“Oh, thank the Great Mother!” this old woman said when she saw them all, then leaned against the wall, gasping hoarsely for breath. “I…I…was frightened I wouldn’t…find you.” She looked at Pelaya, surprised. “Your Ladyship. Forgive me.”

Pelaya just barely nodded a greeting, irritated by yet another interruption. Eril was right—they needed to get back to Landsman’s Market.

“What is it, Losa?” asked the round-faced girl, Yazi.

“The boy who can’t talk, the little brother! He is up in the counting house tower and very…” She waved her hands, trying to find the words. “Angry, sad, I don’t know. He won’t come down.”

“Pigeon?” Qinnitan sat forward. “He not…hurt?”

“I don’t think hurt, no,” said Losa. “He is just hiding in that tower, the old broken one near the seawall. I think the…cannons? I think the cannons scare him. He wants his sister.”

“We’ll come, too,” said Yazi. “He likes me.”

“No!” said Losa. “He is very scared, the boy. He almost falls when I come. Up very high. If he sees people he doesn’t know so well…” She shook her head, unable or unwilling to come up with the words for such a dire prospect. “Just his sister.”

The dark-haired laundry girl did not appear to grasp everything said, but she smiled—it did little to hide the anxiousness in her face—and said something in her own tongue to the girl Yazi. For a moment Pelaya wondered if she should go with them to help—Olin had taken an interest in this girl, after all—but she could think of too many reasons why she should not let herself get further involved.

After the old, scarred woman had led the brown-haired girl out, Pelaya began to move toward the front of Kossope House. “It’s good she’s found her brother,” she said, smiling at the other laundry women. “Family is so important. Now I must go back to mine. May the gods protect you all.”

The faces of the servants turned toward her as she reached the door. They watched her, silent as cats.

“I’m sure everything will be well,” Pelaya called to them, then had to hurry to catch up with Eril, who was already striding off in a determined way in the general direction of Landsman’s Market.

Old Losa led Qinnitan across the courtyard into a section of the palace deserted days earlier by the clerks who had worked there. It was strange to move freely through rooms she had only tiptoed through before, terrified she might break someone’s concentration and earn a whipping.

“Why would he run away like this?” Qinnitan asked, falling back into Xixian now that the young noblewoman and her servant had been left behind. “And how did you happen to find him?”

The old woman spread her palms. “I think the cannons frightened him, poor little lad. I heard him calling and found him where he was hiding, but he wouldn’t come with me.”

“Calling?” Qinnitan said, suddenly fearful again. “But he can’t speak. Are you sure it was him? My Pigeon?”