Clara went directly to the cloth merchant and spent a focused and productive hour there, which Arthur did not follow in detail but which resulted in her returning to the meeting point with a bolt of deep green fabric, a paper of pearl buttons, and the expression of someone who had completed a transaction they were satisfied with.
She also had three books from the bookseller's cart, because Clara's approach to a book cart was comprehensive.
Lyra had found clothes — a winter blouse in pale grey that suited her, a pair of wool-lined gloves, and two small gifts wrapped in paper that she did not explain but carried with the careful quality of things intended for someone specific. She had also found a book, because Lyra always found a book.
Arthur bought metals first — a selection of silver and copper and a small amount of a refined alloy the metalsmith called hardsilver that he had not encountered before and which had a mana conductivity in the diagnostic that made him genuinely interested. Then he went to the bookseller and spent the rest of his budget there, four volumes on magical theory including one on construct design that was the most technically advanced thing he had seen available in this county. He tucked them in his spatial pocket with the satisfaction of someone adding to a collection.
Saya bought food.
This was not a surprise — she had been talking about the market food stalls since before they arrived, and she worked through them with the methodical enthusiasm of someone for whom new things to eat was one of the better categories of new experience. She came back to the group with a wrapped parcel of spiced dried fruit, a bag of something roasted that smelled extraordinary, and three small paper packets of spices that she had clearly selected with intention.
She had also bought three small painted trinkets from a craftsman's table — small lacquered pieces, decorative, the kind of thing that sat on a shelf and caught the light.
Arthur noticed her holding one of them for slightly longer than the others, turning it in her fingers.
'For your mother?' he said.
She looked up. The amber eyes had something in them that she was managing with the contained competence she brought to most things.
'She likes things like this,' Saya said. 'Things that are pretty for no reason.' She looked at the trinket for a moment more. 'I keep seeing things I want to show her.'
Arthur said nothing immediately. He let the moment be what it was.
'Shadow is still looking,' he said. 'Every day.'
'I know.' She wrapped the trinket in her cloth bag with the others, careful. 'I'm not — I know she's all right. The tribe is all right. It just — ' A pause. 'It just misses her.'
He sat down on the edge of the fountain at the center of the square beside her. He didn't say: it will be fine, or: not much longer, because he didn't know the second one and the first one wasn't the point.
'I know,' he said.
She sat beside him for a moment. Her tail, hidden behind the ring's illusion, would have been curled tight if it had been visible. After a while she straightened up.
'I'm going to get more of the roasted ones,' she said, about the food.
'Get enough for everyone.'
She went. He watched her go and thought about Shadow's network and whether there was a search pattern he hadn't tried yet, and added it to the list of things to work on when they got home.
◆ ◆ ◆
They were near the eastern side of the market, Lyra examining a display of pressed flowers that she said were for a project and which Arthur suspected were because she thought they were nice, when Saya stopped walking.
He noticed because she had been beside him and then she wasn't, and when he looked back she was standing still with her ears — visible only to him through the diagnostic, the ring's illusion holding for everyone else — flat against her head.
He followed her gaze.
Two people at the far end of the market row. Both demihuman — he could read the signatures through the diagnostic, different from human, different from Saya's. Taller than her, broader, with a quality to the way they moved that was territorial and watchful. One was looking at something at a merchant's table. The other was standing slightly back, scanning the crowd in the methodical way of someone who did this by habit.
The scanning one slowed.
Arthur saw it happen — the nostrils widen slightly, the head tilt, the moment of: something is here that I recognize.
'Walk,' Saya said, very quietly. 'Toward the cloth side. Don't look back.'
He turned to Lyra. 'Go find Clara. Market entrance, now.' Lyra read his tone and went without question.
He and Saya moved with the crowd, not fast enough to be running, fast enough to be going somewhere. He kept his body between her and the direction they had come from and kept the diagnostic running on the two demihumans behind them.
'Wolf tribe,' she said, barely audible. 'And the Ao Kitsune and the wolf clans have not been at peace for a long time.'
'Will they know you through the ring?'
'By sight, no. By scent — ' She hesitated. 'Maybe. If they were close enough to spotthe difference.'
He glanced back once. The scanning one had moved from where it had been standing and was working the crowd with a different quality of attention now — not looking at the stalls but at the people. Looking for something it had caught a thread of.
Arthur turned them down a side row, through a gap between two canvas stalls, and they came out on the far side of the market near the wall of a warehouse where the crowd was thinner. He pulled a low-grade mist construct from his toolkit — ambient, subtle, the kind that made a space seem slightly uninteresting to look at — and spread it across the area where they were standing.
They waited.
The diagnostic tracked the two wolves through the market crowd for another ten minutes. They were thorough. They covered the eastern stalls twice. Then the one who had been scanning said something to the other and they moved on together toward the northern gate, and the specific quality of attention they had been carrying went with them.
Arthur let the mist construct dissipate.
'Gone,' he said.
Saya let out a breath.
'I should have expected it,' she said, more to herself than to him. 'We're close to the Veiling. Demihumans come to the towns near the forest sometimes — hunting, selling, making coin to bring back. I knew that. I just — ' She looked at where they had been. 'I wasn't thinking.'
'You recognized what they were before I did,' Arthur said. 'You had us moving before they confirmed anything. That's not not-thinking.'
She considered this.
'Wolf demihumans specifically in this town,' he said. 'That's useful information. I'll keep the network watching the area while we're here.'
'They won't connect a human farm family to me,' she said. 'We're probably safe enough.'
'Probably is fine. I work with probably.' He moved out from the warehouse wall. 'Come on. Clara will be catastrophizing at the market entrance.'
She followed him out. Her tail, he knew from the diagnostic, was low but moving. Still processing.
He kept Shadow's eyes on the northern gate for the rest of the d