“Weren’t you? A strange new woman showing up in town and making waves. Is that it? And if I was from the Clan, you were supposed to kill me. What was it to be? A bomb in my bedroom? Or a knife in the dark?”

“Not me,” he whispered. “One of the warriors.”

“So why were you there? To spy on me? Are they that short-handed?”

He looked down at the table, but not before she saw shame in his eyes.

“Ah.” She glanced away for a moment, trying desperately to think of a way out of the impasse. She was hopelessly aware of the guards standing behind her, waiting patiently for her to finish with the prisoner. If I leave him here, the Clan will kill him, she realized, with a kind of hollow dread she hadn’t expected to be able to summon up for a housebreaker. Housebreaker? What his actions said about his family, that was something she could get angry about. “Hell.” She made up her mind.

“Lin, you’re probably right about the Clan. Most of them would see you dead as soon as look at you. There’ve been too many years of their parents and grandparents cutting each other’s throats. They’re suspicious of anything they don’t understand, and you’re going to be high on any list of mysteries. But I’ll tell you something else.”

She stood up. “You know how to world-walk, don’t you?”

Silence.

“I said.” She stopped. “You ought to know when you can stop holding it in,” she said tiredly. Thinking back to Angbard, and how she’d managed to face him down over Roland: Don’t look too deep. Everything on the surface. The familes all worked that way, didn’t they? “Nothing you say to me can make your position worse. It might make it better, though.”

Silence.

“World-walking,” she said. “We know you can do it, we got the locket you carried. So why lie?”

Silence.

“The Clan can world-walk too, you know,” she said quietly. “It isn’t a coincidence. Your family are relatives, aren’t they? Lost for a long time, and this shit—the killing, the feuding, the attempts to reopen old wounds—isn’t in anyone’s interests.”

Silence.

“Why do they want me dead?” she asked. “Why are you people killing your own blood relatives?”

Maybe it was something in her expression—frank curiosity, perhaps—but the youth looked away at last. The silence stretched out for a long moment, lengthened toward a minute, punctuated only by the sound of one of the guards shifting position.

“You betrayed us,” he whispered.

“Uh?” Miriam shook her head. “I don’t understand.”