The third district of Tés Aváir falls under General Moriven and has the lowest crime rate in the city. This is not due to the efforts of the Tuerier, but to the fact that all crime in the district is controlled by a single person, whose name no one knows, and whom everyone fears.

Classified Tuerier report, for internal use only

Chapter 14

Cajis

The letter came during breakfast on a Tuesday in the third week.

A grey dove flew in through the open window of the dining hall, circled once over the tables, and landed on Retia's shoulder. There was a small piece of parchment tied to its leg with a red string. Retia loosened it with her fingers, unfolded it, and read.

Her face changed.

It wasn't dramatic. It was the kind of change that happens behind the eyes, in the muscles round the mouth, in the millimetre by which her jaw tightened. Retia was someone who didn't show anything she hadn't decided to show, and what was happening in her face now was something she hadn't decided. It slipped through because it was too fast and too big to control.

"What's wrong?" said Ahra.

Retia folded the letter up and put it in her pocket. Her fingers shook slightly as she did it, and she pressed her hands flat on the table to hide it.

"Cajis," she said. "My little sister. She went missing for a couple of hours last week. My mum didn't know where she was." She looked down into her tea. "She's home now. She says she was just at the market."

"But you don't believe her," I said.

Retia looked up. Her blue eyes were hard and shining and frightened.

"Cajis is thirteen. She never goes anywhere on her own. She reads books and sits in the garden and talks to the neighbours' cat. She doesn't go to the market on her own for two hours after dark."

She picked up her cup of tea and drank. Her hands were still now. She had got them under control.

"I want to go home," she said. "On Friday. And I want you to come with me."

Ahra looked at me. I looked at Ahra. There was no need for discussion.

"Of course," I said.

Retia got permission from the Headmaster through Professor Gopaltu, and on Friday after the last lesson we went down to the quay and took the ferry to Tés Aváir.

The crossing was different this time. It was late autumn now, and the air was colder than when we had been there last, and the sky was grey, with a layer of cloud lying low and heavy over the sea. The wind had gone round to the north-west and brought a sharpness with it that cut at your cheeks and made your eyes water. The waves were higher, and the ferry rocked more, and Ahra sat with his eyes closed and a faintly green face, holding on to the rail with both hands.

Retia stood in the bow with her face to the wind, looking ahead. Fulmen sat on her shoulder and looked too. There was something in the way she stood that said she was already home in her head, that her body was on the boat but her thoughts were in Tés Aváir, in the house with the white front and the red roof, at the table where a place was never laid for her father.

I stood beside her. Alôpex lay in my hood with her nose sticking up, and her fur was warm against the back of my neck.

"She's all right," I said. "Cajis. She's at home."

"Yes," said Retia. "This time."

That was what she was afraid of. Not what had happened, but what could happen. That Cajis would do it again. That she would disappear one evening and not come home.

Tés Aváir in late autumn was a different city from the one we had visited three weeks earlier.

The leaves on the magical bushes along the streets had changed from green to red-gold, and they fell slowly in spirals onto the cobbles, more slowly than ordinary leaves, held up by magic. The flowers in the pots had been replaced by berries in colours I had never seen by the fjord, dark blue and deep orange and a sort of transparent pink that glittered in the grey light. The cobbles were wet from rain that had fallen in the night, and they glistened, and the air smelt of wet stone and autumn and that sweet rot there is in leaves that have begun to fall apart.

People walked faster than last time. Robes were pulled tighter, hoods were up, and there were fewer children in the street. A Tuerier patrol went past us with quick, military steps, three men in grey robes with short swords at their sides, and their faces were closed and watchful, and they looked at us without a greeting.

I noticed other things too. A shop in a side street with boards over the windows. A mural on a wall that had been painted over with whitewash, but not completely, so you could still see traces of what had been underneath: a face, a symbol, something that had been removed but not forgotten. A woman who walked faster when she saw the Tuerier patrol, and who turned into an alley before they reached her.

"It wasn't like this last time," I said.

"No," said Retia. Her voice was quiet. "Something's changed."

As we passed The Golden Book, I asked them to wait and went in alone. The shop smelt of leather and dust and the bookseller's ink, and the bell above the door tinkled behind me. The space on the back shelf was empty, a dark gap between two spines, and the bookseller was shaking his head before I had managed to say anything.

Retia's house was on the same street of neat houses and little gardens, but the garden was different now. The flowers were gone, replaced by withered stalks and empty pots, and the path up to the front door was covered in wet leaves that nobody had swept. One of the downstairs windows was dark.

Retia stopped in front of the gate and stood still for a moment. Her hand was on the latch, but she didn't open it. She just stood there looking at the house, and something in the way she held herself said she was preparing. That the house she was coming home to wasn't the same house she had left.

Then she opened the gate and went in.

Arvia was standing in the doorway before we reached the path. She was clearly thinner than last time, and her smile was the same warm smile, but it sat on a face that was tired. Her scent was still there, freshly baked bread and warm linen, but there was something new under it: something sour, something that reminded me of sleeplessness and worry.

"Retia." She took her daughter in her arms and held her, and this time it was Arvia who held on too long, and Retia who stood still and let herself be held.

"Hi, Mum."

"Cajis is up in her room," said Arvia. "She's..." She stopped. Her smile wavered. "She's all right. Just a bit quiet."

We went in. The house still smelt of food and herbs and home, but there was something thinner about it now, the remains of something that was no longer made with the same care. The pictures were still hanging on the wall in the hall. Retia as a child. Arvia with a baby. Cajis on a swing.

And the picture of the man with the scar was gone. The hook was empty. There was a pale rectangle on the wall where it had hung, and the dust around it said it had been taken down recently.

Retia stopped and looked at the empty hook. She said nothing. But her hand, which hung at her side, clenched, slowly, and let go again.

We ate. Arvia had made stew, but the portions were smaller than last time, and she ate almost nothing herself. She sat watching Retia while Retia ate, and there was a hunger in her eyes that had nothing to do with food.

Cajis sat at the table with her book. She was different from last time. Not physically, not visibly, but something in the way she was there had changed. She sat more still. Her eyes, when they lifted from the book, looked further than they used to, out through the window, out towards the street, as if she were waiting for something or someone.

"How's school?" asked Arvia, looking at me.

"Good," I said. "It's different from Fjordly."

"Better?"

I thought about the Dherak lesson and the jolt in Haltora's hand on my shoulder. About the passages in the dark. About the creaking stair and the raven's feather on my wall, where Nihil pretended not to see it, and the feeling of having a place that was mine.

"Yes," I said. "Better."

Arvia smiled. And this smile was real, it reached her eyes, and it was the first real smile I had seen from her that evening.

In the middle of the meal I got up to wash my hands. I went out into the hall, past the pictures that were still hanging, and past the empty hook, and when I came back, Cajis was standing in the hall.

She was standing with her back to the wall and her book pressed against her chest, right below the place where her father's picture had hung. Her eyes were open and still and looking straight at me.

"Mum took the picture down," she said. Just that. As a piece of information. As something that had happened, neither good nor bad, just happened.

"I noticed," I said.

"She took it down because she cried every time she walked past it." Cajis's voice was the same matter-of-fact voice she had used last time. The flat, honest voice children have when they haven't yet learnt to wrap the truth up. Or when they have decided not to. "She doesn't think I know. But I hear her at night."

I said nothing. My hands hung at my sides, and I felt the cold stone of the wall against my shoulder as I leant back. The hall smelt of lavender and warm wood, the same scent as last time, but thinner now. I stood there looking at a thirteen-year-old girl who was carrying more than any thirteen-year-old ought to carry, and I felt it in my chest, the cold recognition there is in seeing someone who is like you.

"I saw Dad," she said.

The three words fell out of her like stones you have kept in your pocket too long.

"Last week. I wasn't at the market. I was down by the harbour, and I saw him. He was standing in an alley talking to someone. He had the hood of his robe up, but I recognised him. His hands. The way he stood. And his eyes." She looked down. "One grey. The other blue."

"Did you tell your mum?"

"No." She looked up again, and her eyes were hard and soft at the same time. "If I tell her, she'll be frightened. And she's frightened enough already."

Protection. Cajis was thirteen and protecting her mother by keeping her mouth shut. Just as Edrin was protecting me. Just as Kalmin was protecting whoever it was. Everybody in this world kept the truth hidden to protect someone they loved, and the price was always the same: the one doing the protecting carried it alone.

"Retia," I said. "Should Retia know?"

Cajis thought. Her fingers tightened round the book. Then they loosened.

"Yes," she said. "Retia should know. But not my mum."

"All right," I said.

"Promise."

"I promise."

Cajis nodded. A short, firm nod. Then she walked back towards the living room with her small, quiet steps, and I stood in the hall looking at the empty hook and the pale rectangle on the wall and thinking that this house, which smelt of bread and warmth and love, also carried something else: an absence too big to wrap up in a smile, however well practised the smile was.

I told Retia that same evening, in the garden behind the house, while Ahra and Arvia did the washing-up inside.

The garden was small and enclosed and smelt of wet earth and the last remains of summer's flowers, which had gone to sleep for the winter. A bench stood under a tree that had lost its leaves, and we sat down with Alôpex between us and Fulmen on a branch above our heads.

"Cajis saw your dad," I said. "Last week. Down by the harbour."

Retia's hand, which had been resting on the arm of the bench, tightened round the edge. Her knuckles went white. She looked straight ahead, at the garden and the hedge and the dark sky above it.

"I knew it," she said.

"What?"

"I knew he was here. Somewhere." Her voice was flat and controlled, the voice she used when she was holding something in. "Cajis has always been able to sense him. Even when she was tiny. When he was in the city, she knew. It's as if she..." She stopped. Took a breath. "It doesn't matter."

"It does matter."

"No." She looked at me. Her eyes were shining in the dark, but she wasn't crying. Retia never cried in front of anyone. "My dad is here in the city, and he's hiding, and he isn't coming home. That's the part that matters."

The wind stirred the leaves in the hedge. Alôpex lay still between us, and her warmth was the only warmth in the garden.

"What are you going to do?" I said.

"Nothing," she said. "Yet." She got up from the bench. Brushed her hands down her trousers. Straightened her robe. "But I want to know more. I want to know what he's doing, and who he's talking to, and why he's hiding." She looked down at me with a face that was hard and decided. "And I want your help."

"You've got it," I said.

She nodded. Held her hand down to me. I took it and got up, and her grip was firm and warm and brief, and it said everything she didn't say in words.

We went back in. Arvia was standing in the kitchen drying plates with a tea towel, and her hands were moving mechanically, and her gaze was far away. Cajis was sitting on the sofa with her book and didn't look up when we came in. Ahra was standing at the window, looking out into the dark with Lynx at his feet.

Everything was normal. Everything was quiet. Everything had the quiet of a house where everyone is holding on to something they don't say, and where the love is there, still, underneath it all, but it isn't enough to fill the rooms the silence has made.

On the ferry back to Déynáir all three of us stood on deck. The wind was cold and carried the smell of salt and seaweed and whatever is in the sea at night, dark and deep and unknowable. The castle lay ahead of us with lights in the windows, and the river glinted faintly in the moonlight.

Retia stood between us. Her scent was there, salt wind and wild roses, but it was different tonight. Deeper. More serious. The scent of someone who has made a decision.

"Thank you," she said quietly. "For coming with me."

"Of course," said Ahra.

I said nothing. I just put my hand on the rail next to hers, close enough for her to feel the warmth from my fingers if she wanted to, but not close enough to touch.

She closed the gap. Her little finger lay against mine. Just that. Just that one finger, light and brief, and we stayed like that the whole way across without either of us saying anything about it.