Her guess was confirmed when her sister said, “There. Warded. Now—you have been very busy this morning asking questions, and not all about horse training.” She folded her legs and sat herself down in the moss and leaf-litter in the cavelet, patting the ground next to her. Gingerly, Delia joined her on the ground.

“Well,” she replied, looking into Isla’s gray eyes, “Something’s going on. How did you know I was asking questions?”

“Because Ceri is a Mindspeaker like me, and he told me,” she replied. “And now I have to make up my mind whether to tell you what’s happening, or ask you to stop asking questions. Either one creates problems, and I’m trying to decide which course is safest.”

“Safest for whom?” Delia retorted, feeling more than a bit impatient with her sister.

“Everyone. Literally almost everyone in this Duchy,” Isla replied sternly. “Including you. This isn’t some bit of gossip, this is something that puts the lives of everyone who knows about it, and plenty who don’t, in danger.”

“All the more reason to tell me,” Delia said, doing her best to sound calm, rational, and above all, trustworthy. “I want to help, and I happen to have a lot of free time. Right now, about the only responsibilities I have are to Star and my pony. I can take on more. A lot more. And I can go places and do things you and Kordas can’t, because I’m just the youngest daughter of a Baron with no Barony anymore, who doesn’t even have a good dower or astonishing good looks to her credit.”

Isla sat silently, looking at Delia as if she was weighing a lot of heavy options.

Although they were sisters, Delia really did not know that much about Isla. After all, they were nearly twelve years apart in age. Isla had been living at Valdemar since the age of thirteen, fostered there—supposedly—to learn the running of a manor from Kordas’s mother. She hadn’t even come home when their brother, a year older than Isla, had died while at the Capital. Delia had seen her only once between that time and when Kordas came to take her away to Valdemar, and that had been at her wedding to the Duke. They had been playing catch-up since then, but not as much as one might think, since Delia wasn’t particularly interested in learning how to run a manor, and had been left more or less to her own devices. Which, to be honest, consisted mostly of shadowing the manor Artificer as much as he would allow, and reading everything in the manor library.

So she had to assume that Isla also didn’t know as much about her as she would have preferred, given what she’d just said.