“And in Karse, suspicion is no bad thing.” Talamir pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes in a grimace. “Let us start with the obvious. You might as well add yourself to Selenay’s bodyguards tomorrow. The entire Court will be down at the Festival, and I’ve no doubt that your mysterious young man will be in the midst of the throng. You’ll have your best chance to spot him then, and I can identify him for you.”

That was a shortened version of “You’ll show him to Kantor, who’ll pass the image to Rolan, who’ll show it to me, and I’ll put a name to him.” Alberich nodded.

But he wasn’t happy. “Hoped I had, the crush to avoid,” he sighed. He still wasn’t comfortable rubbing elbows with the titled, even when he was playing so “invisible” a part as that of a bodyguard.

“Well, you can’t,” Talamir retorted, with an unusual level of assertion. “I won’t be around forever, and it is well past the time when you began taking up the duty of spy within the Court as well as down in Haven.”

If anything, that made Alberich even more uncomfortable—because no matter what he did, he couldn’t take Talamir’s place within the circles of the Court. For one thing, even if he’d been Valdemaran, he wouldn’t fit. For another, no one was ever likely to confide anything in him. He just didn’t have the face for it.

But he held his peace. There were more ways of undoing a knot than splitting it with an ax. There were Heralds permanently assigned to the Collegium who might serve as his eyes and ears among the highborn, especially the women. Ylsa, perhaps. And there were Trainees coming up who were highborn themselves who might be trusted to play clandestine agent.

“My best, I will ever do,” was all he said, and he and the Queen’s Own got down to the business of trying to find other ways for Alberich to set eyes on the young man in question again—just in case, against all probability, he did not show his face at the Festival.

Because in Alberich’s experience, the thing that you planned for always turned out to be the one that was least likely to happen—and the one that you had never thought of was the one that landed in your lap.

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