“You know a lot. You don’t seem afraid of much. You speak freely to everyone, even to me. Even to the prince, now he’s released you from the requirement to speak through Luviara.”

“I’m surprised she hasn’t turned back yet.”

Xilsi grinned with what appeared to be genuine delight. “That old coot! She’s as tough as they come. She’s been all over the empire and outside it, too. I swear by the High Heavens, she has walked more in her life than all the rest of us put together can ever hope to manage. She’ll never turn back, not at a chance like this.”

What manner of chance is that? Elen wanted to ask but held her tongue and let Xilsi go on.

“A different interlocutor had been assigned to His Highness when he was raised to the seat of all-seeing eye. He sent that one back because he said the man was a spy for Prince Astaylin. He asked for Theurgist Luviara by name.”

“Did he? Is it common for a prince of the Third Estate to know the names of theurgists?”

Xilsi flicked her fingers as if brushing dirt off her shoulder. “His Highness is the smartest person at court, for all he’s only twenty-six. Six years younger than me, if you can credit it.”

“You look younger than him.”

“It’s my face,” Xilsi said. “My mother was the same. She looked twenty until she was fifty.”

“And after she was fifty?”

Xilsi grinned. “Then she looked twenty-one.”

Elen laughed.

“That’s what puzzles me about you,” Xilsi went on. “I’ve been a warden since I was seventeen. Like our Kem.”

Elen couldn’t help but wince—Kem confiding in everyone already—as Xilsi went on.

“I’ve never met a provincial official, much less a mere deputy courier, who would talk and laugh with a Manor-born soul like me the way you do. Ipis thinks you’re the intendant’s child by a courtesan, secretly raised in his household. Kem said you aren’t. Although if he’s of Duenn Manor, I don’t know how he would know, but he seemed certain.”

“I’m not the intendant’s by-blow, I assure you.”

“Prince Astaylin’s spy, then?” Xilsi asked, so casually that Elen realized this entire seemingly friendly conversation might have been engineered to spring the question on her.

She shook her head with an amused smile. “Warden, I assure you, I have never been to the heartland nor farther south than the one time I traveled to Ilvewind Cross with the intendant’s retinue. I have walked the Moonrise Hills circuit every month for the last ten years. If you doubt the truth of my statement, you will find the transmission logs of my passage at every village and temple along the route, as well as in more detail at Map Hall in the Residence at Orledder Halt.”