When Taryn left Dr. Seir’s laboratory, she headed for the library. She didn’t know what grandeur it had once possessed or what purposes it had once served but it was now a musty place overrun with books (if such a thing were possible for a library) and managed by a dozen quiet curators and archivist.

She had spent a lot of time there searching through anything she thought would help her recover her memories. It was how she had discovered the works of Dr. Moors, a self-styled scientist specializing in the underdeveloped field of psychology. His work had done more to grow her reading abilities than anything else. She’d spoken with Vares about supporting the expansion of the field. But he replied that allowing any such studies of the human mind would be tantamount to condoning the intrusions of mutant readers. It was a prime example of how anti-mutant sentiments crippled the kingdom’s potential. In the future Taryn hoped to create, readers trained in psychology would help people recover lost memories, keep aging minds sharp and possibly even cure the insane.

From her corner of the library, Taryn surveyed the movements around her as light from the glass ceiling illuminated the floors beneath her. Certain that she was alone, Taryn turned to the heavily laden shelves behind her and willed them aside to reveal the stone wall behind. She slid aside the unseen metal rods that anchored the secret door. She pushed the foot-thick slab inward and slipped through the opening.

Once in, she willed the wall and shelf back into place and rested against the wall. Then she activated her Survey over the city. The Lady’s Day was five weeks away and Taryn searched the sectors for mutants and regicidal minds. Finding only Denan, she Shadowed the guardsmen on duty as they checked the city’s fortifications and double-checked the palace’s defenses.

Vares and the city were safe for now.

Taryn moved to sit cross-legged in the empty space at the center of the triangular room. When she’d discovered it six years ago, dust and droppings had covered the stone floor and the rotten bookshelf that had lain against the wall. She’d found all manner of climbing and crawling creatures nested ther. Cobwebs had stretched from the floor to the ceiling of every corner. Its windows had been nothing more than three arches cut from the wall. They were large enough for her to straddle comfortably; opened to the courtyard where the Black Knights completed the first stage of their training.

At each stage, they would move to a different courtyard around the palace, until they were in the northwest. Then Taryn would clean and oil the the fitted armor gathering dust in the darkest corner of her training room and train them in defending their minds. As their final trainer, Taryn had the last word on whether or not a Knight was ready for field work; another reason for the Administrators to despise her. But none of the Knights were allowed to know that she was the one who completed their training. Only nineteen people in the whole world knew that there was mutant living in the palace and it had always been Vares’s sincere hope for that to never change. So Taryn concealed her identity with a masked helmet she’d discovered among Dr. Seir’s belongings.

The eternally somber human face mask had empty eye sockets covered with green colored glass and an emerald ‘X’ set under the left eye. A meshed grill in the nostrils and between the unmoving lips allowed Taryn to breath. And since she had the frame of a fifteen year-old girl, the grim, black masked helm helped the recruits take her seriously.

The Knights only trained at night, though.

During the day, the training yards were filled with Vares’s Infantrymen. She could hear them now, grunting and shouting and drilling and sparring.

Vares hadn’t even known that the room existed. And when Taryn asked his permission to use it, she did not hide her intentions from him. She’d pestered him about it every night for three months before he finally agreed to grant her use of it. She had brought in a carpenter’s workbench and made the shutters that covered the windows now, the wide desk and chair that sat under the last two windows and the decorated shelf that stood between the first two. Now it was where Taryn withdrew to test and develop the techniques she had perfected over the years; where she worked to achieve and maintain the level of control she had over her abilities now, without fear of being spied on or accidentally stumbled upon.

Taryn willed the wooden shutters open and sunlight slanted into the room. Closing her eyes to it, she opened her mind to the city’s people and went to work.

During her night watch, she’d carved out a small space for herself in Denan’s mind. There she’d gathered most of the perspectives of his Pilgrimage. She’d compiled all the memories of 1,152 spectators from ten minutes prior to its halting until ten minutes following into one master scenario. She could move forward, back, and through it in order to conduct a thorough investigation.

“You’re not going to find anything new here,” Hunter said from one of the archers’ rooftop nests. The figures beside him were blurred. None among the spectators had seen who loosed the arrows, only the shadowed figures running away. Taryn herself had only been able to read their flames because of the heightened nature of their activity in the moment, but her Survey was blind to them now. Even with the very specific parameters of yesterday’s events. “Whoever these impostors are, they’ve been trained to slip through your Survey.”

She didn’t want to accept that. She knew of only one group who could do that and she wanted to exhaust all other avenues before she put her immunity at risk.

Hunter sniffed at the feet of the blurred figure. “I might be more help if you could import smells instead of just images and sounds.”

Taryn had thought she could just make a comparison of faces seen before and after Denan’s escape. But there had been hundreds of people who were simply caught in the chaotic aftermath, especially as the panic from the day spread up and down the Fall. And almost all of them were blurred snatches and hurried glimpses – no distinguishable parameter she could set a Survey on.

“His Majesty isn’t likely to interrupt us now.” Hunter jumped down from the roof and prowled through the frozen likenesses scattered on the street. “You want to try the mask seller again?”

Taryn moved to where the vendor had set himself up and read the real man from her position within Denan’s mind. She placed all 409 faces who’d paid for his wares into his likeness in her recreation for easier access. Then she pulled back, moving herself out of the scenario until she sat cross-legged in the corner of Denan’s mind. The scenario was laid out before her like a living model of the city. She matched most of the 409 faces to people standing in her scenario now. She let the scenario run to its end, again and again until she’d watched 336 of them either retain or discard their masks in the chaos. They littered the streets of Pine Keep like broken and crushed husks.

Still, there were twenty-seven masks on the ground whose owners she hadn’t been able to read since she’d started her watch last night. Yet there were seventy-three unmatched faces in the vendor’s mind. “They could be outside my range,” Taryn suggested. “I’m sure some of the spectators have fled the city. These imposters might have done the same.”

“I saw at least two dozen running with masks,” Hunter said. “The man in the alley still had his mask. What if his friends all kept theirs too?”

Taryn ran the scenario again and counted… Twenty-six. “There is no guarantee the eight archers are among them.”

“There is no guarantee you’ll find all of my gifts,” Hunter offered. “That doesn’t mean I won’t leave them.”

Taryn knew it was only her fear talking. The real Hunter had disappeared when she’d left for breakfast that morning and she hadn’t seen him since. She didn’t know why but she imagined he was out plotting his revenge against her for making him miss his evening hunt. The doppelganger’s meaning was clear, though. So she mapped the routes of these masked runners. Without their faces, she was relegated to tracking them through the memories of the people she’d already identified, adding time beyond the twenty-minute range until she saw nineteen of them eventually remove their masks once they’d gotten themselves to safety. The seven that remained simply disappeared, traveling farther than anyone she’d already identified. They’d scattered in every direction but three of the seven disappeared within blocks of each other, the paths they followed taking them east of the Fall, towards Larisport.

“Don’t get excited yet,” Hunter warned. “The bluebacks wouldn’t let eight masked bowman into Pine Keep, not if they were coming out of Larisport. Maybe they have a staging ground in this sector. What do we know is in that area?”

Taryn was already ahead of him. She created a likeness of Pine Keep’s Master Builder. She gave it the same white hair and tanned wrinkles as the actual and bound it to the man’s mind.

“Do you recognize this?” Taryn asked him, drawing his confused attention to the sector modeled before her.

He squinted his grey eyes at the sun beaten scenario. “That’s Pine Keep. Most of it, at least.”

“Excellent.” Taryn drew a red line over the buildings and roads, tracing a straight line from where each of the three masked men had started to where they disappeared, and going further until they all intersected outside of her map. “Can you tell me what’s supposed to be here?”

“We should probably cover everything within a few blocks,” Hunter suggested.

“Can you do that? Can you give me everything within five, ten and fifteen blocks of this spot?” Taryn pointed at the intersecting lines.

“I-I don’t know about all this,” he said, backing away.

“We’ve barely started,” Hunter asked. “Why is he suspicious already? Are you pushing too hard into him?”

“Master Serick.” Taryn spoke softly so as not to spook him. “Is there an issue here?”

“It might not be a good idea to share this kind of information. Especially at this time of the year. The city planer’s office was broken into just last week. ”

Of course. With all the fear of mutant attacks surrounding the Lady’s Day, the city’s leaders went into a frenzy with training and retraining their employees to develop their mental defenses. Add in a recent theft and his heightened sensitivity to readers made sense.

“You should talk to Vares about teaching middlings how to defend their minds properly in this academy of yours,” Hunter told her. “You’d certainly do a much better job than these frauds who call themselves mental defense trainers. We’ve already got his subconscious here. If we were really seeking to harm the city or the King, he’d be varn already!”

“Master Serick, wait!” Taryn shouted, for he began to employ his training. Rudimentary as it was, Taryn was beginning to feel the strain of keeping his subconscious self tethered there and his likeness was beginning to dissolve.

“Look!” She presented him with a copy of her passport, conjured from her own memory, and he stopped dissolving. “I am an ally of the King. I require your assistance in identifying weak points in the city’s defenses.”

He bent to study the document, peering back between her face and the portrait drawn. “Very well, then,” he nodded. “What do you need?”

“I need to know who owns these properties,” she said, pointing again to the dark area north and east of the place of Denan’s near immolation. Her three red lines intersected somewhere in the middle. “I need to know everything about their structures, their layouts, what they’re being used for.”

“Do you think there might be enemies of the Seat operating within these very walls?”

“I’d like to be sure that there aren’t.”

The building master bowed to her. “It shall be done just as you say.”

Taryn and Hunter both rolled their eyes and left him to his work. Buildings were already filling out the dark spaces of the model as he spoke what he knew and Taryn knew them as they appeared.

“Do you really think that’ll be a good idea?” she asked Hunter as they watched the builder work.

“We share a mind,” Hunter reminded her. “I can only think it because you do. But will the King agree?”

Taryn didn’t know. After their word game was over, they didn’t talk much about her idea. Well, she talked. Vares listened and smiled and let her decimate his golden army into surrender.

“You’ll have a month of dinners to convince him. Right now you need to figure out how you’re going to investigate all these suspicious buildings.”

Though the Master Builder wasn’t done, she’d already noted four buildings among the homes, offices, shops and warehouses within her radius that served no discernible or legitimate purpose. Taryn cast her mind to the city beyond the palace and found no mental flames blazing in the space occupied by those buildings. “I’ll have to run them down in person.”

“Or… you could use that passport to get the Guard to do it for you,” Hunter suggested.

What he didn’t say was that they would likely start searching all the sector’s abandoned or condemned building soon in an effort to find Denan. Likewise, Taryn didn’t bother explaining what he already knew; that Vares had given her the passport for emergencies, to use in the case of a life threatening event. Otherwise she ran the risk of making it an immunity nullifying act and she could not afford the risk so close to her pending negotiations.

“I can search them while I’m out making deliveries.” She made a list of the addresses, added a reminder to get a pair of eyes on the one in Larisport as well since she’d been unable to glean anything from her Survey concerning the place last night.

Two more structures filled the darkness; no recognizable designation, no owner.

“All of them?” Hunter asked.

“The sooner I can get what I need to exonerate Denan and release him, the sooner he can get back to his family,” Taryn said simply.

When the builder was finally done, there were seven sites for her to investigate. They may have been due to gaps in the man’s knowledge but she didn’t think so. She thanked him, and severed his mind from his likeness mid-bow. Taryn went to work mapping her route to each location from the bakery. The bakery never delivered to that corner of the city. It was too far. She’d end up spending the whole afternoon out and away from her friends. What would today’s excuse be?

“Worry about that later.” Hunter’s words brought her back to the moment as the dissolved pieces of Master Serick’s likeness reshaped themselves into pictures of an overturned cart choking up the streets and slowing her down. She wondered if she could day that she had to help put out a print shop fire before it devoured an entire city block. She even thought of manufacturing a mutant sighting so the Guard would set up checkpoints all over the city. “We’ve got a list of places and a list of faces. Lets see if any of them connect to that six pointed star.”

Taryn heeded the words of her more focused self and cast a Survey out for body painters across the city. She found thirty-three of them, half of whom operated out of Larisport. Both her immunity and Viktor’s ruling warned her to be careful here. As long as her efforts were in service to investigating potential threats to the King, she wasn’t in danger of violating either. These people were smuggling mutants into the city under false pretenses. That had to be enough to justify her actions against any charges Vares or the LAAMP could bring.

After she filtered her results down to the six body painters who’d actually seen the six-pointed star, black arms like tongues of fire around a ring, she created a likeness for each one, bound to their consciousness as she pulled them in.

“What’s wrong with this one?” Hunter asked of a figure slumped on the ground. He placed a paw on the man’s head, getting a good grip of his long, dishwater blonde hair, and pulled. His eyes were barely opened, his lips slack.

Taryn bent to place a hand on his shoulder, tethering herself to his mind amidst all the others she was connected to.

She could barely see through the Shadow. The room he was in looked dark and the body painter’s eyes were only half open. She just made out the shadowy figure of another young man passed out on a couch; a young woman with heavy lidded eyes. The smell of burning cannis leaves.

Taryn retreated, coughing and waving away the cloud of smoke that came back with her.

“Should I wake him?” Hunter growled, protracted claws at the ready.

“No!” She grabbed him by the collar and pulled. The line between the body and the mind tended to wear thin under the influence of the King of the Lane’s wares. “He’ll feel it. I won’t be able to trust anything I find in his mind now so I’ll work his Inquiry later.”

“Before you do that,” Hunter said as she turned her focus to the grey-haired woman beside him. “You should send a Survey out for any instance of that symbol, not just among body painters. A six-pointed star is a common symbol among the Lorric Extremists, which could explain why this league of impostors is trying to help mutants. They may be religiously motivated.”

Meaning they could have literature; which she can use to identify ideologies that she can match to individual minds; identify a following. That was a bittersweet revelation. Even though the masked archers were skilled in slipping through her Survey, they may be known by people who were not. Zealot minds tended to burn bright and that would be helpful in identifying them. But it also boded ill because the only place they could have possibly received their religious activation was the one part of the city she couldn’t breach.

“If we find something he can act against, he will,” Hunter assured her.

Taryn doubted that the King of the Lane was stupid enough to think he could violate a Provident Ruling without rousing Vares to action. But she hoped. She did as he bid, casting her net over the entire city.

Suddenly, the man on the floor started screaming; ear shattering, blood curdling screams of agony. Taryn and Hunter both turned to find that his likeness was on fire and he was burning.

Hunter was on fire too. As was everyone else, and all the work she’d spent the bulk of two watches compiling - the detailed map, the hundreds of identities, the hours of memories.

“It’s a beacon,” Taryn said. Someone needed her help. Someone she knew.

“Go,” Hunter said. “We’ll see what’s left once you’ve put it out.”

Taryn drew back into herself, releasing all the minds she’d held in the corner of Denan’s. Back in her training room at the palace again, she waited only long enough to take a breath before she entered the flame that blotted out a large swath of Camp Brock.

The boy stood on the muddy bank of a canal, throwing rocks into the grey water that irrigated one of the few stretches of land dedicated to the city’s parks and gardens.

‘Gustin!’ Taryn used a different voice with him. Not Vares’s. He wouldn’t have responded well to the authoritative vibrato. Instead she’d chosen the gentle commanding voice of Mama Kebar; loving, and not one to suffer foolishness. ‘What’s wrong?’

He yelped at the sound of her manufactured voice, slipped on the muddy bank and crawled back to level ground on his palms and heels.

“What are you doing here?” he yelled at her. “I didn’t call you!”

‘Your beacon has swallowed up half the minds in Camp Brock,’ she told him.

“I don’t. Want. Your help.” He punctuated each word with a rock hitting the water and it sounded like his words were coming out through gritted teeth. “Leave me alone and never bother me again.”

‘You don’t mean that.’

“Get out of my head!” he shouted.

And Taryn did. She thought about getting back to her investigation until his mood stabilized and he reached out to her again. She could get a lot done mentally with only a few seconds physically. But she reasoned he’d just burn it all up again. So she waited. There were no clocks in the palace library so she had to Shadow the minds as they passed into the palace doors, hoping someone would glance up at the large clock face that decorated the foyer before rushing into work or a meeting.

8:22.

It had been a couple of minutes since she’d entered the training room. So far, the majority of that time had been spent waiting on Gustin and she began to feel her patience wane.

8:23.

Why wasn’t he in class? The Master’s Conservatory wasn’t an easy school to get into and for someone who had spent eighteen months studying sheet music and practicing finger speed exercises on an ancient clavichord his mother had salvaged from a burn pile, Gustin wasn’t taking his scholarship very seriously.

Just as she was beginning to think that he really did mean what he said, his beacon found her again and she was back there, staring down at the flowing water through tear-blurred eyes as the people of the city’s southwestern sector carried on.

‘What’s wrong now?’ she asked him.

He sniffled and wiped at the moisture on his face. “You left me.”

‘You told me to.’

“I didn’t think you’d actually do it!”

‘I promised I’d never do this without your consent,’ Taryn Echoed. ‘I keep my promises.’

“Everyone who says that never really mean it.”

That’s when she noticed the canvas pack at his feet, filled to swelling and bound with leather straps. ‘Tell me what the problem is.’

“She promised she’d be there.” His voice was small, strained with stifled tears. “I’ve never believed her before and I told her not to but she just kept saying it. I should have known better.” He reached into the pack and pulled pages of music, lines and dots of blue ink Taryn would never hope to understand, his initials, G.D., scrawled in a messy script on the bottom corner of each page.

‘Is that the piece you played last night?’

“I was supposed to. I wrote it for her. It was light and hopeful. She doesn’t deserve it.” He balled up the first page and threw it in the canal. “She’s the reason Grana’s dead.” Another page into the water. “She’d the reason my father is gone.” And another, this time with tears.

Taryn clenched her own jaw and stifled the accusation in her own heart.

“She breaks everyone she touches.” He was all out of pages to throw. “I won’t be next.”

He watched the pages float away, the tan balls bobbing in the stream to make their own little piece of music.

‘So you’re running away because you think you mother has abandoned you?’

“I know she did.”

‘Because you didn’t see her at your concert? Does that mean I’m not talking to you now, because you can’t see me?’

“This is different. I know what you are and we’re having an actual conversation.”

‘So why aren’t you having an actual conversation with her?’

He had no answer for that. “You abandoned me, too.”

‘You’re right,’ Taryn Echoed. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there when the instructors said you couldn’t perform with that ratty blue coat you like to wear. I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you screamed your classmate into a crying fit for offering to let you wear his grey coat for your set. I’m sorry I didn’t hear the angry noise you made when you attacked that golden piano with such reckless abandon.’

He blinked his eyes clear. “You saw all of that?”

‘I wasn’t the only one,’ Taryn Echoed. ‘I understand that you’re angry and you feel hurt. But you can’t lose your temper every time someone does something you don’t like. Go home. Talk to Jinjer. And if you still decide you want to leave, I won’t stop you.’

He didn’t take up his pack and run. He didn’t really want to. When he cooled, he’d remember that his mother had been the first to recognize his musical talent. Some melody would play itself out in his mind and he’d long for those ivory keys to let it out. He’d come back and he’d remember that some people didn’t have the luxury of a mother to argue with. He’d remember that he wouldn’t survive another loss.

Gustin had spent the first six years of his life largely neglected by his mother. He’d had a father who doted on him. But one day his father didn’t come home. Even Taryn didn’t know what had become of him; only that he wasn’t coming back. Which was more than his family had. Jinjer didn’t know what to do. She’d had her own darkness to fight and having a child thrust upon her before she even wanted the responsibility didn’t help. So he’d gone to live with his great aunt. He was happy with Grana for two years. But towards the end of her life, she tried to help Jinjer break free of her destructive habits when Jinjer wasn’t strong enough to even think about wanting it for herself. Her death had been the catalyst that launched Jinjer on her journey to sobriety.

Gustin became a ward of Camp Brock and developed some destructive habits of his own. When Jinjer sued for custody three years later, they happily gave him up. She thought she was getting a chance to make up for eleven years of neglect. She didn’t realize that it had morphed in him to eleven years of rage.

That’s when Taryn found her. Two years ago, Jinjer was crumbling under the pressures of a difficult child who blamed her for every ill in his life, a small mound of white powder on the corner of the peeling vanity, restless hands itching to reach, sallow face in the mirror about to make a choice she knew she would regret.

Now, her vices were legal; noble, even.

Taryn found Jinjer putting the final touches on a lumpy mattress, buried under layers of blankets, folded and tucked into neat and crisp edges. After a ten hour shift cleaning up after the wealthy guests of an old manor home converted into a hotel, she never made it home in time to see Gustin off to school. Instead, she made his bed, and tidied his room, careful not to rearrange the sheets of music he left scattered throughout the rest of the house. By the time he got home in the afternoon, dinner was on the table but his mother was off to her second job, feeding grabby drunks in one of Camp Brok’s less prestigious alehouses.

‘Jinger.’

She froze at the sound of Taryn’s voice. “He’s run away again?”

‘He’s on his way back.’

Jinjer’s breaths were coming so hard Taryn could hear them. She could almost feel her own heart pounding to the wild tempo. Then she closed her eyes and the Shadow went dark. Taryn heard a long sigh and a soft tap and knew Jinjer had let her head rest against the wall, that she rubbed the palm of her hand against the rough surface. It was a technique she used to ground herself when she felt overwhelmed, to escape to a single moment where she wasn’t.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “Please, tell me what to do because I don’t know what more he needs. I don’t know what more I have to give him. Everything I do is for him. Everything. And he keeps…”

Taryn didn’t need to be a thought reader to know that Jinjer’s mind was churning out a death cycle. She knew how frustrating it was to try so hard all the time and still fail; to do the right thing, every time, and still be rejected. That was when the dark thoughts crept in; thoughts she hadn’t considered in years; thoughts she’d buried under the light of what she believed was a good life. That’s when it became easy to believe that nothing she did would ever be enough good. To believe that it would be better to stop trying.

‘Did you enjoy the concert?’

Her breaths eased. Taryn thought she even heard a little chuckle roll from her lips.

“The music was… not the best. But his performance… Every key stroke was precise; every sequence stitched and knitted into the next in a compact symphony. He was magnificent to watch, my little master. They may not have applauded his sound but they could not deny him that. His performance was perfection.”

‘He didn’t see you there. He thinks you’ve lied to him.’

Her eyes flew open and Taryn saw brown stucco plastered over a brick wall. “Of course I wouldn’t. I’d begged off a couple of hours so I could listen to him play but I couldn’t stay. I had to make up the time before I started at the Tower Home.” She sank down, her back to the wall. Her eyes moved across the room, from the large bed to the heavy oak desk; the manuscript notebook with pages of half-filled staff paper torn out, books on orchestration, on music history and theory.

Taryn considered the books and notes that littered her own desk; books on the martial arts and weapons forms; a thick portfolio of notes she’d taken on incorporating her abilities into those forms. It was how she’d learned to master her abilities but she’d never get the approval to start teaching others if her plan involved teaching mutants the art of combat and warfare. She’d tried to find a way to do without it. The result was an endless frustration; made worse by the fact that she would not likely be allowed the aid she required to correct it.

“His scholarship doesn’t pay for all of this,” Jinjer said. “For his uniforms and his shoes. I couldn’t stay.”

Another pang of accusation stung at Taryn’s heart.

She turned her attention to the decorated shelf that housed her workbench and the supplies and equipment she used in her various training exercises; jars of painted pebbles; a sack full of slivers of paper, on which Taryn had written the names of everyone who moved within the palace during the day; the dismembered pieces of four wooden mannequins.

She pulled at two boxes that rested on top of the shelf and took one of the hollow, wooden pigeons out from within. Once the secret compartment she’d built into its belly lay open before her, she fed it five coins from the purse of 200 gold that had decimated her peace for the last three weeks.

Taryn launched the pigeon out into the morning, watched it soar over the wall of the palace grounds, remembering to flap its wings on occasion.

‘A friend of mine recently returned from a long trip,’ she began. ‘He brought back a few gifts, presented them over dinner and we were able to enjoy them together. He’d given me many gifts over the years but one in particular was of great import to me. Not because it was expensive, and not because its something I’d wanted for years.’ She’d actually never thought about building her own collection of exotic chess sets.

‘I could sell the gift and it could have a hundred different owners over the course of its life. He could have bought a thousand gifts and recouped their value. But the time that he spent, just sitting and talking with me, that can’t be recouped. It cannot be sold, traded, or stolen. It will only ever be ours and that was the greatest gift. He could have gone anywhere else, done any thing else, with anyone else but he chose time with me to be the gift that he gave to himself.’

The man had an entire kingdom to run, a hundred officials vying for his attention with a season’s worth of situations he needed to be informed of and issues that needed his resolving. Taryn would have understood if he’d begged off their dinners for a few days to make up the time. She’d expected it. But even as he listened to the escalating border dispute between a pair of feuding Counts, with a stack of urgent invitations, ordinances, and proposals awaiting his consideration, he’d made time for her. She liked who they were; who he was with her. She didn’t want to leave.

‘Things are nice to have, but they’re not what’s needed,’ Taryn finished.

Jinjer scoffed. “If I leave either of my jobs to spend time with him, we’d starve.”

‘I’m not suggesting you do anything so dramatic. Just take a break every now and again. Do something with him. Do something for yourself. Those are the things, those little bursts of light, that will keep the darkness at bay.’

The wooden pigeon had arrived near the flame of Jinjer’s mind. Taryn tried to land it on the sill of the open window. But Jinjer didn’t have it in her sight and Taryn had misjudged where she remembered it to be. The wood knocked against one of the edges and tumbled into the room, making Jinjer shriek with surprise.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ Taryn Echoed. With Jinjer staring at the disjointed figure, Taryn was able to right it, and reveal its hidden treasure. ‘This should ease some of your burden.’

Jinjer moved her hand from her racing heart and studied the coins carefully.

“I can’t take this.” She dropped the coins and rubbed her palms against her skirt like they had been scalded. “It’s my responsibility to take care of him. No one else’s.”

But it was Taryn’s fault that Jinjer had to do the work of two parents. It was Taryn’s immature outrage that sparked the uncontrolled outburst; that had stolen the only parent of a six year old boy she hadn’t even thought to consider at the time. It was her fault Gustin was so afraid of people leaving him; her fault he developed the impulse to leave first. ‘Think of it as an investment,’ she Echoed. ‘Maybe one day, when he’s a world renowned composer, he’ll write a song about me.’

“He’s already started.” Jinjer gave a small laugh. “Courting Darkness, I think he calls it.”

It wasn’t one of her favorite nicknames but there was no time for Taryn to figure out how she felt about that. ‘He’ll be back soon,’ Taryn Echoed. ‘Remember, he doesn’t need you to be perfect all of the time. He doesn’t even expect you to be good most of the time. But he does need you to be present. And right now, he needs to hear what you just told me.’

When she left them, Taryn was sure they would find their way to each other. They wanted to; which was half the battle. And there was nothing to hinder them; no legacy of loss, no danger of deceit. No legal agreements made before either of them had any real understanding of the ramifications.

8:31.

The energy loss from her morning extraction and rage was beginning to wear. She couldn’t eat and Inquire at the same time, so she commandeered a meal cart from the hall outside the library – the product of one of her more reasonable requests – and delivered it to her training room while she prepared and sent the rest of her flock out; twenty-one pigeons loaded with a single coin each and the last three bearing thirty gold.

Gustin’s was not the only upended life she needed to make atonement for.