"...dunno. Just—I dunno, I might be making it up. Just the way they talked about each other and about Phobe? It was different from the way everyone else talked. The two of them were trying to pretend they weren't in a panic but they were. I think. I don't know for sure—"

Taharqi lifts an appeasing hand. "You don't need to convince me to trust your instincts. I know what it's like when something makes the whole picture make a lot more sense than it would otherwise even if you don't know it's true for sure."

"...yeah, that's it. The picture makes a lot more sense if Mr. Vincent and Ms. Jenny are Phobe's parents.

"And there's just not really a motive. It feels too, too—coincidental."

"Because of the political factions involved."

"Yeah. High Priest Zhed is the leader of a group of, they call it moderates, I guess? Which as far as I can tell is people who think that maybe the whole thing where they subjugated the locals and imposed their customs on them and killed a bunch of them wasn't very nice of them and wasn't super about Freyja's love. And High Priestess Niren is the leader of the conservatives, who—I don't understand what they think, I talked mostly to people who like Zhed." He's much more sympathetic anyway. "So I think it's something political to make Zhed's faction look bad, like, look, obviously the natives suck, see, you tried being nice to them and what'd that get you, it got your jewel stolen is what."