The streets were quieter in the morning light than they had been at night. A few ragged children played here and there, feral dogs rooted in the garbage, and the faint shouts of sailors rang from the direction of the docks, but for the most part the Old Quarter was silent and still.

Yozerf felt his body fall into an old, familiar rhythm as he walked. His hands remained near his belt, as close as possible to his weapons. His shoulders slouched slightly, and he kept his head down, signaling to everyone that he was something that should be ignored. He supposed that if he had been in wolf form, he would have tucked his tail between his legs.

The daylight held different memories than the night. He remembered getting up early as a child to walk to the market with Ginny, spending what little coin Darryn gave them on sweet bread and rotgut. After eating a little and drinking a lot, they would curl their tiny bodies together--she had been ten and he eight--and sleep away the rest of the day until it was time to get up and go out to the streets yet again.

"So tell me of these humans, my son," Londah said, breaking him out of his thoughts.

For a moment, Yozerf felt an odd confusion, as if it was impossible to fit the different pieces of his life together. He shook his head sharply, like the wolf flinging water from his coat. "What would you know?"

"You said that Ax sent you to them. Yet you will not leave them."

"They are my pack."

"Ah." She paused delicately. "And the woman? She seems unlike Sweet Gin."

Yozerf's stomach tightened. He had avoided speaking to Suchen of his fight with Londah over Ginny's presence in his life. Londah had felt that they were bad for one another--that their closeness only served as a constant reminder of their shared past. But who else did he have? He had Ginny had been a pack of two, close as siblings from the same litter.

But she didn't want to be your sister, did she?

No, she didn't. Perhaps Londah had seen it. Perhaps he had seen it, but denied it, terrified of losing Ginny. Terrified of failing her.

But he had failed her, of course.

And she had died.

"Very unlike," Yozerf said at last. "Ax sent me to them, to protect another young woman--Queen Rozah, escaping from the prison her Regency Council had kept her in for all her life. I...Suchen..." He trailed off, not certain how to explain the events that had changed his life from a state of hopeless endurance to something precious. "We fell in love," he said finally, spreading his hands apart helplessly. "It was not something I sought."

A faint smile touched Londah's face. "My son in love with a human. If I had not known Sweet Gin, I would not have thought it possible."

"I did not love Ginny. Not like that."

"I know. But you cared for her."

"Yes." Yozerf looked away, not wanting to go any farther down that path. "There is something you have to know." He gave her the skeleton of what had happened the previous winter, from his encounter with Ax to Rozah's death at Nava Yek, a dry thing with no detail. No mention of his fall from the tower, no, or Telmonra's silent presence in his head. Not because he didn't trust her to keep his secrets, but rather because she had a way of turning every pain and mistake of his into an indictment of herself.

"I have failed you, my son."

"Jahcgroth is our kin," he said quietly. "He is Jonaglir. I don't know how that could be, but it's true."

A wide-brimmed hat shaded her features from sight, but he heard her breath catch in surprise. "There were many things lost after Caden's fall," she said uncertainly. "It's said...I had it from my mother that Medelin, Telmonra's son, was brought into Jenel as a slave. His captors didn't know who he was, and no one who was taken with him dared speak of it. He was only a child at the time...there were so many things he did not remember."

A flash of pain hit him, a sense of grief so intense that it stole his sight for a moment. He remembered Medelin standing solemn in the courtyard outside of Cade Kwii, looking so grave and helpless, striving to hold back tears. "You must go," Telmonra said to the boy, her own heart breaking. "It isn't safe here. I'll send for you as soon as I can."

And then only a few days later, the messenger kneeling before the throne, telling her that the Jenelese had attacked the caravan, that the son--her only child--was likely dead...

No. Yozerf closed his eyes for a moment, struggling to sort out his memories from Telmonra's. He didn't die. He was taken captive, but he lived.

The grief lingered nonetheless, and he wondered suddenly if, being a ghost, she was even capable of understanding anything but the vengeance that drove her. If she could truly know anything she had not known when she died, or if it was all just an echo…

"And do your humans know this?" Londah asked, jarring him.

He flailed a moment for the thread of their conversation, unable to remember what she referred to. Jahcgroth, we were talking about Jahcgroth.

"The traitor..."

"No," he said at last. "No. I...I didn't know how to tell them." How to say that their great enemy was his blood kin.

"I see. You fear that they would turn against you."

He started to lie, then caught himself. "I don't know," he said at last. "At the time…it was too difficult. And now, after so long...wouldn't you ask yourself why I hadn't spoken earlier, if you were them?"

"Perhaps." She shrugged. "It makes no difference. So tell me, then, now that we are away from other ears...if Jahcgroth survived the fall of Nava Yek, whose side are we on, you and I?"

Yozerf's mouth tightened. "Jahcgroth betrayed us, trapped the dragons and allowed Jenel to destroy Caden," he reminded her.

In his head, Telmonra snarled.

"So he is our enemy. And the human lord and his followers are our allies."

"Yes."

She nodded, content with that. If he'd said the opposite, that Jahcgroth was their ally and Auglar to be put to death, she no doubt would have returned to the tenement and killed everyone there with equal composure.