To make matters worse, they learned nothing of note. Alaya flirted playfully with Alec throughout the evening, but his thoughts were with Myrhichia and later Seregil informed him that he’d told the elderly archduchess that his first kiss had been with a rabbit.

“I thought she said ‘first kill’!” Alec exclaimed. “I wondered why everyone laughed.”

Much to Alec’s relief, Kepi was waiting for them when they returned home, and with more news of the raven people—promising news.

“Some of ’em was seen in the Lower City,” the boy told them, hunkered down by the fire in his dripping clothes, flannel draped over his head as he gnawed on a cold goose leg. “I talked with folk who remembered the old man, and the young fellow with the crutch. But they ain’t been seen about down there since the quarantine.”

“So that must have driven them up here,” said Alec.

“What about the Ring?” Seregil asked.

“That’s the good bit, my lord! There’s a little girl who traded with an old raven woman for a sweetmeat the other day. Now she’s in the drysian temple in Yellow Eel Street.”

“I’m surprised they brought her out at all,” said Seregil. That temple stood close by one of the Sea Market gates that let into the Ring. “The Ring folk generally tend their own.”

“Do you want me to go back again?” Kepi asked hopefully.

Seregil gave him a few coins. “Go back to watching Duke Reltheus for now.”

Kepi made them a bow and disappeared into the storm again.

“Could the sweet have been poisoned?” wondered Alec.

“Possibly, but it sounds like it isn’t only food they offer. As for the trades, if it was just hair, that would make necromancy more likely, or even alchemy, but there doesn’t sound like there’s any pattern to the trades. Or it could all just be coincidence.”

Alec grinned. “Are the fish biting well enough for you now?”

“I think they just might be. Let’s start with that little girl in Yellow Eel Street.”

Braving the storm, they rode to the Sea Market and entered the temple. A drysian met them and led them through his small shrine to a smaller room beyond it.

A haggard, fair-haired woman knelt beside the pallet, watching as another drysian let some liquid drip between a little girl’s lips. The child was no more than seven, a golden-haired, blue-eyed little thing. She’d been bathed and put into a clean nightgown, Seregil noted. Too late again. The woman, presumably the mother, was in worn clothing, but remarkably clean for a Ring dweller. She glared fiercely up at the two well-dressed nobles approaching her girl.

“What do you want?” she demanded, her accent marking her as southern-born.