But now—though it was hard to see the paladin in the blithe young woman who rode along so easily, plum juice running down her chin—now Paks was more than that. Arianya had never heard of such a thing as that silver circle on her brow. The stories she’d already been told, including that meeting with the thief who claimed to have brought her out of Liart’s lair, went beyond imagining.

“Want a plum, Marshal-General?” Paks asked, holding out a handful. She’d bought the plums from a farmer that morning, just after they left Thornhedge Grange, and clearly intended to share them out before lunch.

“Thank you,” Arianya said, taking one and biting into it. “I hope the king will let us see Dorrin’s gift again when we pass through Vérella. I’d like to make a sketch of the designs.”

“If the necklace is part of that set,” Paks said. “I wonder if it’s magical as well.”

“I was worried about that,” Arianya said. “Magelord jewels … possibly royal … that’s not something we should have in our treasury.”

“Why not?”

Gird wouldn’t like it was the obvious answer. Arianya paused. “It’s a danger to those who don’t know how to control its power,” she said instead. “I’m not sure Dorrin could. Though anyone who could mend a well the way she did … that’s power, all right. Remember the old story about the magelord who sent a whole river into a well and flooded a fort that way?”

“That’s when Gird’s friend Cob was hurt, wasn’t it?” Paks asked. “It’s in the histories we had to read. Those scrolls I brought—do they tell the same story?”

“Yes, in more detail. But the point is, magelords could control water, or some of them could. And Dorrin can.”

“She thinks it’s because of Falk,” Paks said. “She prayed.”

“She may wear Falk’s ruby, but she’s not just a Falkian knight,” Arianya said. “When she killed the man—her father, she said, wearing another man’s body—that wasn’t a prayer to Falk. That was magery.”

“It could be both,” Paks said. She bit into another plum and spat out the stone into her hand, then tossed it to the base of a hedge to the river side of the road. “Alyanya’s blessing,” she said.

Arianya glanced back, half expecting the stone to sprout then and there and bear flowers and fruit by the end of summer. No, that was silly. “I don’t see how it could be both,” she said. “Gird wouldn’t—surely Falk wouldn’t—”

“But she’s his knight,” Paks said, as if that made everything clear. “And I know he talks to her.”

She sounded so certain. Arianya remembered feeling that certain and being wrong, terribly wrong. But she was not a paladin. “I wanted to ask you about that place where you found the scrolls—was it like Luap’s Stronghold in Kolobia?”

“No—at least—not exactly,” Paks said. “It was more elvish. Macenion—the part elf I was with—said elves had built it.”

“I never heard of elves going under stone,” Arianya said. “Even in Kolobia, there was no sign elves lived under stone.”