There was a dead noble—a man from Victon. He stared up at them from his bed with wide, dull eyes. His face still held traces of fear in the way his lips were pulled back in a terrible grimace, gums bright red around yellowed teeth. The whites of his eyes swelled around dim blue irises.

“I’ve never seen a dead man before,” Matthias said quietly.

Teldris looked down at her brother. “I have.”

She couldn’t remember how old she was exactly when she first watched a man die. It was very young. She had a hazy memory from Balehold where she sat on a balcony that overlooked the training yard. Her little legs stuck out between the white stone balusters, swinging in the open air. She remembered how if she squinted out toward the horizon, it felt like she was soaring over the mountain ranges that surrounded their fortress.

That day the lancers had been sparring.

The death happened so quickly that Teldris didn’t catch it until the body was carted off the field. The halberd sat discarded on the floor. Dust and dirt and sand collected where it was wet with blood. She sat there and watched as the yard cleared out and only a single man was left to collect the shattered bits of the dead man’s head. When he broke to wipe sweat from his forehead, he looked up at the sun to see Teldris there.

The next day the lancers were back in the yard training again. Except when Teldris returned to the balcony, the doors had been locked.

Since then she could count on her hands the number of people she’d seen dead: the assassin who made an attempt on her father’s life, a Freyn ambush when she and her father visited the north, or the Matron killing a stubborn Crow in the court.

A commotion jolted Matthias and Teldris from their daze. They turned to see the Matron tearing through the room, barking orders to the confused lancers in attendance. The uniformed men backed away in a flurry of motion, two of them darting for the door while the others fumbled for various items among their belts. Matthias exhaled a curse. A woman thrashed on the floor. Her throat made a fountain of blood. Everyone had thought her dead.

Alenna fell to her knees, splattering the gore up her white uniform. She gently cradled the woman by the back of the neck.

Teldris and Matthias held their breaths as they watched. They’d expected the wound to seal up. They’d expected gold dust to filter through the air. They got none of that.

The woman’s strained squelching died down just as quickly as it had begun.

“She’s dead?” Matthias asked, his voice pitched with an incredulous lilt. He looked to Teldris and she didn’t know how to respond, her face blank. Of course she’s dead, she wanted to say. Instead she swallowed down the lump in her throat.

It was a strange thing to see your mentor fail. Teldris wondered how close to death she really was in her fight with Matthias. Would she be in Thelos if the Matron had been a second too late getting off that viewing platform? Her gaze flickered down to Matthias’ leg, recalling the nasty wound that concluded their duel. Would Matthias?

Alenna drew her hands away from the body and they were red. She let out a sigh, fluttering the hair that framed her face.

While Matthias’ gaze remained fixated on the dead woman, Teldris turned her attention to the lancers as they began to survey the area. There were six in all that reported to the scene. Two of them had been summoned shortly after they had concluded their shift. Their uniforms were rumpled and unkempt.

One of the lancers spoke to a distressed innkeeper. The man’s hands wrung at his white silk caftan as he described how he found the noble in his room. Alenna stayed knelt by the woman, her eyes fixed on a trail of blood as she listened. Sweat dripped from her temple, her fists clenched tight as the other lancers flowed outward to begin canvassing the area.

The first order Alenna had given the wards before they even arrived on the scene was not to touch anything. Teldris and Matthias were just there to stand and observe. So that’s what Teldris did as she moved around the room. She observed.

The apartment that the noble rented was made of two lavishly furnished rooms adjoined by a beaded archway. The lancers and their dusty boots trampled over thick rose-colored rugs with golden tassels. They stepped around the dark red stain beneath the dead woman, avoiding where it pooled out onto the tile.

One of the rooms, furthest from the main entryway, boasted a large circular bed where the bedding was half piled onto the floor. A marble-topped table still had the fixings of an early dinner. Half-eaten roast chicken, its breast slivered from the carcass sat among toppled brass goblets. Dark red wine dripped onto silverware scattered all over the floor.

Teldris looked out on the balcony where the doors hung open. A pot laid on its side, cracked down its belly with its contents spilled out and spread across the ceramic tiles. The dark, loamy earth had her think it a reflection of the dead man inside.

The city sounded distant beneath her. She could see the lancers hurriedly searching the streets below, fists knocking heavily on wooden doors, shouts rising as they pushed their way into rooms where they weren’t fully welcome.

The killer couldn’t have gone far if the bodies of the victims were still warm, the woman still on the cusp of death when they arrived. Did the noble scream? Did the woman? From below came the braying of camels and the ringing of windchimes, bells, and crescents passing hands. Teldris wondered if anyone would have heard.

“Don’t touch anything,” Josan said from behind Teldris and she startled. He looked at her with a raised brow. “You don’t want to disturb anything. Can’t have you bungling the evidence that’ll find the bastard that did this.”

“So they’ll call an inquisitor?”

He nodded. Teldris gingerly made her way across the balcony to the railing, making sure to walk around the broken pot. The cream-colored tiles were mottled pink and she thought it looked like a strange type of marble.

The building was affluent enough that it rose above the others around it. There weren’t many neighbors adjacent to their story. Below, the city flowed out rippling like froth on waves. It made her dizzy. She tried to imagine the murderer leaping from the balcony to escape. From the balcony to the awning. No. From the balcony to the clothesline. No. From the balcony to—

Josan’s soft curse caused Teldris to turn around. Her gaze latched onto dark and dusty footprints on the floor of the balcony that hadn’t been there before. They were all over the stone. Her eyes flit up to Josan and he bit his lip to contain a sheepish smile.

“Josan—” Teldris hissed as she held back a laugh.

He held a finger to his lips. “It’s only a Victon anyway,” he said with a wink.

“His life matters just the same,” she said. The mirth drained away from her. Teldris liked Josan. And something about what he just said, the way he said it—his disregard for the dead man—sat wrong with her.

“Of course,”—He nudged her rib with his elbow—“Holy Mother.”

Teldris scowled at his boyish smile. “That’s blasphemy.”

Josan shrugged at her before he walked off, still tracking dirt across the balcony. She would simply inform the inquisitor when they arrived in case the blame happened to fall upon her.

When Teldris returned to the bedroom, Alenna was wiping her hands clean on a rag. The body of the woman still laid at her feet. The dead noble hadn’t moved either. Not that Teldris expected him to.

“What now?” Teldris asked as the Matron passed the soiled rag off to Josan.

“Inquisitor?” Matthias asked. He stood by a stone pedestal that propped up an ornate vase. Fresh flowers flowed from its slender neck. Their petaled faces swayed as air from one of windcatchers cooled the room.

Alenna nodded absently. She studied the same trail of blood that she had observed before. The blood reminded Teldris of a time when she carried a candle, spilling fat globules of red wax over the temple stone.

An inquisitor would bring more answers. While Teldris had grown familiar with the lancers in the area, inquisitors were a mystery to her. They were never local. Inquisitors studied in distant lands, from out of the country even, depending on their specializations.

The inquisitor that arrived revealed a few badges. The metal badges clinked against one another as the leather wrap unfolded from his hand. There were so many schools an inquisitor could specialize in that Teldris never learned what the different icons on their badges meant.

She had to edge closer, reading the fancy scrollwork that had been stamped on each of the thin metal plates. He had four, which by inquisitor standards weren’t impressive, but they were the ones that mattered for the Order and its purpose: Physiology, Anatomy, Toxicology, and Theology. It was said that no Kvash inquisitor worth his salt would go without a Theology badge from Quendon.

This inquisitor, with his chin at a near constant tilt upward, held himself with an air of self-importance. He wore a light linen shirt, partially open to bare his upper chest and reveal chains of gold hanging from his neck. The same fine chains dripped in loops from his ears and Teldris could hear their silvery whispers every time he turned his head. She couldn’t find any weapons on his person so she assumed he must have been doing well if he was so sure of himself.

The Matron seemed unimpressed.

“The bodies have been untouched, yes?” The first words out of his mouth. His head swiveled from the man on the floor and then to the recently deceased woman.

Teldris and Matthias positioned themselves in the corner where they could be out of the way. At least as out of the way two wiry teenagers could be. Teldris’ shoulder knocked at the vase with its drooping flowers. It dusted her shoulder with orange pollen and Matthias sneezed. He turned red when everyone glanced his way, scratching his nose and averting his gaze from everyone.

“I was all over the woman,” Alenna said. Her white uniform was stained red where the dead woman spattered gore all over her. She waved away the inquisitor’s scowl with a dismissive wave. “She wasn’t a body then.”

The inquisitor nodded as he tugged on some leather gloves. They were black and glossy and squeaked as they settled in the creases of his fingers. “Anything else?”

“Nae,” Alenna said and Teldris could catch the subtle flex of Alenna’s jaw as she ground her back teeth. “She was trying to say something but I didn’t catch it. Too much blood.”

The inquisitor knelt by the woman’s body. He hummed thoughtfully as he began to poke and prod at her like some strange curio. “Still warm,” he murmured, his hands rubbing the woman’s arm. Teldris had to bite back a remark. “Still limber. But not for long.”

Alenna shifted restlessly. She frowned. “Like I said—”

Teldris watched the heated exchange between Alenna and the inquisitor. He moved around the room like it belonged to him, observing things and touching them as if someone had inconsiderately thrown them out of array.

She wondered vaguely if he was the type of inquisitor they actually needed. It was rather obvious how the two people died after all. The man with a wound in his gut and the woman with an open neck.

He returned to the body of the dead noble with a slender metal wand he drew from a sheath. The wand depressed the solid flesh beneath it and he hummed once again as he observed the way it responded.

“What in the four winds is going on?” Matthias muttered under his breath.

Teldris just shook her head, her arms crossed and a hand covering her mouth to hide a myriad of expressions from horror to fascination.

Inquisitors were double-edged swords for the Order. They worked for and against them, helping wardens break a case and lead to an arrest but also exonerate those that were prosecuted. They were an objective party and most of them knew how vital they were to Valen’s justice system and thus acted so.

In her time spent with Alenna and the courts, Teldris had yet to meet an inquisitor who didn’t look down his nose at everyone around them.

“There’s something in the man’s throat,” the inquisitor declared. It drew the attention of everyone in the room, even the two remaining lancers, and they all turned to face him. He worked open the dead man’s jaw, inserting two fingers into the yawning mouth. It took some rooting around before his furrowed brows turned upward on his forehead.

The inquisitor fished out something red and golden. Flat—clamped between his middle and forefinger—and shaped like a half-moon, the object held bits of flesh on its two points. Teldris grimaced. A crescent coin.

“I don’t understand,” Josan said to break the puzzled silence. “Why waste a good crescent?”

“Not anyone I know that does this,” the inquisitor muttered as the coin danced over his knuckles and between his fingers. It left a glistening stain over his black gloves.

“Right,” Alenna said wryly. “If they were Kvash, it’d be left behind in the dust for anyone to pick up, wouldn’t it?”

“A fallacy,” the inquisitor said with a wave of his hand. Then he cocked his head, his eyes sharp, his voice flat. “If that were the case, wouldn’t it be someone of the Order?"

“If only it were that simple,” Alenna said. “Aren’t many of us left that can perform the rite.” She crossed her arms across her chest, finger tapping on a leather-padded elbow. She tilted her chin at the man with his bloody coin. "There is a place in high Valois on the coast. They bury their dead and place coin in the mouths of the deceased."

“More than one?” the inquisitor asked as he prodded the dead man’s throat with his metal wand.

Alenna frowned. “No.”

“I think there’s a full in there,” he said as he produced a pair of long, slender forceps from a leather tool roll. Teldris stepped closer despite the sharp look she received from her Matron. She couldn’t imagine how a full stack of crescents could have been shoved down the man’s throat so she had to see for herself.

His killer had been cruel.

The inquisitor pulled out two, three, four more crescents, laying them side by side on the carpet, point to point. One of the lancers that had been searching the apartment approached and drew Alenna’s attention away from the macabre spectacle.

“There’s more,” the inquisitor stated and Alenna rubbed her temples. Blood streaked the hairs that framed her face. From the looks of the lancers that had returned and the disappointment in the Matron’s expression, Teldris surmised that the canvassing bore nothing for their efforts.

Alenna strode out onto the balcony. Teldris and Matthias watched Alenna and the way her head swiveled as she took in the surrounding buildings. To the right, vines hung down from the story above. To the left, a clothesline stretched over the alley to a building across a busy street. Right, a broken urn. Left, a small table with a used pipe and ashes scattered across a pink and green mosaic surface.

The Matron knelt to observe the dirt, she rubbed some of it between her fingers. The clump of dirt was loamy and wet, falling away to leave her skin stained pink. She frowned at her fingers and brought them up to her nose warily. Her eyes narrowed into a thoughtful squint.

Josan appeared and hovered nervously in the doorway as he watched Alenna. Teldris looked to him and he peered back with a pleading look. Her lips thinned as she regarded him and he only seemed to shoot back an even more intensive silent plea, light blue eyes round and glimmering.

Taking a deep breath, Alenna blew at the dirt on the stone floor of the balcony. The dirt scattered until a gentle breeze swept it away altogether. What was left had Teldris and Matthias leaning closer, hovering right over their Matron’s shoulder. Teldris had to reach out to grasp the collar of her brother’s shirt to keep him from toppling into the woman.

Boot prints. Some of it was smeared but thankfully Josan—or Teldris—had caught himself before he did much damage. They were still able to make out a few prints clearly though each different boot seemed to point in three different directions. Alenna shook her head as she observed the prints.

“Did any of you touch this urn?” she asked with a frown.

Matthias’ eyes widened and he shook his head. Teldris did the same. She glanced up at Josan again and he seemed intent to observe the street below. “No,” she said softly.

And it wasn’t a lie. Neither of them touched the earth and she certainly didn’t step around in it like Josan did.

Alenna exhaled a soft frustrated noise from her nostrils. Ponderously, she moved toward the urn. She looked from its open belly up to the balcony above them. “He had to have gone up,” the woman muttered to herself.

“We’ve been upstairs,” Josan said, his voice tense. He paused before offering: “We can detain them for questioning.”

A slight nod from Alenna and Josan was quick to make himself scarce. She turned to look at the two wards.

Teldris straightened her back under the Matron’s gaze. “Josan—”

“Has large feet,” Alenna interjected. She turned away from Teldris, ignoring the way Teldris’ face screwed up in confusion.

“From what I can tell, whoever did this had to have known the victims,” Alenna said thoughtfully. She shifted around the broken clay pot to peer over the balcony and then up at the story above. The vines swished as she brushed them aside. “And he escaped here somehow.” She leaned further over, elbows braced on the railing as she pondered. “Without anyone seeing.”

Teldris nodded absently. She was still caught up in the mess, the carelessness in which it was handled, Josan’s boot prints scattered in the dirt. Crouching down beside the broken pot, Teldris tucked her hands in her lap as her eyes scoured the floor. Matthias made a questioning noise.

A shadow passed over her as Alenna left the balcony. Matthias hesitated for a moment, glancing down at Teldris before he followed on the Matron’s heels. Teldris ignored her brother as she slowly reached out to brush her hands over the dark soil.

The dirt filtered through Teldris’ fingers and she made a face at the way it stained her skin. Teldris didn’t have gloves like the inquisitor did.

She felt rather strange, knelt by a broken pot and a mound of earth, getting her bare hands filthy. For what? It would be silly if she came up with nothing. Just a child playing with dirt when she should be following Alenna and taking in the process of an investigation. She looked up for a moment, the doubt getting to her. Matthias stood at Alenna’s side, nodding dutifully to something that was said between the Matron and the lancers. Teldris’ chest tightened as she turned back down to the soil.

Her eyes followed the scattered dirt, the boot prints that tamped the earth to form little furrows to look like Weaver Callum’s vegetable garden, freshly plowed and ready for planting. And there she found something, reaching over to the mound that spilled out of the lip of the cracked pot. She plucked a strange, translucent leaf from the dirt, its edges ragged and falling apart as she touched it.

Teldris frowned at the thing she held. Surely it wasn’t a leaf. The pot held no plant that she could see. The thing in her hand almost looked like lace but she couldn’t imagine human hands weaving something so intricate. Perhaps if a mathematician from Quendon found himself very bored and very idle.

It encompassed the size of her palm. She held it up as if she were looking at the world through the filmy material. It turned Thelos’ colorful canopies into a mosaic. The thing reminded her of the snake molt she’d find in the hard desert except the grain seemed impossibly large for any regular sized snake. Teldris grimaced at the thought.

Up on the third floor of the inn, the stone had been baking all day in the open sun, and even though the sun glowed orange on the horizon, muted by the deepening violet sky, Teldris could still feel warmth emanate from the building as if it was a living thing, pulsing and beating with life.

The dirt was the apartment’s viscera offering up the contents of its stomach. The heat smothered everything, even the sounds of the city as Teldris knelt there, slowly sweating as she sifted through the dirt with nervous and untrained hands. She picked the strange things out, piece by ragged piece, laying them out side by side atop the dirty marble.

There were four of them in total. The largest no bigger than her hand with her fingers outspread and it was partly split down the middle, its outer edges falling apart.

When her search no longer offered anything else up, she leaned back, her shoulders aching and her spine feeling like the decorative folding fans from Valois. Glancing over the balcony, Teldris spied the top of Josan’s head among the other lancers as they filtered out of the inn and into the evening crowd.

Shadows along the street looked like bruises against the sandstone. The residents of Thelos began to light their lanterns and braziers, candles in the open windows. She didn’t know how long she’d been there but it was long enough that the apartment in which they were investigating was near empty when Teldris strode back inside.

She had gathered up the leathery material, stacking them on top of one another until she clasped them in her hand like a stack of parchment scrap. They crinkled as they brushed against one another and she worried that the things would crumble to flakes and dust before she reached the Matron.

In the common room of the suite, Matthias and Alenna stood huddled together by a window with a pointed arch gilded in brass. The sunset limned their hair in a fiery gold. They pored over a long scroll of parchment that Teldris could only assume were the inquisitor’s notes, murmuring and nodding in concurrence with one another.

An indignant heat rose up Teldris’ neck. She strode through the room, thumb rubbing over the strange texture of the material still in her hand. She’d almost thought the inquisitor was gone but she spotted the man skulking outside in the hallway that led to the other suites.

“Is the investigation over?” she asked loudly.

Alenna looked up from her discussion with Matthias, eyebrows raised. Matthias opened his mouth but he looked from Teldris and then back to the Matron. Something he saw there had him clamping his mouth shut, turning his gaze back down to the parchment with a concentrated frown. The Matron answered her question with pointed silence.

“Why didn’t you come get me?”

Alenna released the parchment to Matthias. “Did I not tell you to pay attention and stay close?” Matthias held the long document awkwardly with both hands before him as if it were some stranger’s newborn. Yet Alenna paid him no mind, her hawk-like amber eyes fixed on Teldris. “Why aren’t you paying attention?”

“Because I found something you missed,” Teldris said.

She wondered if Alenna even saw what she held in her hands. Whether the Matron knew the importance of it. After her father’s meetings in Balehold, Teldris recalled something he often told her: When you have the upper hand, you never back down. She saw this in the way he handled the kings and queens of the five kingdoms. She saw it in the way Alenna fought each and every trial. The Matron’s style of fighting was fast and aggressive, unrelenting. And Teldris’ was no different.

Alenna’s lips formed a long line of displeasure on her square jaw. For a moment, it didn’t feel like Teldris had the upper hand.

“The soil,” Teldris explained as she held the stack of translucent material up in her open palm. She watched the Matron’s gaze settle on the newfound evidence. Evidence that Teldris had discovered and held out for Alenna and Matthias to see. “I found these in the soil.” Then she was quick to add: “You wouldn’t have known because Josan kicked up all the soil. Tracked it everywhere. Those were his bootpri—”

“What do you think you’re doing?” Alenna’s voice snapped through the air like the string of a crossbow.

Teldris recoiled and she almost crushed the things in her hand. Some of them drifted to settle on the floor between the three of them. Though Teldris didn’t look, she could sense the movement in the hall. The inquisitor poking his beak-like nose in through the doorway.

“What—” she stuttered. Teldris rarely ever stuttered but she was baffled by Alenna’s response. “What do you mean? I was investig—”

“Why would you oust Josan like that?” Alenna asked. Her voice was heated, sizzled like coals in a lit brazier. Like a brand on hide. “He is a Lancer. As a warden, your life depends on his loyalty. You rely on him to be your eyes and ears—an extension of your own hand as much as your sword would be. Have I not taught you well enough? The importance of your role as a leader.”

Teldris had opened her mouth but no words came out. She still held the evidence she found out in her open palm. Slowly, she drew her hand back, fingers curling over the fragile material. She heard it crunch softly in her fist. And to Teldris’ frustration, Alenna paid it no mind. The woman’s gaze pierced her even as Teldris scrambled to make sense of it all, to fumble for a retort, a defense.

Where she had expected praise, she was instead being berated. For what? For being a tattle? Teldris pursed her lips as Alenna spoke on: “The men and women who follow you owe you nothing. Respect and loyalty must be earned before you even step into the pool—”

“I don’t understand,” Teldris managed to edge in heatedly. She threw her hands out in frustration. Remembering the evidence, she discarded what was left on the nearest surface she could find, a small console table. Matthias’ eyes followed them to where they lay scattered among the knickknacks. At least her brother was curious about her discovery. “I’ve found something important and you’re going on about me and Josan?”

“This isn’t your investigation, child,” Alenna said. Teldris winced. The woman’s ire only seemed to inflate her more until her presence filled every corner of the room, leaving none for Teldris.

Teldris took a step back. Her father would never have reacted this way. He would have been proud that she had the initiative to catch something that no one else with far more experience had. That she took charge instead of idly standing by like her brother. “I was helping,” she said quietly. “I was helping you.”

“I told you to observe,” Alenna reiterated. “Until you become a warden and you receive your sanction, you’re not to touch anything.”

“But—” Teldris bit down hard on her lip. The look Alenna flashed her—she knew better than to press on. She swallowed down her words.

The Matron’s brow furrowed as she regarded Teldris. Though Alenna was shorter, Teldris had never felt so small. “If you’re so prone to forget your instructions then perhaps your father was correct in that you still have a long way to go before we take you into the field—much less face your Mother in the near future.”

Teldris’ hands curled into fists at her side, her jaw clenched. She couldn’t even bring herself to look at Matthias. She didn’t know what would have been worse to see on him, smug satisfaction or sympathy. Bile rose in Teldris’ throat as she stiffly turned toward the door.

The inquisitor startled as he found himself face to face with Teldris. His eyes narrowed at her. Whatever figure she struck, he chose to back away, giving her just enough room to brush past him and into the hall.

Outside the suite, Teldris felt like she could finally breathe. But she felt the pressure at her back, knowing she left behind an inexplicable occurrence with the Matron. It wasn’t right that she was scolded. Teldris was sure of it.

Her hand itched. Looking down to scratch it, she found one of the leathery pieces stuck to the inside of her hand by sheer virtue of the sweat of her palms. Teldris peeled it off with mild disgust. She rubbed it between her fingers to feel the odd texture against her skin.

It was such a strange thing. She didn’t know of any animal in Kvashine that it would come from. And yet the Matron had no interest in it whatsoever. Frustration bubbled up in Teldris as she marched her way out of the building and into the bustle of the evening crowd.

The inn shared a quaint courtyard with a number of other shops. Beneath an awning, a motley of tables and stools had been set out for the evening and the patrons of the inn and its neighbors alike congregated beneath it. They shouted and laughed and talked amongst themselves as if nothing had happened.

She twisted around and peered up at the building behind her. Someone had lit candles and placed them in the windows. The balcony remained dark.

Teldris slipped the evidence she had inadvertently smuggled out of the crime scene into the pocket of her tunic. She brushed at her arms as if she were shaking off Alenna’s betrayal. It took her a moment, turning this way and that to figure out which way it was to get back to the Court of Ashes and its garrison. In the end she found her way with certainty.

If the Matron wasn’t going to accept Teldris’ help, she would find someone who would. Alenna Darnett wasn’t the only warden in Thelos.