uses of the ink.”
The girl’s eyes glinted with a repressed smile. Sandy olive skin and black curls were common enough in Selafai, but her long-lashed blue eyes were striking. “No I didn’t. I listened at the door. Illusion. Distraction. Obfuscation.” She stumbled a little over the last.
“Confusion,” Isyllt supplied, “obscuration. Hiding. Sometimes hiding in plain sight.” She licked her ink-stained finger and smeared a faint grey smudge on Dahlia’s forehead, like a temple’s ashen benediction. Her own look-away charms worked well enough, but to divert attention from two people in a busy place she was glad for the ink’s extra focus.
Dahlia let Isyllt take her hand and didn’t flinch from the touch of her crippled fingers. After a few steps, it became apparent that the spell was working very well indeed. Some of the more perceptive pedestrians stepped around them, even as their eyes slid past, but more were entirely oblivious, and would have run them over had they not dodged. Dahlia had the grace and slightness of youth, if not a decade and more of practice, and they passed the worst of the crowd without collisions.
Isyllt knew she was showing off, and shook her head at her own folly. From the directions she caught the girl’s gaze wending, she was also encouraging a young pickpocket.
She dropped the spell in front of a kiosk at the edge of the quadrant, startling two young men enough to claim their place in line. The vendor hardly blinked, inured to sorcerers’ tricks. Isyllt bought two trenchers of fried calamari and dolmathes, and found a seat on a low wall beneath an alder tree.
They ate in silence for a while, punctuated by the crunch of breaded rings. “What information do you have?” Isyllt finally asked, licking spiced salt and lemon off her fingers.
Dahlia looked up from her nearly empty trencher, muscles working along the curve of her jaw. She scrubbed a sheen of oil off her mouth with the back of one hand. “I found someone who knew her. Who knows her name.”
A true name, along with the lock of hair now safely tucked into her kit, might be enough to conjure with. “Will your contact talk to me?”
“He will. But he wants to know that you’ll do something.”
The protesters—Rosian and natives both—were yelling about justice and wrongs, about the law’s disregard; she didn’t appreciate the reminder. Some onlookers shouted encouragement, others heckled and jeered. Go home, some called, and the increasingly familiar cabbage-eaters.
Isyllt frowned at the grease-stained bread in her hands, breaking off chunks and tossing them across the cobbles. Brown clouds of birds descended on the morsels. “I want to find Forsythia’s killer. I want to stop him. But I can’t promise you justice.”
Dahlia laughed bitterly. “If you did, I’d know you were lying.” She devoured her bread in quick, methodical bites and dusted her hands on her skirt. “Meet me at the Briar Patch tonight, after the Evensong bells.”
She vanished well enough without sorcery.
The protests in Archlight weren’t the only ones. Isyllt passed more crowds on her way through Elysia—angry Rosians demanding attention, and locals trying to ignore them or shout them down. Of Vigils she saw very few.
Civil unrest wasn’t enough to scare away the Briar Patch’s custom. The tavern was packed, and a wall of noise and heat rolled over Isyllt as she opened the door. Ciaran played elsewhere, replaced onstage by a trio of hennaed women singing bawdy songs and dancing with pantomimed drunkenness. The crowd knew all the words, or invented new ones with enough conviction that it hardly mattered.
Isyllt slipped in just before the cathedral bells tolled. She wore a plain grey dress and dark cloak instead of her usual leathers, with soft knit gloves to hide her hands. It was a guise that would avoid certain kinds of attention, but might attract others. Luckily the drunks were far more interested in the charms of the performers than in a skinny