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The gunsmith merely shrugged and handed him the sack. “I hope he was worth it,” was all he said.

Dallin rolled his eyes, withstood the man’s attitude for another moment while he got specifics on the when and where of the livestock auctions, then thanked him politely and sauntered as casually as he could manage toward the back of the stall. With a performance that probably wasn’t half as convincing as Wil’s had been, Dallin slipped through the curtain and out through a small anteroom to the door, ducking down as he made his way through it.

The alley was indeed quiet, no traffic but a young woman pushing a barrow full of vegetables over the broken cobbles. Dallin gave her a bit of a nod as she passed, gaze reaching and scanning what appeared to be an otherwise empty stretch of alley. He’d stopped worrying about Wil running away days ago, but damn it, if those men had spooked Wil and he’d taken off—

“Down this way,” came from behind him, accompanied by a light tug at his elbow. Dallin only twitched a little, turned to find Wil at his side, eyes darting beneath the brim of his hat

“Where did you come from?” Dallin wanted to know.

That space had been decidedly unoccupied two seconds 90

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ago. And where the hell were Dallin’s reflexes? He couldn’t remember the last time someone had successfully got behind him without him knowing it.

“I can turn myself invisible,” Wil said with a wry wink, smirked a little when Dallin’s mouth twisted. “I was right there.” Wil pointed to a tiny shadowed alcove to the side of the gunsmith’s stall and gave Dallin’s sleeve another tug. “This whole place is crosshatched with alleys and little side streets—we could probably get lost if we’re not careful, but it’ll likely throw those men off for a while.”

Dallin just shook his head, waved a hand. “You’ve been doing pretty well so far,” he told Wil seriously.

“Lead on.” Because it was all too clear that Dallin was decidedly
not
at his best today.

A surprised little half-smile flitted over Wil’s face, but he just nodded, turned, and led Dallin into a labyrinthine crisscross of overgrown bricked paths and dirt alleyways, intersected now and again by neater cobbles and stone walks. The sun slanted lower over the tops of the buildings they passed, roofed variously with thatch, tin and slate. They were losing time—another two hours ’til the auctions—but losing the guard and his little posse was a bit more important right now.

They fetched up some time later when the random path they were following dead-ended at the rear of a great stone building, stately and dignified, with portcullises grown over with ivy and the crumpled autumn remnants of wild roses. The characteristics were universal and unmistakable. Dallin grinned.

“A library,” he told Wil. “Perfect. I’ve been wishing for Manning and his know-it-all lectures, but this will do very well indeed.”

Wil’s mouth twisted a little. “You want to go in there?”

He eyed the building, its crouched stone bulk with its thick stained glass windows. “What am I supposed to do in a library?”

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“Hm, well, yes, but it might turn out to be important.

Or at least somewhat informative. I hope.” Dallin shrugged. “It shouldn’t take too awfully long, and those men wouldn’t venture in there unless they were serving free beer.”

“
Any
way,” Wil sighed, shoving his hands in his pockets.

Dallin hadn’t noticed until just this second when he’d watched Wil hunch in again that, though the alert wariness had remained all through their diversion through the alleys, the expectant sullenness had disappeared. It was subtle and not a huge difference, but it
was
a difference, a marked distinction between how Wil behaved around Dallin as opposed to everyone else. And now that Dallin was thinking about it—about all of the different faces Wil had donned just since they’d arrived at Chester’s gates—he realized the resentful look of a man constantly on tenterhooks, just waiting for the next offensive, had only really re-emerged after he’d been disarmed. He’d been cagey but determined when the guard had moved toward him, but drawn in and angrily sharp the moment the rifle left his hands. He’d gone from a man with the confidence of carbine and cartridge at his back to a back-alley grifter like a fish that had grown legs and lungs but still knew how to swim with the sharks. Dallin had more-or-less handed over the reins to him at the gunsmith’s stall, and Wil had taken them up like he’d been born to this particular saddle. For all Dallin had seen in his years as a constable, he’d never know the underside of a city as well as one who’d spent time in it. Wil was much better at being a sneak than Dallin was.

“
What
?” Wil wanted to know.

Dallin realized he’d been staring and not moving. He shook his head and breathed a small laugh. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that you’ve impressed me again.”

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One dark eyebrow rose. “Because I said I’d go to the library with you?”

“Because you got us out of a touchy situation without a shot being fired or a punch being thrown.”

Wil scowled. “You’re very easily impressed,” he muttered. “Are we going in or not?”

Dallin only waved a hand toward the path that led to the front of the building. Wil rolled his eyes and slouched around to the front steps. Smiling slightly, Dallin followed, waiting politely for a clutch of women to pass him before stepping out into the still-busy street as Wil shuffled up the steps ahead of him. They were well away from the main thoroughfare of the market, deeper into the city itself, but plenty of traffic still bustled along the several stray carts that hadn’t been fortunate enough to win a prime location on the square. He was just stepping across the cobbled walk, following after Wil, when an abrupt, inexplicable shudder fizzed up Dallin’s spine, and his eyes shifted a cursory sweep over the sparser crowd—

Dallin stopped dead with his foot on the bottom step of the library, body gone tense and rigid, his full attention captured by the man across the narrow street.

Wide and tall, hair the same color as Dallin’s but graying and longer, with beaded braids holding it back at the temples. His dress was similar to those of the general public fanning about him, affording him a wide berth, but plainer, colors bland and tending toward browns and beiges. His face was clean-shaven and deeply tanned.

Dallin couldn’t really see from here, but his mind’s eye etched a string of scars over the right cheekbone at the same instant he realized the man’s gaze was pinned over Dallin’s shoulder—Wil. Dallin jerked his head, took a step up the stone stairs—meaning to block the man’s line of sight, perhaps, or just get between him and Wil. Wil seemed to feel something, too, his shoulders twitching 93

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a little and his head jerking to the side before he spun about, frowning. His eye caught Dallin’s, questioning.

Dallin blinked, shook his head, turned his glance back out into the street…

No bulky figure stood staring, no blond head towered above the crowd.

The ghost of the Watcher from his dream, perhaps?—

dedication and devotion to his Calling reaching even beyond his foreign, anonymous grave? Or merely Dallin’s lack of sleep and recent immersion in the bizarre finally catching up with him?

“Something wrong?” Wil asked from behind.

“Maybe,” Dallin murmured, turned. Wil’s expression was clouded, anxious, his good hand gripping the library door’s handle in a white-knuckled fist. His eyes kept snapping from Dallin and then out into the street, searching, and then back again to Dallin, dark and on the verge of fear beneath the wide brim of his hat. Dallin wondered if Wil had seen, too, or if Dallin’s own disquiet was leaking out onto Wil. In fact, Dallin wondered if he’d even seen anything himself, now that the initial rush of apprehension was beginning to subside. It wasn’t like he was exactly the epitome of stealth and expertise today.

He gave his head a quick shake and pulled a sedate expression to his face. “Thought I saw something,” he told Wil, “but if it was there, it’s gone now.” He jerked his chin. “C’mon, we’re already running later than we wanted.”

Wil stared up at him for a moment, flicked his eyes back out into the street, then twitched a small nod. He pulled the door open and went inside. Dallin gave the street one last sweep before he followed.

The scents of a library, like its overall appearance—

regardless of architecture—were universal and so therefore soothingly familiar. Dust and parchment were more 94

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palliative to Dallin’s senses than a stiff drink would’ve been. He stood by the door for a moment, just breathing in the scent of beeswax and ink, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light filtering in through the high windows paned in painted, leaded glass. It wasn’t as big as Putnam’s, nor was it as comfortably shabby: the shelves didn’t overflow with a mishmash of titles of which only Manning knew the order, but were lined neatly, each volume tucked in its own slot; no squat little stove piled with teapots and saucepans heating the Librarian’s lunch ticked in the corner, but a central hearth burned with a sensibly sized fire that put off just enough heat for comfort and chased away the dampness that bred mildew.

Dallin knew just by the neatness of the setting not to expect someone like Manning to greet them, but Chester’s librarian still startled him somewhat: a spare little woman, gray and just going slightly wizened, who looked like she was perpetually chewing on the sour-bitter rinds of a lemon. She regarded them suspiciously, eyes going narrow as they roved over Dallin’s weapons and their obvious travel-wear, narrowing further when they rested on their heads. Dallin started a little, took off his hat and nudged at Wil to do the same.

“Good afternoon,” he began politely. “I was wonder—”

“Ye can’t take books ’less you live in Chester.”

Amazing, how the woman managed to bark it so quietly.

Dallin blinked, heard a muffled snort from Wil, and shot him a quick sideways glare. Dallin shook his head.

“I wasn’t—”

“If ye want a book, ye’ll have to show papers and leave five billets deposit.”

Dallin frowned this time, pinched at the bridge of his nose. His first impulse was to puff up and cut the woman down to an even smaller size with verbal chastisement 95

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and high-handed posturing. His second impulse was to do exactly the opposite of his first impulse. His first impulse, after all, had worked decidedly against them at the gates.

He pasted on a pleasant smile and dipped his head.

“We won’t be taking any books with us and promise to be more than careful with any you might permit us to look at.” He didn’t think he’d achieved a look of innocence since he was five-years-old, but he tried for one anyway. “We’re looking for something in particular, something about the gods of the Four Corners. Have you got anything that might help?”

She thought about it, eyes flicking a telltale glance to the center of the far wall, before fixing again on Dallin.

“You can read?”

It was strange, being assumed a Linder after all this time. Dallin had never met anyone from Lind in the years since he’d left it. He was the only one he knew of who had traveled as far south as Putnam. There, those who knew him just knew him as Dallin, and those who didn’t knew him as Constable Brayden. Even in the Army, he’d only seen one other who looked like he’d been from Lind, and he’d been just another of the dead Dallin’s horse had to pick its way over after the last retreat had sounded.

There he’d been first
that big Brayden lad
then
yessir,
Lieutenant, sir
and then finally just
Cap’n
. In Putnam, it had taken him years to fit in, and he’d belonged as much as someone like him could; the Army and the Constabulary were different, valuing skill over heritage. No one had looked at him like he belonged in Lind since he had. It was disconcerting.

“I can read,” he answered evenly, watched as the librarian’s gaze changed infinitesimally, ‘Exile’ now dropping like a little weight behind its reflected judgment.

Interesting. Dallin had never been on the receiving-end of bigotry before. New acquaintances in Putnam usually 96

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viewed his origins as a point of interest and then took him for who he was, whether they liked him or not. Not only did this woman apparently dislike those from Lind, but she liked those exiled from it even less. And by the way her lip curled and she avoided looking at Wil altogether, she disliked anyone who looked like they might be from Ríocht, too, though that wasn’t terribly unique. Refugees from Ríocht were few, but they existed nonetheless, and now that Wil didn’t have the dubious disguise of his hat to hide his hair color, his heritage was all too plain.

The woman sighed, shook her head, then stepped purposefully around them and toward the spot where her glance had shifted before. She pulled down two books.

Dallin felt not even a twinge of guilt when he noted with satisfaction that Manning, for all his disorganized disarray, would never have allowed books in such a state onto his shelves—the bindings were cracking, their weave fraying along the edges of the spines, and no one had bothered to gild the pages to prevent yellowing.

“Let me see your hands,” the woman demanded.

Show me those hands, now, little man.

Dallin lifted an eyebrow, held back a scowl and put his hands out.

The woman had herself a good, long look, mouth twisting tartly at his relatively clean hands, apparently unable to find an excuse not to let him touch the books.

She blew a great, longsuffering sigh and shoved them at Dallin, pointing over to a lacquered table in the midst of eight uncomfortable-looking stiff-backed chairs. And then she wheeled on her very proper heel and clipped over to her desk, slipped on her spectacles, and set to quite pointedly not-really-ignoring them.

Dallin rolled his eyes, gave Wil a sour grimace when he noted the covert snorts had never stopped, then plodded over to the table and dropped into one of the small chairs.