He leaned over and kissed her, then put his lips against her ear. “I’ve been thinking while you were out,” he whispered. “Thinking about this morning and what happened in the cold chamber. I have some ideas that might be worth considering.”

“Tell me about Penderrin first,” she insisted, putting her arms around him and drawing him close, her voice a whisper as well. “I’ve been waiting all day for you to be coherent enough to talk to me. You said you found him?”

He nodded into her shoulder. “In the Charnal Mountains. It happened too quickly for me to be sure exactly where he is; I couldn’t take the time to find out without giving away what I was doing. But it was definitely him.”

“Why would he be all the way up there?”

“I don’t know.” He took a deep breath. “Here’s what I do know. I was doing a general search through the scrye waters for any sign of Pen or Grianne. I found Pen in the Charnals, like I said, but I moved away from the contact before Shadea or one of the others could tell what I was doing. Maybe they wouldn’t have known anyway, but I didn’t want to chance it. I purposely didn’t search Paranor on the grid; after all, that was where Grianne was supposed to have disappeared. What was the point?”

“A question you might have answered differently if you had stopped to think about it,” she said quietly.

He nodded. “True enough. Anyway, I worked my way back to Pen to make certain he was in the Charnals, that I hadn’t made a mistake. Then I moved my hands away again, trying to decide what to do next. I let my concentration lapse, and my hands drifted back down over Paranor. That was when the scrye waters exploded and threw me away from the basin. Shadea claimed that Paranor’s warding magic responded to my intrusion, defending the Keep. But I wasn’t trying to intrude. I wasn’t doing anything threatening. What I was doing was searching for Pen and Grianne, and I think the magic that wards Paranor reacted to that. I think it reacted because I found something it was trying to hide.”

She was silent a moment. “But it wasn’t Penderrin because he is somewhere in the Charnals. So it has to be Grianne.”

“I think so. When she disappeared, Tagwen left Paranor without confiding in any of the Druids who might have helped him. I think the key to discovering what happened to my sister lies here, and that these Druids who claim to be her friends are covering it up.”

“But you were brought here to find her. Why would they do that if they are trying to hide where she is?”