of this establishment.’
‘But he’s a friend.’
‘There’s only your word for that.’
‘Satan wouldn’t be here anyway,’ Wess said. ‘If he were free to come here he’d
be free to go home. We’d have heard something of him, or he would have found us,
or -‘
‘You fear he was taken prisoner. Enslaved perhaps.’
‘He must have been. He was hunting, alone. He liked to do that, his people often
do.’
‘We need solitude sometimes,’ Aerie said.
Wess nodded. ‘We didn’t worry about him till he didn’t come home for Equinox.
Then we searched. We found his camp, and a cold trail…’
‘We tried to hope for kidnapping,’ Chan said. ‘But there was no ransom demand.
The trail was so old – they took him away.’
‘We followed, and we heard some rumours of him,’ Aerie said. ‘But the road
branched, and we had to choose which way to go.” She shrugged, but could not
maintain the careless pose; she turned away in despair. ‘I could find no
trace…’
Aerie, with her longer range, had met them after searching all day at each
evening’s new camp, ever more exhausted and more driven.
‘Apparently we chose wrong,’ Quartz said.
‘Children,’ Lythande said, ‘children, frejohans -‘
‘Frejojani,” Chan said automatically, then shook his head and spread his hands
in apology.
‘Your friend is one slave out of many. You could not trace him by his papers,
unless you discovered what name they were forged under. For someone to recognize
him by a description would be the greatest luck, even if you had an homuncule to
show. Sisters, brother, you might not recognize him yourselves, by now.’