The answer undid Giddon, who didn’t have a Grace to hide the tears that filled his eyes. He blotted them quickly with his sleeve. Bitterblue? he said. I’m afraid she’ll take anything I say right now as a reason to run away.

I think you have to accept that she may run away, Giddon. It’s not in your power to stop her.

Giddon blotted another tear.

“Hava?” he said.

“Yes?” she said, warily, not looking up from the map.

“You can talk to me.”

Her mouth went hard. “Bully,” she said. Then she pulled inside herself, that way she did when she wanted to pretend he wasn’t there. It wasn’t something she did with her Grace; it was just something she did. She turned and began walking.

“Wait,” Giddon said, taking her sleeve.

“Hey! No grabbing!” she said, yanking her arm away.

“Wait!” he said again between clenched teeth, for he wasn’t stopping her because of their conversation. He was stopping her because he’d just caught sight of someone in the square, someone he almost didn’t recognize, so strange was it to encounter her in Ledra.

“What is it?” said Hava quietly, understanding.

“There’s a pale, blond woman walking toward a staircase,” he said, turning to admire a fountain nowhere near the woman, “with a tall brown man in a long fur coat, you see? The woman is wearing a light yellow coat.”

“I saw her,” said Hava, who turned to admire the fountain with him. “So?”

The more Giddon thought about this, the stranger it was. “She’s an Estillan Graceling,” he said. “Her name is Trina. She’s one of the first people I ever led through the tunnels to Monsea. Last I knew, she’d found employment in a hotel in eastern Monsea, near the silver mines. So what’s she doing here?”

“What’s her Grace?”

“She can find hidden objects.”

Hava paused, giving a little annoyed shake of her head. “Be more specific.”

Giddon remembered the passage through the tunnels with Trina, who’d been quiet, almost aloof. She’d had no family. Nor had she shown much interest in the others who’d made up the escape party, until one of them had referred to her Grace as a party trick. Then her uneven eyes had flared.

“Say you’ve lost something,” he said, “like a piece of jewelry or a memento. Or say there’s something you want, but you don’t know where to find it, or even if it exists, like a starfish on a beach, or”—he used the example from the tunnels—“a seam of gold in the walls of a tunnel. As long as she understands the essence of that object, she can find it.”

“Could she find Bitterblue’s body?” asked Hava abruptly, and Giddon was undone again.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe? The ocean might be too deep.”

“Should we ask her?”