“The Ishien don’t know where we are,” Kaden said.

“By now they know we’ve escaped.”

Triste shook her head. “There were at least twenty gates back on that island. We could have gone through any of them.”

Kaden blew out a long breath. “But we did nothing to cover our tracks. Matol will be able to follow us.”

“And Tan knows where we planned to meet Valyn,” Triste said reluctantly, picking at a nasty crescent scab on the back of her wrist. “If he told Matol, the bastard doesn’t need to track us.”

Kaden hesitated, staring out the end of the alley, watching the wagons and water buffalo, the men and women flowing by like a current.

“We have to go,” he said, “now. The Ishien, if they even know where we’re going, will take time to follow us here, time to get to the chapterhouse. I just need a few minutes to find out if Valyn’s been there.”

“It’s a risk,” Kiel observed.

“Everything’s a risk,” Kaden said. “Waiting will only make it worse.”

The Shin chapterhouse didn’t look like much: a narrow brick face—maybe ten paces wide and three stories high—crammed between two larger buildings at the border of a small cobbled square in one of Annur’s quieter quarters. Nothing marked it as a chapterhouse, which wasn’t surprising; the monks Kaden knew had never been much for crests or sigils. There was just the blank brick, the blank wooden door, and several windows on the upper floor, all firmly shuttered.

The rest of the elm-fringed square hummed with quiet activity—people hanging laundry out of windows, men and women bartering in the rough wooden stalls of a market, two water buffalo with noses buried in a stone trough—but around the chapterhouse there was nothing, no one, no ornament, not even flowers in the bare gravel fronting the structure. The place might have been abandoned, save for the tenuous line of smoke rising silently into the sky. There was no sign of Valyn, but then, Kaden’s brother would hardly be lounging in the shade in front of the temple with his kettral leashed to a tree. A score of other buildings fronted the square—houses and shops, a wine store with bottles racked high in front of it, a stately old mansion that had seen better days, windowpanes broken, front yard unkempt, utterly uninhabited by the look of it. There was no way to search them all hoping to find Valyn. The only way to know if he had visited the Shin was to knock.

“Stay here,” Kaden said. “I’ll be fast.”

“What should we do if the Ishien come?” Triste asked. She looked as though she were trying to watch every direction at once, trying to study every stranger.

Kaden shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“There is a way out,” Kiel said, “from inside.”

“A back door?”