I looked for Zaira, but she was deep in some card game with Terika in the dining hall, Scoundrel curled at her feet. The glare she shot me across the hall made it quite clear she had no use for my company, so I grabbed a slice of tartgrass quiche and nibbled it in a window alcove in an administrative hall from which I could see the colonel’s office. I tried to work at the puzzle of who might have the means and motivation to kidnap the heirs of Ardence, but my thoughts kept reaching back to that moment on the steps, between the shadow and the light.

I barely had time to finish my quiche and wonder if I should press my ear to the colonel’s door when Marcello emerged, eyes downcast in apparent thought.

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

He rubbed the back of his head. “I suppose. Some new information to digest. Will you walk with me?”

“Of course.”

I felt a certain fluttering in my stomach as I fell in beside him. As we proceeded down the hall, I cast glances his way, wondering if he would walk a little closer, or take my hand. Anything to show the moment in Istrella’s stairwell had happened, and that things between us had changed.

But Marcello’s eyes kept pulling away to things we passed in the Mews hallway—an old suit of armor, the door to a playroom for small children, a scrawled posting requesting the return of a missing wormwood jar to the alchemy lab. I wasn’t sure he even knew he was walking next to someone at all, let alone a woman he’d maybe nearly kissed less than an hour ago.

I’d swear I hadn’t dreamed it. How could he be so maddeningly oblivious?

“What did Colonel Vasante talk to you about?” I asked.

“Mmm,” Marcello replied in the direction of his feet.

I stepped in front of him, startling him into meeting my eyes. “You’re distracted,” I accused. “What’s bothering you?”

He sighed. “Come with me to the dining hall. Zaira needs to hear it first.”

We found Zaira sitting with Terika in the dining hall, their heads together over half-finished bowls of pauldronfish bisque. Scoundrel waited at their feet, his eyes on Zaira’s bowl with intense devotion. We wove our way to them through the thinning late-lunch crowd, passing between a table with half a dozen children throwing bread at each other on one side, and a group of uniformed soldiers struggling to ignore them on the other. As we approached, Terika threw back her head and laughed over something Zaira had told her.

When we got closer and Zaira saw Marcello’s serious face, however, her wicked grin sobered. “Don’t tell me you have more bad news about Ardence.”

“So you do care what happens there?” I asked, trying not to make it a challenge.