Mrs. Erickson was almost sent flying by someone who had come too close to Amaldi; Kaylin caught her before she went down on the cobbled street. She kept an arm around Mrs. Erickson while raising her voice.

I’m on it, she heard. Severn was close.

Hope replaced the wing across Kaylin’s eyes—this time without smacking her face with it first. Darreno had an arm around Amaldi; she was pressed against the side of his body, and he was glaring out at a world that could no longer see her.

As the crowd had been small, panic had lesser immediate effect. Kaylin’s tabard—and Severn’s—had more of one. They weren’t Swords, and they hadn’t had the Swords’ extensive training in crowd control, but Severn’s voice and presence had an almost immediate calming effect, something Kaylin’s hadn’t managed to achieve on its own. She tried not to resent this, which wasn’t as hard as it might otherwise have been, because she was thinking about how much trouble she was going to be in if things got further out of hand.

Hawk starts riot.

Amaldi’s utter absence wasn’t noted by newcomers or people who had failed to see her momentary solidity, and panic was replaced by a lot of head scratching and mutters about kids these days, even if some of the runners had been old enough to be Kaylin’s grandfather, whoever he was.

Severn came to stand by Kaylin’s side; he was also wearing his tabard. “Sorry I took so long.”

“Meetings always run long.”

He shrugged. Not a meeting he could discuss, then. He turned to Mrs. Erickson and extended a hand. She took it, but her expression was four parts worry to one part good manners, as she called them.

It was clear why. Both Amaldi and Darreno had frozen in place, as if so afraid to draw Severn’s attention they had chosen to mimic statues in the hope of being overlooked. He couldn’t see them.

“What happened?”

“I came to ask a few questions of Mrs. Erickson’s friends.”

His expression was perfectly neutral, as if Mrs. Erickson’s friends weren’t a matter of Halls of Law gossip. And Records.

“I came with her,” Mrs. Erickson said, as if attempting to defend Kaylin from Severn’s ire. Kaylin would have found it amusing had the older woman not looked so strained.

“She had to come. I can’t see her friends. Or I couldn’t without Hope.”

Something in the focus of his gaze changed. “You can see her friends?”

She nodded. He could, if necessary, see what Kaylin saw; he could listen—and clearly he had, because he’d come to join her. But she was never certain that he knew what she knew, the way the Barrani whose names she held did or could. “I can’t see anything if Hope removes his wing.”