“Do you trust them?”

“No, but there are few men I trust in these times.”

I had to ask. “And yet you trust me with your messages. Why? You know nothing of me.”

He said, “I know all I need. I saw the way you looked at Lily. More than that, I saw the way she looked at you. That tells me much about the measure of a man.”

I took his measure for a moment. “Gilroy does not trust her. He believes I’m being played.”

“By Lily? Never. She’s not capable of such a thing.” He sounded certain. “I agree you’re being played, but not by her.”

I waited for his further explanation, and when none came I remarked, “That isn’t helpful, as a warning.”

“It’s the only warning I can give.” He did stand then, and turned a fraction so the light no longer fell behind him. Robert Moray never did a thing without a purpose. It was his intent that I should see his eyes. They were determined. “There is more at stake,” he said, “than ye can possibly imagine, Sergeant Williamson. Ye’ll have to find your own way through.”

* * *

I was searched, as Robert Moray said I would be, when I left his cell. The guard seized Moray’s letter with such satisfaction that I found it comical to watch his face change when he saw to whom it was addressed. He kept it anyway.

“I’ll see this is delivered to the Earl of Seafield,” said the guard, which suited me, since I had no great wish to see the earl again.

The guard, for all his searching, missed the gold ring on my finger. Finding nothing else that he had cause to confiscate, he gave me back my sword belt with the whinger and permitted me to leave.

I hadn’t realized, till I passed through the portcullis gate and put that castle tower at my back, how being in that place affected me—but leaving it, I felt as though an iron chain had fallen from my chest. All men must feel the same when they’re set loose from prison. Free air is a precious thing to breathe.

I breathed it deeply, trying not to think of Moray left in that stone room with little comfort but his honor, and in hazard of his life.

The wind had changed. It drove the dark clouds on before it, and I caught the long familiar scent of threatened rain. As I came down into the Landmarket I was already lengthening my stride so I’d outpace the coming storm.

Approaching Caldow’s Land, I met our neighbor from upstairs, the Latin master, who’d been hurrying home up the street from the other direction. He stopped to greet me, and we stepped into the shelter of the portico outside the merchant sisters’ shop, and he asked how I liked the books that I had bought from him, and whether they had been of use. I told him that they had. And then I thought of something I had meant to ask him.