somewhere in her skirt before the door burst open.
“They’ve taken her!”
The light from the torch on the landing blinded Walegrin to the details of the
scene before him. There was a central figure, huge and yelling; writhing
attachments to it, also yelling and presumably his guards, and finally Thrusher,
leaping out of the darkness to wrap lethal arms around the neck of the unsubdued
invader. The dark hulk groaned. It fell back, squeezing Thrusher against the
wall. It twisted, freeing its right arm, then calmly peeled someone off its left
side and threw him into the eaves.
“Walegrin!” it bellowed. “They’ve taken her!”
Cythen was crouched on the balls of her feet, beneath the giant’s notice but not
Walegrin’s. She was ready to strike when he laid a hand on her shoulder. She
relaxed.
“Dubro?” Walegrin asked cautiously.
“They’ve taken her!” The smith’s pain was not physical, but it was real
nonetheless. Walegrin did not need to ask who had been taken, though he could
not imagine how they had gotten past the smith in the first place.
“Tell me slowly: Who took her? How long ago? Why?”
The smith drew a shuddering breath and mastered himself. “It was just past
sundown, a beggar-lad came up. He said there’d been an accident on the wharf.
‘Lyra bid me help if I could, so I followed the lad. I lost him almost at once^
there was nothing on the wharf-” he paused, taking Walegrin’s wrist in a bone
crushing grip.
“It was a trap?” Walegrin suggested, grateful for the gauntlet that protected
his wrists from the full power of Dubro’s despair.