The abbot looked at him hard for a moment or two, then addressed Tan. “I take it back, friend. The boy has come a long way.”
“Not far enough,” Tan responded without turning.
The abbot leveled a bony finger at Kaden. “How many people in the world could have seen what he saw, even without being able to identify it? A few dozen?”
“More than that,” Tan replied dismissively. “Meshkent’s high priests. Most emotion leaches. Any of the Csestriim—”
The abbot laughed gently. “I’m talking about humans, my friend. I know that you have once again begun honing that old blade of yours, but the fact of the matter is, Csestriim have not been seen on this earth in millennia.” The abbot gave Tan a long, searching look that would have had Kaden squirming in his seat. His umial, however, simply shrugged. “There may be a handful of emotion leaches scattered around Annur,” Nin continued, “but no more than a handful. I doubt that even some of them would have seen what the boy saw.”
Tan opened his mouth, but the abbot continued, forestalling any protest. “The Shin are trained from the moment they arrive in close, careful observation, and yet, who here noticed Pyrre Lakatur’s misstep? You and I. Maybe one or two of the older brothers.” He looked at Kaden almost sadly. “The boy would have made a fine monk.”
“Noticed what?” Kaden asked. “What did I notice?”
“There is more to being a monk than hunches and guesses,” Tan responded.
“He did not guess. He observed.”
“What did I observe?” Kaden asked again.
Tan shook his head brusquely. “He is in a dangerous place. He sees enough to question, but not enough to know when to hold those questions.”
“I understand that you’re telling me to stop asking,” Kaden said, stifling his frustration, “but I’m not going to stop asking. What did I see?”
“A sliver of a pause,” the abbot replied, ignoring the outburst. “A few blinks more than normal. A slight tightening at the corner of her mouth.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Individually, those signs mean nothing.”
“Taken together, they may also mean nothing,” Tan added.
“But you don’t think so,” Kaden interrupted, a sick dread rising in his throat. “You think Pyrre is keeping something back. Why don’t we confront them? Demand to know about the weapons. Demand to know about my father?”
He lapsed into silence as Tan turned from the window.
“If I hadn’t found you, you might be dead now, instead of whining like a child in the abbot’s study.”
Kaden stared incredulously.
“Lies,” his umial continued. “Deception. These are not remarkable in a man or woman. They are even less remarkable in one who makes her living buying and selling. What is remarkable about Pyrre Lakatur is how well she lies. How ably she deceives.” The large monk approached until he loomed over his pupil. “The pricing of silk and the driving of wagons are the least of this woman’s training. Somewhere she has learned to suppress the most basic imperatives of the flesh. You may want to ask yourself, when you finish playing the impetuous prince, why a woman with such impeccable training comes here, to the end of the earth, dressed as a merchant. While you spend the following days digging out the cellar of the meditation hall, you may want to consider the goals of such a woman. What has she come here for? Who has she come here for?”
34
Whatever wary trust Valyn managed to establish with Talal, nothing had changed in the course of daily training. The Wing was halfway through its probationary period, halfway to flying its first real mission, and they still hadn’t managed to win a single contest. I’d be surprised if Command lets us stand guard over a vegetable stand, Valyn thought to himself grimly as he rolled over in his bunk, restless in the predawn darkness, let alone fly to northeastern Vash to hunt for Kaden.
It wasn’t that the individual members of his Wing were incompetent. In fact, operating independently, each had shown moments of genius: Gwenna rigged and blew an entire bridge by moonlight in less than an hour; Talal swam the entire breadth of the Akeen Channel underwater; and Annick, of course, hadn’t missed a single target, regardless of distance, weather, or time of day.
In spite of these successes, however, the Wing just could not manage to get out of its own way. Gwenna blew the bridge while Laith and Valyn were still crossing it, singeing half their clothes off and dumping them in the water; Talal emerged from the Channel only to take one of Annick’s stunners to the back of the head; and Annick’s perfect shooting only led her to grow more and more scornful of the Wing, as though she were the only professional in a group of children.