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and armor in his own smithy.”
    “The manner of his gifting?”
    “It came to his ancestor as a free gift a little over two hundred years ago. The clergy nearly refused to coronate a commoner. The nobles threatened to rebel if they did, and the commoners threatened to revolt if they didn’t.”
    What motivated a man? A priest’s answer didn’t vary much, whether they were from the Merum, Absold, Servants, or Vanguard orders. It didn’t matter what color robe the priest wore, the reply centered on some or all of three categories: sex, coin, and power. And the greatest of these was power.
    “What was it you wanted to tell me about Ian’s gift?” I asked. I had an intuition about what was happening, but the theory scared me. I didn’t have the power to investigate a noble. Only the king’s castellan and his deputies could do that. Right now, I didn’t even have permission to investigate Ian’s death. I’d stepped off a porch into what appeared to be a puddle and fallen in over my head.
    “His gift of beauty was as close to pure as we can determine,” Custos said. “Our records only go back to the third century, but as far as I can tell, it was never split.”
    I tried to digest that. It would explain Ian’s success as Laidir’s court musician. The more a gift was split by a parent to two or more children the weaker it became. There were any number of people who were the recipient of a gift that had been split so often it conveyed almost no benefit whatsoever.
    But pure? Since the war nine years prior I’d developed the habit of jumping to the worst conclusion, a habit that had kept me alive more than once. “Custos, where else are the records of the gifted kept?”
    He blinked, his large brown eyes, looking at me as if I were a parchment written in some unknown tongue. “In Collum? Nowhere. The other orders haven’t committed the scribes necessary to have the records copied.”
    Inside I went through every swear word I’d heard Jeb ever use, and then I started making up my own. “Who else has access to the records here?”
    He shrugged. “We keep them locked up for protection, but any of the brothers or acolytes could retrieve the key.”
    I ran through Jeb’s vocabulary again. It was now quite possible that whoever had killed Ian knew that I was looking for them. And this innocent, strange, owlish man at my side with his incomprehensible mind was in danger now as well. I fought down the temptation to run out of the room with my sword in one hand and my dagger in the other, as if I could spot the killer or his allies. If the room where the records of the gifted were kept was being watched, we’d already been spotted.
    I ran through the filmy chain of evidence in my head, trying to talk myself out of my conclusions, but I kept coming back to last night’s wandering. My own peculiar brand of night-walking filled me with guilt and self-doubt, but in the nine years since the war, it had never failed me. The old man lying crumpled on the porch had been murdered. And according to a boy who had no reason or motivation to lie, the men who’d dumped him there had gone to some length to make themselves appear less than wealthy.
    Within the truth that even a king’s musician didn’t earn anything close to the least of the city’s nobles laid the motivation for the killing: power. “Custos, the priest at Ian’s death said this was the second time this month one of the gifted had died. Who was the first?” I half-expected him to lead me to a different shelf, but I’d forgotten, again, that his ability to remember seemingly insignificant details far surpassed the rest of the human population.
    “Lira Obair,” Custos said without hesitation. He looked at me, and I saw his gaze, which perpetually wavered on the edge of unfocused, sharpen into something bright and cold. “Not pure, but close to it, my boy. She held a gift of craft.” His hands, almost as delicate as a musician’s, waved at me as he