“I-”

“Martus? Darin? Damned if I can tell you apart. All of you the same, and none of you like your father.” Hertet went past me, flanked by the two lords with Sir Roger at his heels. “Still, what did Reymond expect ploughing such a foreign field? He wasn’t the only plough, that’s for sure.” His voice carried back across the courtyard as he walked away, trailing off as the distance grew. “They can’t help it, these Indus girls . . .”

I found myself on my feet, having got there swiftly and without conscious decision. My hand had found the hilt of my knife. The tide of angry words rising to defend my mother’s honour had yet to leave my mouth only because they were still battling to organize a coherent sentence.

“Prince Jalan.”

I looked up. The overly large guardsman loomed over me. “The queen will see you now.”

I shot a scowl at the retreating backs of Hertet and his cronies—one that in a just world would have lit them up like torches—and brushed myself down. You don’t keep the Red Queen waiting.

Four guardsmen escorted me into the empty throne room, gloomy despite the day blazing through high windows, striated by their bars. Lamps burned around the dais and Grandmother sat ensconced in Red March’s highest chair. Two of her advisors stood further back in the shadows, Marth, wide and solid, Willow, whip-thin and sour. Of the Silent Sister, no sign.

“You’ve changed, Grandson.” Grandmother’s regard could pin a man to the floor. I felt the weight of it settle on me. Even so I had time to be surprised by her acknowledgement of our relationship. “The boy who set out has not returned. Where did you lose him?”

“Some wayside tavern, highness.” In Hell was the true answer but no part of me wanted to talk about that.

“And you have something to report, Jalan? I’m sure you didn’t request an audience before the throne without good cause. Your northern friends eluded my soldiers. Perhaps you encountered them again on your travels?”

I glanced left and right, seeking the Silent Sister. Did Grandmother already know exactly what I’d been up to from the moment I left the city? Had my great-aunt’s silence revealed it as prophecy before the march of days turned it into my personal history?

“I found them. I recovered the key. I returned it to Vermillion.”

The Red Queen left her chair with remarkable speed for an old woman. Standing on the dais with the spars of her collar fanning out above her head she towered over me. Even toe to toe in our stockinged feet she would have overtopped me, and few men can say the same.

“You’ve done well, Jalan.” She hadn’t a mouth for smiles but she showed her teeth in a reasonable approxi-mation. She stepped down and was before me in three paces. “Very well indeed.”

I noticed her hand in the space between us, held out, palm up. The same hand I had seen wrapped around a crimson sword in my dreams of Ameroth. “I . . . uh . . . don’t have it now.” I took a quick step back, sweat running down my neck all of a sudden.

“What?” As short and cold a word as I ever heard uttered.

“I—it’s not . . .”

“You left it somewhere?” Her eyebrows lifted a remarkable distance. “There’s no safe place—” She glanced about and waved at the guardsmen around the walls, all hand to hilt. “Quick, all of you. Get to the Roma Hall and escort Prince Jalan back with the—”

“I gave it to Great-uncle Garyus,” I said. “Your highness.”

Grandmother raised both arms, one to each side, palms out, and every man in the throne room stopped moving, guards halfway to me now frozen in their tracks. “What?” I swear she could stab someone to death with that word.

I clenched my teeth and gathered my courage. “I gave it to my greatuncle.”

“Why would you do that?” She took hold of my jacket, gathering two handfuls of the cloth, one just below each shoulder. “To.” She hauled me closer. Far too close. “Me?”

We stood eyeball to eyeball now. Oddly—worryingly—that same red tide that had risen in me when standing before Maeres Allus in the Blood Holes rose in me now, curling my lip in a half-snarl. “I lost his ships. I gambled them away.” Spoken too loudly. No highness. No apology. “I owed it to him.”

I had gone from Lisa and Barras to the east spire above the Poor Palace and climbed the long stair. I’d told the old man of my failure and sat with bowed head for his judgment. Instead of raging he had struggled a little more upright against his pillows and said, “I hear you have a salt-mine.”