Sir Ehren’s reaction was a complete nonreaction. He simply stared at her for a moment. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “She’s been... bloody crows.” The voice that emerged from the young man was a great deal more strident—and frustrated—than she would have expected to accompany his face and bearing. “Abducted. Of course she has been. Because obviously there isn’t enough going wrong tonight.” He glared at her. He had a rather effective glare, Amara thought, despite the muddy hazel color of his eyes and the fact that he stood nearly half a foot shorter than she did and was thus compelled to glare up at her. She had to make a conscious effort not to take a step back. Veradis did step back from him. “And I suppose,” he said, “you want me to help.”

Amara faced the young man mildly. “You... do seem to be having that sort of evening, Sir Ehren.”

“Crows,” he said wearily. The word betrayed a wealth of exhaustion. He hid it well, but Amara could see the signs of strain on his young face. If he’d been any older, she suspected, the past weeks would have aged him ten years. He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. The change in the young man was nearly magical. His expression became mild again, his posture diffident, nearly servile. “I’m not sure how you could trust anything I did to help you, Countess.”

“She couldn’t,” Veradis said quietly, and took a step closer to the young man, extending her hand. “But I could.”

Ehren eyed Veradis. A skilled watercrafter’s ability to sense the truth in another, when it was freely shared, was the bane of all manner of deceptive enterprise—and if trusted too casually, was a wellspring of fresh deceptions in its own right. As someone who had spent years becoming skilled in that particular expertise, he probably regarded it with almost as much distrust and wariness as Amara did.

“How could this possibly harm the Realm, Cursor?” Veradis asked, smiling slightly.

Ehren warily took her hand. “Very well.”

“One question,” Veradis said quietly. “Whom do you serve?”

“The Realm and people of Alera, and the House of Gaius,” Ehren replied promptly. “In that order.”

Veradis listened with her head tilted slightly to one side. As the young man spoke, she shivered slightly, withdrew her hand, and nodded to Amara.

“I note,” Amara said drily, “that your choice of loyalties, Cursor, is not quite the Academy standard.”

Ehren’s mild eyes flickered with something hard, and he began to say something but seemed to think better of it. Then he said, “One should bear in mind that at the moment, there are two scions of the House of Gaius in the Realm. I’m working with the one that’s actually here.”

Amara nodded. “Isana was taken from—”