"No!" she said, pushing away, staring at her habit and the dark stain spreading there, at the knife in Hespero's hand.

Then he caught her by the hair, and she felt it draw across her throat. She felt air blow through her head. She had to do something, stop him, stop him before it was too late…

But she couldn't think or feel him at all anymore.

Or anything.

Hespero knew he had to work quickly, while Anne's blood was still pumping. Holding his hand to her head, he closed his eyes, opened himself to otherwhere, and searched for her life to catch hold of it before the dark river took it away. There he would find the attunements he needed to use her gifts. He would need them to face the Black Jester alone. To win the throne.

But there was nothing draining from her, no memories or sensations, no power-no gifts.

He opened his eyes. The blood still was pulsing from her carotid, which meant her heart was still beating. She was still alive despite her empty gaze.

He'd killed her too fast, knocked the life out of her instead of draining it. He'd been in too much of a hurry. But she'd almost had him. Another few seconds would have been enough, and it would have been him, not her, lying there dead.

The blood stopped. With a sigh, he stood and looked down at her pale corpse.

"You were always foolish," he said. "You never minded your lessons."

He hesitated, looking around at the sleeping courtiers. Could he keep them all thus until his army arrived and he could rule safely here?

Not without Anne's gifts. He was going to have to leave, come back, and fight his way in. How annoying, when he was already here.

Ever pragmatic, Hespero turned and left the room, the castle, and Eslen. Time was short, and he had leagues to travel and much to do.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MURIELE LIFTED pen from paper and turned her head; she'd thought she'd heard a distant strain of music. She went to the balcony but didn't hear anything other than birdsong in the valley. She glanced at what she'd been writing and found she wasn't in a hurry to get it done. It was just something she was doing to pass the time.

There was a lot of time. Berimund had left men to serve and protect her, but he had departed more than a nineday ago. Her Hanzish wasn't really good enough to have a decent conversation with any of her guards, not that any of them seemed all that interesting.

She wished she had Alis with her, but she had to face the fact that Alis and Neil were probably dead or at least imprisoned. It wasn't a pleasant thought, but she thought it best that she keep her feet on the ground from here on.

So she spent her time playing card games with herself, writing letters to Anne that she had no way to deliver, trying to puzzle through the few books available-all in Hanzish except one, a book of meditations on Saint Uni, which was in Church Vitellian.

She was still shocked at how wrong it had all gone. Was it her fault? Was it her own mouth that had condemned her? Maybe, but it seemed to her that Marcomir would have found an excuse even if she'd stayed as quiet as a mouse. No, it was the embassy itself that had been the mistake.

But the man at the table always knows what the cook should have done, and there was no going back.

Maybe Alis had at least had time to find the Hellrune and do whatever Anne intended. That seemed to have been the actual point of the delegation, for Anne, at least. But even that seemed terribly unlikely. It was true the girl had gifts-she could even render herself unseen in the right circumstances-but to make her way through an unknown castle to find an opponent who could see the future seemed as dubious as her own mission of peace.

She sighed and patted her belly, thinking it needed filling. Someone eventually would bring her something, she knew, but she had a taste for cheese and wine. She had the run of the pantry and nothing better to do, especially treading the same regrets and worries over and over again.

She went to the stairs and started up, as the balcony room was the lowest in the underearth structure.

She found the pantry and cellar and cut a slice of hard white cheese, poured herself some wine, and sat alone in the kitchen, eating and idly studying the hearth, marveling again at the craft involved in building this place. The kitchen was still some ten kingsyards beneath the surface, which meant a chimney must have been cut down to the fireplace, which drew perfectly.

That led her to muse about the possibility of cooking something for the evening meal. She hadn't cooked in twenty years, but once she had rather enjoyed the alchemy of it.

She got up and started going through the pantry and was imagining what she might make from pork confit, pickled radishes, spelt flour, dried cod, and prunes, when she heard voices. She ignored them at first but noticed eventually that the language didn't have the cadence of Hanzish. It sounded more like the king's tongue.

She abandoned her exploration of dried goods and made her way down a short corridor that brought her to the great hall, a lovely chamber that must have been partly natural, for it had stone teeth depending from the ceiling, as she had heard existed in caves.

But the chamber didn't hold her attention at the moment.

The many dead men on the floor did.

And Robert, talking to a fellow in a black jerkin. Robert, who now waved at her and smiled.

"We were just wondering where you were," he said.

In the gray of almost dawn, Neil gauged the distance and wasn't happy with what he thought.

"Is this the only way?" he asked.

"The only other way is down," Brinna said. "There are twenty guardsmen between us and freedom there, and even at the peak of your fighting ability, I doubt you could manage that much killing."

He nodded absently. He was standing on the casement of the only window in Brinna's suite, which faced another tower and another window. The second building was perhaps three kingsyards away, the window around a yard lower than the one on which he stood. He was being asked to jump from one to the other.

Other towers jutted up all around, a virtual forest of them.

"Where are we?" he asked. "This doesn't look like anyplace I saw in the city."

"This is Kaithbaurg-of-Shadows," she said.

"You live in the city of the dead?"

"I get my visions from the dead," she said, "so it is convenient. Besides, haliurunnae are considered to be more dead than alive. Many people feel polluted by our presence."

"That's terrible," he said.

"Can you jump that far?" she asked, passing the issue back into wherever seldom spoken of things belonged.

"Why not just lower us down to the ground?"

"The rope isn't that long," she said. "I took it from the boat, thinking I might have need of it one day, but I was only able to manage so much without it being noticed in my things."

"Well," Neil said, "I'll jump it, then."

He tossed the hauberk and sword first, worried at the echoing sound of their impact, and then flexed his knees.

He knew he wouldn't manage to land on his feet, and he didn't. He hit the bottom of the window with his breastbone and caught his arms over the edge. His left arm cramped up in a ball, and the right went weak, but he managed to get one elbow up, then the other, so that he could squirm through.

Alis tossed him the rope, and he tied his end on a roof beam above the window.

He waited impatiently as Alis tied off their end, then showed Brinna how to hang on the rope by her hands and knees. Even though it was a downward slope, he could see the princess was having trouble. Although she didn't make a sound, tears were running from her eyes by the time Neil received her on his end.