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With a silent sigh, I looked over the boxes and the side table on the display stage and out into the mid-morning…gloomy as only a late-winter morning could be in Fenard.

Finally, I added another log to the hearth.

“I’ll be back.”

Destrin hummphed, hunched himself into his sweater and looked at the square storage box on his bench.

Bostric, behind Destrin, raised his eyebrows at the box, then looked to me. I glared, and he sighed. Destrin wasn’t always communicative, but Bostric was going to end up with everything, and the least he could do was accept Destrin’s faults.

“Do take care, honored journeyman,” Bostric called. His voice was mock-plaintive.

I swallowed another grin and drew my cloak around me as I stepped into the chill on the street, making sure the door was closed behind me. My steps carried me toward the market square.

As I stepped onto the sidewalk beside the avenue, one of the few streets with an actual raised stone sidewalk separate from the road surface, I could sense a tension in the chill and damp air. Without even a hint of a breeze, the odor of wood smoke hung over Fenard, imparting an acrid edge to every breath.

A tinker pushed his cart listlessly toward the square. Behind him waddled a balding and white-haired man carrying a satchel. Neither looked up as I skirted them.

Overhead, the sun was lost behind the featureless gray clouds that appeared unmoving.

Clink…clink…clink…At the sound of the coach on the stones behind me, I stepped toward the bricks of the shop walls.

…clink…

A glimmer of golden wood caught my eye, just as the unsmelled odor of chaos gripped at my feelings, as the chaos-master’s coach rolled slowly by, drawn by the two oversized white horses I had first seen on the road from Freetown the previous fall. Behind the coach were the same two guards on their matching chestnuts, and the same dead-faced coachman drove.

Outlined in the coach window was the profile of a woman, the veiled woman I had seen at the inn in Howlett. The coach rolled down the avenue before I really cast my senses at the passengers.

Crack! The whiplash was metal, but I nearly cringed on the street from the force of the reaction, and from the immediate dull ache. Retreating behind the defenses Justen had taught me, I forced my steps to remain even as I continued toward the square.

“Geee-haw…” The mechanical voice of the driver echoed from the bricks and stones.

I did not rub my forehead, much as I wanted to, wondering at the fleeting impression I had received of three people within the coach. There had only been two, that I knew.

By the time I had passed by the square, with the rusted open market gates patrolled by the prefect’s guards, and was farther toward the palace, I could see that the heavy iron gates of the palace had already closed.

I shook my head slowly, turning back toward Destrin’s. Every time I acted without thinking, I exposed myself. Now Antonin would know that there was at least one order-master in Fenard. The contact had been so brief, and his response so automatic and contemptuous, that I hoped he would not recognize me as an outsider or from Recluce.

I hoped, but there wasn’t much else I could do, except keep on woodworking and learning…and trying to think before I acted. And all of that without letting my boredom push me.

Overhead, the clouds remained gray, but the faintest hint of a breeze touched my cheeks.

XLV

PERLOT’S CRAFTING—THAT was what the ornately-carved sign read. The chiseled letters, old temple-style script, were painted black. A pale hard-finish coat that did not carry the gold overtones of most varnishes let the warm red-oak tones shine through.

As the morning mist beaded on my cloak, I tied Gairloch to the post in front of the shop. The winter had dragged out longer than usual, and when spring had come, the rains and the cold had mixed, like in the downpour that flooded the stable because I had neglected to clean the drainage gutters outside Gairloch’s stall. Cleaning muck,