“Kem!” She spoke more sharply than she’d intended. He looked at her, startled at her tone, but she found a cheerful expression from her inexhaustible store of presenting the face she needed the world to see. “I have to go. Are you coming?”

He and Joef let up the fake fight at once.

“I do have to go finish my testing trials,” admitted Joef sheepishly. The lads slapped each other on the back, Elen nodded to Joef, and they parted.

She and Kem walked out of the Residence compound and through the intendant’s quarter toward East Ramp, the one she’d entered by. Culverts on either side of the ramp separated the Sul River into two canals. These flowed west through the Halt and out, through another pair of culverts, beneath the western half of the split road. Eleven cottages were built into the wedge formed where the ramp met the high wall of the raised road, with the canal between them and the ramp. Surrounded by a fence on the interior side, the cottages housed Orledder’s deputy couriers.

Kem whistled merrily as they hurried through the fruit trees and small garden strips. Theirs was the smallest cottage, set up against the high wall-like bank on which the road was built. Before the avalanche, merchant and military traffic had rumbled through constantly, north and south. But she’d not minded the backdrop of noise. In her early childhood, spent living outside the empire, silence had been the real threat. Silence meant a Pall was rising, smothering life, turning fresh-hearted songbirds into voiceless monsters, devouring the unprotected alongside the unwary.

“You all right?” Kem asked as they entered their enclosed entry porch. “You must be tired. You didn’t get much sleep last night. I bet you were watching over me, weren’t you?”

The haunt’s slyly sardonic smile rose in her memory. He’d have had a few choice words to say about the habits of princes, she was sure. If she set off this afternoon, she might overnight at Three Spires again tonight, at the full moon, one of the three bright nights when there was enough moonlight to allow a haunt to walk. She could talk to him again.

“No, no, what can you be thinking?” she muttered, then laughed. Imagine harboring such a fancy! Worse, she’d asked the haunt if he was a sorcerer, and he hadn’t answered. Charm was a dangerous snare, as potent as rose-oil scent in luring in an unwilling victim.

Noticing Kem’s puzzled expression, she tweaked his cheek between her fingers the way she’d done when he was little. “Yes, of course I was awake all night watching over you, my precious little sprout, while you snored.”

“Ouch! You are tired!” He rolled his eyes as she released him. They set down their packs and took off their boots. He added, “I can pack for you while you take a nap.”