Covenant's End - Ari Marmell Page 0,57

of control, has it?”

If the young major's expression hadn't been answer enough, his comment of “I'm not sure where you've been the past few seasons, but you might give some serious thought to returning there” certainly would have been.

It would only be much later that evening, at the end of shift, that Paschal would notice. He couldn't begin to imagine when or how it had happened—he'd had his eyes on her for the entire conversation, and she'd never left the chair—but when he reached to collect the Guard-issued rapier he'd leaned upright in the corner nearest his desk, it was simply gone.

At which point, after a long moment gawping like a fish who'd just discovered fire, he was—despite his best efforts—too busy laughing, and recalling some of Julien's less believable but more exasperated stories, to be angry.

Leaving Paschal's office did not translate directly into leaving the Guard headquarters. Widdershins had someone else to see.

Or, well, to look into.

She wasn't especially concerned about being recognized. The changes in hair color and wardrobe, her skill with adjusting her posture and pace to blend in, the inaccuracies and vagaries of her “wanted” portrait, and of course the fact that the Guard headquarters boasted all sorts of visitors and messengers at this time of day…. Frankly, Shins was all but guaranteed to go unnoticed even before Olgun began subtly encouraging people to look the other way.

Assuming she didn't run into anyone who actually knew her. A guard who'd arrested her in the past, perhaps, a fellow Finder being brought in for interrogation, or possibly Archibeque himself, since she still had no idea why he had it in for her, could all ruin her efforts, her day, and quite possibly the rest of her natural life.

So, easy it might be, but no point in dawdling.

It didn't take long, just a few moments of loitering and wandering the building—its walls stained an oily charcoal by years of exposure to cheap oil lamps—to learn which room she wanted. Given the quantity of traffic in the main halls, it was far more difficult to find a moment of privacy long enough to slip the lock and get into said room. Ultimately, it required Olgun providing a distraction—the poor courier wouldn't suffer anything worse from his stumble than a bruised knee, but he'd be ages reordering the stack of papers he'd scattered—and funneling as much assistance and luck as he could into her efforts at the latch, before she finally managed to crack the door open long enough to duck inside.

Dim, but not dark; the sun's smallest fingers felt around the edges of the shutters, providing enough light to see. The shelves and desk were bigger, the stacks of paper neater, and the back wall had that aforementioned window, but still and all, it wasn't all that different from Paschal's.

Or rather, it didn't appear all that different.

It smelled off, for one, though Shins found it impossible to put her finger—or her nose, to be more accurate—on what it was. Only later would she realize it was the absence of scent that had nagged at her. That lingering combination of sweat and ink and food and drink and a dozen other little things, the scent of work, was faint, too faint, far more so than even the presence of the window could justify.

Then, of course, was the fact that Paschal's office hadn't made Olgun scream.

Shins's plan had been to carefully scour the room, sift through the papers, hunt for the slightest sign of any connection between Commandant Archibeque and Lisette or the Guild. That, if one were to judge by the divine conniption she'd just experienced, would no longer be necessary.

“Holy horsebubbles, Olgun! Calm down!” Then, after a frozen moment spent waiting to see if her own outburst had drawn any attention from beyond the office door, she continued. “Are you sure?”

The god's response to that question was so blasphemously profane, Shins wasn't entirely certain he hadn't just mortally insulted himself.

“All right, yes, you'd be in a position to know! I wasn't thinking. Don't say it.” She pondered, mind spinning, while casually rifling a random drawer without really paying any heed to what lay inside. If the fae had been here—and often enough to leave an aura Olgun could sense even in their absence—what did that mean, exactly?

“So, what, the commandant's been meeting with them?”

Her head swam with sensations and images of various mixtures, liquid concoctions of color swirling around and within one another. One of the pair was disturbingly