Saraphillia's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

The brand was gone, but the leak remained. Saraphillia stood at her twin's drawer and pulled it open. Inside lay a stack of names on scraps and slips. Some belonged to traders sheltering in her fortress. If even one had reached the Guild, a hound would come. But she could not know which names had been sold and which still held. Guess wrong, and a true informant walked free inside her walls. Mara Thornshield leaned in the doorway. She ran a covert trade network against the Guild, and she measured a good day by a trader walking out free. She had once stopped Saraphillia from practicing an untested spell on living skin. Now she watched the drawer the way she watched a bad road. "You can't test them all," Mara said. "You'd tip the wrong person off." "I won't ask," Saraphillia said. "I'll listen." She carried the names to her workroom. On the shelf sat a small crystal box, its blue surface marked with old carvings. She had bought it broken. It held a fluid that stirred when a name was spoken false. She did not read the names aloud. She read the silence around each slip, the gap where a true name bent into a lie sold to the Guild. One by one she laid the slips on the box. Most sat quiet. The fluid held still. Those names had never left the room. Then she set down a slip and the fluid clouded red. The box knew. This name had been spoken to the Guild. "That one," she said. Mara took the slip. She read it and went still. "This is a trader we brought in last week. Not your sister's hand." Saraphillia's chest loosened, then tightened again. The leak was real. But her twin had not sold it. Someone else had copied a name from the drawer and carried it out. "Then the drawer isn't the leak," Saraphillia said. "Someone reads it." Mara folded the slip into her belt. "We move him tonight. Foxes and the fairy draw the hounds down the far gully. He rides the mountain route." Outside, a glowing fox shook itself in the dark, and a faint shimmer of wings crossed the window. Saraphillia looked at the drawer again. She had feared her twin was the traitor. Now she knew the truth was worse. A stranger walked her halls, watching, copying names as fast as her twin hoarded them. She closed the box. The red fluid settled clear. "I can test the names now," she said. "But I still don't know the face that reads them." Mara pulled her hood up. "Then that's the next hunt." Saraphillia set the safe names back in the drawer, exactly as they had lain. The reader would return. And this time she would be listening for the hand that reached in.