Valyn shook his head. He really didn’t give a shit if the place was a warehouse or a whorehouse as long as it had good sight lines, redundant exits, and enough life left not to collapse abruptly on their heads. Rampuri Tan, however, had fixed the girl with that empty, unreadable stare of his.

“Show me,” he said.

“We’re going up,” Valyn said. “I want our perimeter established before full dark.”

Tan turned to him. “Then establish it. The girl is coming with me.”

Valyn bit off a sharp retort. The monk wasn’t a part of his Wing, not under his command. He could press the issue, but Rampuri Tan didn’t seem the type to respond to pressure, and every minute spent arguing was a minute of further vulnerability. Besides, there was something about the monk, something dangerous in the way he held that strange spear of his, in the flat calm of his stare. Valyn thought he could kill him if it came to blows, but he didn’t see any reason to test the theory.

“All right,” he snapped. “I’ll cover you. Let’s get this done quickly.”

They found the inscription just where Triste said, the words pitted and worn, half obscured by lichen. Valyn squinted at it, trying to make out the lettering before realizing the language was unfamiliar. Linguistic training on the Islands was extensive, but even the characters were alien—sharp and angular, no loops or curves, a script designed to be gouged rather than brushed. He glanced over at Triste, eyebrows raised. “You can read that?”

She was standing in the deep shadow, staring up at the lintel, shivering with the sudden night chill. “I don’t . . .” She shook her head, then abruptly nodded instead. “I guess.”

“What does it say?” Tan demanded.

She frowned, and for a moment Valyn thought she would admit that the words were foreign after all. Then, haltingly at first, she spoke, her voice oddly lilting and musical. “Ientain, na si-ientanin. Na si-andrellin, eiran.”

The phrases weren’t any more familiar than the shapes graven into the stone, and Valyn glanced over at Tan. The monk’s face, as always, was blank. Spending time around the Shin, Valyn was starting to realize how much he relied on subtle emotional cues. Narrowed eyes, whitened knuckles, tense shoulders—it was all a text he could read, one that signaled belligerence or submission, rage or calm. The monks, however, and Tan in particular, were blank pages, palimpsests scraped and scraped until they were utterly empty, utterly clean.

“What does it mean?” Valyn asked, as much to break the brittle silence as anything else.

Triste frowned, then translated, faltering only briefly. “A home for those who have no home. For those who have no family, love.”

Pyrre had joined them as Triste spoke, and the assassin glanced up at the words with pursed lips. “Would have saved some carving to just write Orphanage. Better yet, Kids.”