Ashbearer: The Wolfs Hall

Steel rang against steel in the frost-rimmed yard below, a rhythm so precise it sounded mechanical. Each strike carried across the courtyard and through the narrow window where Marda stood watching, her breath fogging the cold glass in small white bursts.

Beside her, Kaelen counted under his breath. Not the blows, but the intervals between them. His lips moved with the patience of a man setting stones into a mosaic, each piece placed before the next could follow. A week now since they had come to the citadel with forged credentials and a story polished smooth enough to pass scrutiny. A week of watching. Of learning the architecture of a tyrant's days.

"Forty-three seconds between the change of guard at the eastern wall and the first command shouted on the training ground," Kaelen murmured. He did not write anything down. He never did. His memory was the ledger, and his ledger was perfect. "The captain of the morning drill is named Aldric. He favors his left knee. He limps on cold days."

Marda glanced sideways at him. Kaelen's face held the same expression it always held in these moments: watchful, almost tender in its concentration, as though the small details of the tyrant's household were music he was determined to transcribe note by note. His eyes moved from the yard below to the high gallery where a single figure had just emerged to inspect the drilling.

Sevryn Marden. The Tyrant-Lord of the Ashen Realm.

He stood outlined against the pale morning sky, wrapped in a black cloak trimmed with grey wolf fur. Even from this distance, even through the warped glass, his posture was unmistakable. He did not watch his soldiers the way a commander watches soldiers. He watched them the way a spider watches the architecture of its web, counting which strands held and which trembled.

"He comes to the gallery at the second bell," Kaelen said softly. "Always. He watches for exactly twelve minutes. Then he withdraws to take his morning meal in the smaller chamber, not the great hall."

"How do you know which chamber?" Marda asked.

"The kitchens." A faint note entered his voice, something between admiration and distaste. "The cook told me. Or rather, the cook complained to me, because she assumed I was a new secretary assigned to the household accounts and therefore a safe ear for grievances about the Tyrant-Lord's peculiar preferences."

Marda turned back to the window. Below, Sevryn had lifted one gloved hand and made a small gesture. The drilling ceased at once. The soldiers stood motionless in formation, frost glittering on their pauldrons.

"The cook," Marda said carefully. "You have spoken with her three times now."

"Four. The fourth time was this morning, while you were with the harpist."

Marda said nothing. The one-armed harpist had taken to teaching her small things, scraps of melody and the names of birds, and Kaelen had noted her absences with the same precision he noted the intervals between guard changes. She sometimes wondered if he counted her breaths as well.

The Tyrant-Lord turned from the gallery railing and disappeared into the interior of the palace. Precisely on schedule.

"Twelve minutes," Kaelen said. "He does not stay longer. He does not stay shorter. The morning meal takes him forty minutes more, during which no petitioner may approach. Then the morning audience opens in the Hall of Petitions, and the line begins forming at dawn. Some of them have been lining up since before the first bell, in this cold."

"You have watched them too."

"I have spoken with two of them. An elderly woman whose grandson was taken for an ash-law violation, and a merchant whose caravan was confiscated at the border. Both have waited nine days for an audience. Both were turned away yesterday. Both will return today."

The courtyard below had emptied. The soldiers had marched off to their barracks in lockstep formation, their boots striking the frozen earth in unified percussion. The frost began to soften at the edges where their boots had crushed it into pale slush.

Kaelen moved away from the window at last. He wore the plain grey coat of a minor household official, and his dark hair was cropped close to his skull in the fashion of clerks. He looked nothing like the man who had once led the iron column of the Verdant Company. He looked like a man who counted things for a living and never raised his voice.

"The cook's name is Brida," he said, settling onto the stool beside the small hearth in their shared chamber. "She has worked in this palace for twenty-three years. She remembers the old lord, Sevryn's father, and she remembers Sevryn as a boy. She does not say what she remembers. But her hands shake when she serves Sevryn his midday wine."

"And you have used this."

Kaelen looked up. There was no defensiveness in his face. Only a kind of tired honesty.

"I have asked her about the kitchens. About the route the wine takes from the cellar to the Tyrant-Lord's table. About which servants may enter which corridors. She has answered more than she intended to, because she is lonely, and tired, and frightened, and I have learned how to listen in such a way that frightened people forget to be afraid of what they are saying."

Marda sat down across from him. The fire between them was small and stubborn, fed with scraps of wood that smelled of resin and old pine. Their room was a servant's garret tucked under the eaves of the east wing, cold at night despite the brazier, and warmer now only because the sun had crept around to the small window.

"There is something else," Kaelen said. "Something I have not told you yet."

Marda waited.

"In the evening, after the councils, Sevryn walks the wall. Alone, except for two guards who keep their distance. He walks from the northern tower to the southern gate and back again. He does this regardless of weather. The guards change for him at a specific point on the wall, and during that change, for thirty-eight seconds, no one is watching him at all."

"You have timed it."

"I have timed it twice."

Marda's throat felt dry. "What are you planning, Kaelen?"

He did not answer at once. The fire cracked, sending a small shower of sparks up the chimney, and the scent of old pine filled the room again. Somewhere below, in the kitchens, she could hear Brida's voice raised in irritation at some scullery worker. The harpist was practicing in a distant chamber, a single note sustained so long it seemed to bend the air.

"Not yet," Kaelen said finally. "We are still learning. There is the sister."

"The Princess."

"Cerys." He spoke the name carefully, as though it were made of something fragile. "She is kept in the western wing. Soft house arrest, the cook calls it. She is allowed to walk the gardens in the afternoon, when the courts are open, and only when accompanied by two ladies of her household. She is allowed to receive petitioners of her own, in a small chamber off the Hall of Petitions, but only those petitions her brother has approved in advance."

"You have seen her."

"Once. Yesterday, through the door of the small audience chamber. She was seated, and a woman was kneeling before her, speaking very fast and very quietly. The Princess was listening with her hands folded in her lap." Kaelen paused. "Her hands were not folded as though she were bored, or frightened. They were folded the way one folds one's hands when one is deciding something."

Marda thought of the harpist's small lessons. The names of birds. The names of flowers the cook had once whispered to her in the kitchen corridor, names that had nothing to do with recipes. Small things, pressed into her hands like coins.

"There is a network," Marda said slowly. "Here. Already."

"Yes."

"And you think the Princess is part of it."

"I think the Princess is the heart of it." Kaelen's voice dropped lower. "I think the anonymous patronage that has kept the resistance funded through three winters comes from her household. I think Sevryn suspects. I think that is why she is kept where she is, watched but not removed, because removing her would expose how deeply she is loved by the people he has spent his life trying to break."

The fire settled. The room grew colder by a degree.

"Tomorrow," Kaelen said, "I will arrange to be in the corridor when she walks in the garden. I will speak to her. Or rather, I will arrange for her to speak to me."

"And if she refuses?"

Kaelen looked at her, and for a moment the clerk's mask slipped, and she saw what lay beneath: the iron column, the man who had crossed the Ashen Realm twice on foot and lost half his company to the snow.

"Then we will know that Sevryn has already turned her," he said. "And we will have to find another way."

Marda rose and crossed to the window again. Below, a fresh detachment of guards had taken the yard for their morning rotation. The frost was reforming on the flagstones, pale as bone. Somewhere in the palace, a bell rang, and she counted the seconds as she had learned to count them.

Forty-three seconds later, the first command was shouted.

Forty-three seconds later, steel rang against steel.

The week was not yet over, and already she could feel the architecture of the tyrant's days closing around them like the geometry of a trap.

Word reached Marda before the second bell. A clerk she had never spoken to, a thin man with ink-stained cuffs and the careful eyes of a man who had survived many regimes, appeared at the door of her borrowed room and handed her a folded slip of parchment sealed with a wafer of grey wax.

"By order of the office of the Lord Justiciar," he said, in the toneless voice of a man who had delivered a thousand such summons. "You are to present yourself at the Hall of Wolves within the hour. You will record the proceedings of the Tyrant-Lord's court this day. You will bring ink and quill. You will speak to no one until the session is concluded."

He did not wait for her answer. He turned on his heel and was gone, his boots marking a measured rhythm down the corridor until the stone swallowed the sound.

Marda stood with the slip in her hand. The wax bore no sigil she recognized, only the crossed keys of the Lord Justiciar's office, stamped into the grey like a brand. She set the slip on the small table, crossed to the washbasin, and splashed cold water on her face until her cheeks stung and the last fog of sleep had lifted from her thoughts.

She had asked for this. She had asked Kaelen, in the careful phrasing they had agreed upon, to put her name forward as a scribe for the public sessions. She had not expected the request to be granted so quickly. She had not expected the summons to come with the dawn.

She dressed in the plain grey gown that had been laid out for her, the one without embroidery, without trim, without any mark of office except the small brass clasp at the collar that identified her as temporary staff of the palace administration. She bound her hair back with a cord of black silk. She took up her inkpot, her quill, her sheaf of pale paper. She counted her breaths the way she had been taught, in sevens, and walked down the long cold corridor toward the Hall of Wolves.

The Hall of Wolves occupied the northern flank of the palace, a structure older than the Marden dynasty, older than the Ashen Realm itself, built from the bones of some older keep by hands long forgotten. Its pillars were squared stones of a black granite that wept moisture in summer and frosted white in winter. Its vaulted ceiling was painted in fading pigments with the deeds of conquerors whose names had been chiseled out and re-cut a dozen times. At the far end, above the raised dais where the Tyrant-Lord held his court, a great grey wolf's head had been mounted on a shield of blackened oak, the glass eyes catching the torchlight and throwing it back as a dull amber.

Marda had passed through the Hall a hundred times as a child, on her way to some lesson or another, and the smell of it had always risen to meet her: damp stone, old tallow, the faint sweet rot of the woodwork where the salt air from the bay crept in through invisible cracks. Today the smell was stronger, for the Hall had been closed for two days while the Tyrant-Lord recovered from some private malady that the servants spoke of only in whispers. The air was thick with it, and under it the sharper note of unwarmed bodies, the musk of the petitioners who had been waiting since before first light.

There were perhaps forty of them. Some sat on the low benches along the side walls. Some stood. A few knelt, though whether from devotion or from the ache in their legs Marda could not tell. Among them she saw a baker she recognized from the lower kitchens, a man called Aldric, broad-shouldered and flour-dusted even now, his hands folded in his lap and his face the colour of old tallow. Beside him sat a younger man, thinner, fairer, with his father's jaw and his mother's eyes, and his gaze fixed on the floor as though he could bore a hole through it with the force of his attention.

Marda's breath caught. The younger man was Orric. Orric Aldricsson. The baker's son. The one who had not been seen at his post in the royal bakehouse for three nights running, and whose absence had set the whole of the lower kitchen whispering.

She did not let her face change. She crossed to the scribe's table set at the foot of the dais, a narrow bench with a slanted top, and arranged her ink and paper with the unhurried precision of a woman who had done this a thousand times before. Her hand did not tremble. Her breathing did not alter. Only her mind, behind the clerk's mask, was already running forward through the possibilities.

If Orric was here, then his father had been summoned to answer for him. If his father had been summoned to answer for him, then the matter of the missing nights was already before the court. If the matter of the missing nights was already before the court, then whatever Orric had done, or wherever he had gone, would be opened to the public record. And she, Marda, would be the one to set it down in ink.

She set the tip of her quill to the paper and waited.

A trumpet sounded, a single high note that rang against the vaulted ceiling and fell back in a long slow dying. The petitioners rose, or tried to. A few of them had to be helped up by the guards at the doors. The great doors at the back of the Hall swung open, and the Tyrant-Lord entered.

Sevryn Marden moved the way a blade moves through still water. There was no haste in him, no ceremony. He wore a coat of dark wool over a doublet of black velvet, and at his throat a single ornament of pale gold, the wolf's tooth that was the mark of his office. His face was the colour of old bone. His eyes were the colour of shallow ice. He did not look at the petitioners as he passed them. He did not look at the guards. He looked at no one until he had mounted the three steps of the dais and seated himself in the high-backed chair of state, and then he looked at all of them at once, the way a man looks at a ledger.

"Proceed," he said.

His voice carried without effort. It filled the Hall the way water fills a vessel, finding every corner, every crack, every hollow.

The Lord Justiciar, a stooped man in a robe of ash-grey who had served three Tyrant-Lords and outlived them all, stepped forward with his long scroll and unrolled it with the practised ease of a man who had done this so many times his hands no longer needed his mind. He read the first case. A dispute over a water-right between two tenant farmers on the eastern marches. Sevryn listened. He asked two questions, both of them short, both of them sharp as a needle. He pronounced judgment in four sentences. The petitioner who had lost bowed and withdrew. The petitioner who had won bowed and withdrew. The scribe at the far end of the table recorded the judgment in his neat, crabbed hand.

The second case was a matter of inheritance. The third was a complaint against a tax-farmer. The fourth was an appeal from a man who had been flogged for a theft he swore he did not commit.

Through all of these Marda wrote. Her quill moved in the small precise hand she had learned in the cloister, the letters close-set, the lines ruled with the edge of a folded card. She did not look up more than she had to. She did not let her eyes linger on Sevryn's face. But she listened. She listened with the whole of her attention, the way she had been taught to listen in the long winters when she had sat at the feet of the old clerk in the cloister and transcribed the readings of the dead kings.

She listened, and she began to hear the shape of the man's mind.

The fifth case was the baker.

"Aldric of the Lower Bakehouse," the Lord Justiciar read, in his dry and careful voice, "is summoned to answer for the failure of his son Orric, a bonded servant of the royal household, to present himself at his post for three consecutive nights, in violation of the second article of the household code, and to the prejudice of the crown's provision."

Aldric rose. He was a big man, and he moved heavily, the way big men move when they have been sitting on a hard bench for hours and the cold has settled into the joints of them. He did not speak. He waited, with the patient stillness of a man who has nothing left to bargain with.

"Speak," said Sevryn.

"My lord," said Aldric, and his voice was rough with disuse, "my son is not a deserter."

There was a small silence. The kind of silence that has weight.

"Explain," said Sevryn.

"My son went to warn the village of Dunhallow," said Aldric. "There was word that the Iron Company was coming up the coast road, and that they had been paid to take what they wished from any settlement that had not bought the Tyrant-Lord's protection. My son went to warn them. He did not desert his post for sport, or for cowardice, or for any love of the rebellion that nests in the hills. He went because the village has forty children in it, and he could not bear to think of them waking in the night to the sound of the Company's axes."

Another silence. Longer this time.

"And you knew of this," said Sevryn.

"I knew of it, my lord," said Aldric. "I could not stop him. I did not try."

"Why did you not inform the office of the Lord Justiciar?"

Aldric was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Because the office of the Lord Justiciar would not have arrived in time. And because the village is a poor one, and the people of it have no friends in this palace."

Sevryn did not answer at once. He sat in his high-backed chair, his long pale hands folded on the armrests, and he looked at the baker as a man looks at a piece on a game-board, calculating its value. The Hall was very still. Marda's quill did not move.

"It is the finding of this court," said Sevryn at last, "that Orric Aldricsson is guilty of desertion of his post, in violation of the second article of the household code. He will be punished for this breach, when he is taken. The penalty prescribed is flogging and the forfeiture of his bond for a term of seven years."

Aldric closed his eyes.

"However," said Sevryn, and the word fell into the Hall like a stone into a well, "the court finds also that the village of Dunhallow has been spared a ruinous incursion by the action of the accused, and that the action, though a breach of the code, was not a breach of the crown's interest. The father, Aldric of the Lower Bakehouse, is therefore granted clemency in the matter of his knowledge and concealment, on the condition that he returns to his post and discharges his duties without further lapse. The son, when taken, will be punished as the code prescribes, and no further."

Aldric opened his eyes. He bowed. He did not speak. He withdrew, walking backward, the way petitioners withdrew from the presence, and the guards at the door let him pass without a hand raised to stop him.

Marda wrote it down. Every word. The quill moved in her hand without her direction, the way the hand of a sleeper moves over a familiar task. Her face did not change.

But her mind was already turning the judgment over, the way a jeweller turns a stone, looking for the flaw.

Clemency for the baker. Punishment for the son. The village saved, the father spared, the code upheld. On the face of it, a just ruling. Even a merciful one. But Marda had learned, in the long winters of the cloister, that mercy in the mouth of a Tyrant-Lord is never what it seems. She had learned that a man who rules by ash and iron does not grant clemency because his heart is moved. He grants it because he has calculated, to the last farthing, what it will cost him.

What did it cost Sevryn to spare the baker? Almost nothing. Aldric was a useful man, a skilled man, the only baker in the royal household who could produce the fine white loaves demanded by the Tyrant-Lord's table. To flog him would have meant replacing him, and replacing him would have meant training another, and training another would have meant months of imperfect bread. Sevryn had spared him because the bread was worth more than the satisfaction of punishment.

And the son? Orric was to be flogged, and his bond forfeited for seven years. A harsher penalty, on the face of it, than the father's escape. But Orric was not a baker. Orric was a bonded servant of no particular skill. He was replaceable. And the flogging, when it came, would serve a second purpose: it would remind every other servant in the household that the code was the code, and that even a good deed, done for good reasons, would be punished if it broke the Tyrant-Lord's order.

So the mercy was not mercy. It was arithmetic.

The sixth case was called.

"Lady Aelis of Tarnmere," the Lord Justiciar read, "petitions the court for a grant of the forfeited lands of the late House of Hesper, to be held in tail male, with the customary fines and reliefs."

A woman rose from the petitioner's bench. She was tall, thin, past her middle years, dressed in the dark green of the minor nobility. Her face was composed into the careful blankness of a woman who had learned long ago to hide what she felt. She did not look at the Tyrant-Lord as she took her place before the dais.

"Speak," said Sevryn.

"My lord," said the woman, and her voice was low and even, "I petition for the lands of Hesper, which escheated to the crown upon the attainder of Lord Edric Hesper four years since. I am his niece by his elder sister, and by the customary law of the marches I have the best claim."

"You have the claim," said Sevryn. "What else have you?"

"My lord, I have maintained the demesne at my own cost for the four years since the attainder. I have paid the wages of the steward. I have kept the tenants from emigrating. I have kept the mill in repair and the bridge over the Tarn from falling. I have done this at the cost of my own estate, which is now heavily encumbered. I petition for the grant, that I may be reimbursed for my outlay, and that the demesne may pass into hands that will care for it."

"What do you know of the attainder of Lord Edric?"

The woman hesitated for the smallest fraction of a moment. It was a hesitation so slight that only a watcher would have seen it. Marda saw it.

"My lord, I know what was published at the time. Lord Edric was convicted of conspiracy against the crown, and of the burning of his own tenants at the hamlet of Sley, in the year of the false spring. He suffered the penalty prescribed. His lands escheated. His name was struck from the rolls."

"And what is your opinion of the man?"

"My lord, I have no opinion. He was my uncle by marriage, and I have not spoken of him since his attainder."

"You have not spoken of him," said Sevryn, "and yet you seek to inherit his lands. Do you not think it strange, Lady Aelis, that a woman who will not speak her uncle's name should wish to hold what was his?"

"My lord, I seek the lands because they are contiguous with my own, and because they have been neglected, and because the tenants upon them are suffering for want of a master. I seek them for the tenants' sake, and for the peace of the marches."

Sevryn was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "The petition is refused."

The woman did not flinch. She bowed. She withdrew.

Marda wrote it down. The petition refused. The lands to remain in the crown's hand. And again her mind began to turn the judgment over, looking for the shape of the arithmetic beneath.

The woman had maintained the demesne for four years at her own cost. She had paid the wages of the steward. She had kept the tenants from emigrating. She had done the work of a landlord without the title of one, and she had asked the crown to recognise the work and grant her the reward. It was a reasonable petition. It was, by the customary law of the marches, almost a formal one. And it had been refused.

Why?

Because Lord Edric had burned his tenants. Because the lands were the lands of a man who had done that, and Sevryn did not wish the lands to pass again into the hands of the man's kin. That was one reason. A just reason, on the face of it. A reason that any petitioner would have understood.

But there was another reason, and Marda saw it.

If Lady Aelis held the lands, she would hold them in tail male. She would have children, and her children would hold them after her. In three generations, the House of Hesper would be restored in everything but name. And the Tyrant-Lord who had destroyed the House of Hesper would have undone his own work with his own hand. The petition had been refused because Sevryn did not wish to restore, even in fragments, the houses he had broken.

So the refusal was not justice. It was the same arithmetic, turned the other way. The bread was worth more than the punishment. The broken house was worth more than the unjust refusal.

Marda set her quill down. She blotted the last line. She did not look up, for fear that her face would show what her mind had understood.

The seventh case was called. She bent to her work. But the shape of the Tyrant-Lord's mind was now before her, plain as the frost on the stones, and she could feel it settling into her understanding the way the cold of the Hall was settling into her bones. He was not cruel by caprice. He was not merciful by feeling. He was a man who had reduced the business of ruling to a ledger, and who kept his accounts in the currency of other men's lives.

And the question that had been put to her in the cloister, the question of how such a man could be brought down, had just become, in the quiet of her mind, a thousand times harder.

The evening meal was laid in the Lesser Hall, not the great feasting chamber above.

This was significant. Marda noted it as she took her place at the lower scribe's table, her quill and inkpot before her, her tablet of vellum opened to a fresh page. The Lesser Hall was still vast by any common measure, its pillars carved with the wolves and broken chains of the Marden arms, its vaulted ceiling lost in smoke and candlelight. But it was not the place where foreign ambassadors were entertained, nor the place where the Tyrant-Lord held court in his full regalia. It was the place where he dined when he wished to be seen but not staged. When he wished the company to understand that the evening was a favor, not a function.

He had returned three days past from the southern campaign. The songs had already begun, the poets scrambling to immortalize the routing of the rebels at Greymoor Crossing, the burning of the village that had harbored them. Marda had not been required to attend the victory rites. She had attended the petition court instead, in the Hall of Weights, and there she had watched the Tyrant-Lord reduce a widow's plea to arithmetic.

Now she watched him reduce the dinner to arithmetic as well.

He sat at the high table with his back to the fire, so that the light crowned him but did not warm him. The crown itself was of black iron, plain as a shackle, set with a single stone the color of dried blood. He wore no armor, but the doublet was cut in the fashion of a cuirass, dark leather over dark velvet, the seam-lines traced in silver thread. His hair was the pale of ash that has not yet decided whether to cool. He held a goblet in his left hand and did not drink from it.

Princess Cerys Marden sat at his right hand, in the chair of honor that was not, in truth, the chair of honor. The true seat of the princess was at the left, where the hostess would sit. But Cerys had been given the right, and the giving was the message. She was the visible heir, the blood of his father if not his mother, the face of the realm's continuity. She was also, by every report Marda had ever heard, the only person in the Ashen Realm who had refused to weep when the Tyrant-Lord took the crown.

Cerys wore white. White, in a court that wore black and iron and the dull red of old blood. White silk, high-collared, the sleeves trailing to the floor, her hair dressed with a single net of pearls. She looked like a lily set among iron tools. She looked like a declaration.

She was also very pale, and the pearls at her throat rose and fell too quickly, and the fingers that held her own goblet were pressed so tightly that the knuckles had gone the color of the bone beneath.

Marda bent to her tablet. She wrote the names of the dishes as they were brought up, because that was her cover for being present, the petty duty of a junior scribe. She wrote: First remove, boiled carp in fennel broth. She wrote: Second remove, roasted quail in ash-glaze. She wrote the names of the wines, the colors of the cloths, the positions of the salt cellars. She wrote anything that kept her eyes on the page and her mind free to watch.

Kaelen served at the side table.

Marda had not known this, until she had taken her own seat and seen him cross the hall with a carver's apron over his house livery, a long knife in his hand, his face composed into the blankness that servants wore in the Tyrant-Lord's presence. He moved like a man who had been taught, very early and very thoroughly, how to be furniture. He did not look at her. She did not look at him. They had agreed on this without speaking, the way old conspirators agree on the shape of a safe house.

He carved at the sideboard where the second removes were portioned. He worked cleanly, quickly, without flourish. The quails were small, and the portions were precise, and the Tyrant-Lord's guards did not glance at him twice, because he was nothing to glance at. He was a boy with a knife and an apron, and there were fifty such boys in the kitchens below.

But Marda knew what she was looking at. She had seen Kaelen Voss move through a room before, in the days when he had been merely the second son of a house that no longer existed, and she knew that this blankness was a costume. The hands were too steady. The eyes were not empty; they were overfull, and the overfullness was being held in check by the same will that held the knife.

The Tyrant-Lord lifted his goblet. He did not drink. He spoke instead, and his voice carried without effort, the way cold carries across ice.

"Sister."

It was the word one used in private. In the Lesser Hall, before a hundred witnesses, it was a blade drawn slowly from a sheath. Cerys inclined her head. The pearls trembled at her throat.

"My lord. You honor us with your presence. The realm has not seen you these many weeks."

"You have not seen me, certainly. The realm has seen me very thoroughly."

A ripple passed through the hall, the kind of ripple that pretends not to be a laugh. Cerys did not smile. She did not frown. She held her face in the still white mask that she had chosen for the evening, and she answered in a voice that was smooth as poured cream and twice as cold.

"The realm has seen your banners, my lord. Your banners and your burnings. The poets have been most industrious. I am told the ballad of Greymoor is already being sung in the markets, though I confess I have not heard it."

"You would not. The verses are coarse. They would offend your ear."

"My ear is not so delicate as you imagine."

"No." The Tyrant-Lord turned the goblet slowly between his fingers. The candlelight caught the rim and ran around it like a small fire. "No, I do not imagine it is."

He let the words sit. Cerys did not flinch from them. She raised her own goblet, and she drank, and the drinking was her answer: that whatever he had meant, she had heard, and she was not afraid, or that she was afraid and would not show it. In the Tyrant-Lord's arithmetic, both readings came to the same column.

Kaelen came forward with the carver's platter. He set a portion of quail before the Tyrant-Lord, and a portion before the princess. His hand did not tremble. His eyes did not lift. He stepped back two paces, bowed from the waist, and withdrew to the sideboard.

Marda wrote on her tablet: Quail, ash-glaze, portion of four ounces to the lord, three to the princess. She wrote the lie as a kind of prayer. She wrote the lie because the truth would have been: a boy with a knife, who should not have been there, who was there because the resistance had need of eyes in this room, who was serving meat to a man who had burned his house and hanged his father.

The third remove was brought up. A whole roebuck, spitted and glazed with juniper and blood-orange, the antlers gilded, the eyes replaced with of black amber that gleamed like the crown on the Tyrant-Lord's brow. Cerys looked at it. She put down her fork.

"I am told," the Tyrant-Lord said, "that the roebuck was taken in the forest of Hesper, three days before the harvest was due."

The hall went very still. Marda's quill stopped. The scribe at the next table glanced up, then quickly down again.

"I am told," the princess said, and her voice was the same poured cream, "that the forest of Hesper is no longer a forest. It is a memory."

"It is a memory that feeds us. The deer are fat on the ash. They say the ash makes the meat sweeter."

"I have heard that ash makes meat sweeter. I have also heard that it makes the teeth come loose."

A silence. The Tyrant-Lord smiled. It was the smile that Marda had seen in the Hall of Weights, the smile that did not reach the eyes and did not need to.

"You are bold tonight, sister."

"I am not bold. I am seated."

He laughed. It was a small, precise sound, like the click of a lock. He set down his goblet and turned to the roebuck, and with his own knife he cut a slice from the flank and laid it on her plate.

"Then eat, sister. Let us not waste the sweetness."

Cerys looked at the meat. She looked at him. The pearls at her throat rose, fell, rose again. Her hand went out, and the fingers were steady, and she lifted the meat to her mouth, and she chewed, and she swallowed, and the Tyrant-Lord watched her the whole time with that small, precise smile.

Kaelen, at the sideboard, had gone quite still. The carver's knife rested on the wood, and his hand rested on the knife, and Marda could see, across the width of the hall and the candlelight and the smoke, the place where his knuckles had whitened on the handle. He was watching the Tyrant-Lord. He was watching Cerys. He was calculating, perhaps, which of them he hated more in this moment, and which of them he would have to save, and from what, and at what cost.

Marda bent to her tablet. She wrote: Roebuck, forest of Hesper, juniper glaze. She did not write what she had seen. She did not write that the princess had been made to eat the venison of her own lost lands under the eye of the man who had taken them. She did not write that the Tyrant-Lord

Marda did not write what she had seen, but her stylus hovered, and the wax tip trembled against the tablet with a weight that had nothing to do with the heat of the candles. Across the hall, Kaelen's hand still rested on the carver's knife, and the harpist's left hand had moved, almost without sound, to the strings of his instrument, as though he could feel the cold in the room and wished to warm it. The Tyrant-Lord lifted his goblet again and drank, and when he set it down he did not look at Cerys but at the harpist.

"Play," he said. "Play something sweet. We have had enough salt for one evening."

The harpist bowed, and the harp rang a single note, tentative and clear, like a question put to a larger silence. Then the tune began, and it was a courtly thing, a pavane that Marda had heard at her grandmother's hearth when she was a girl of seven and the world had still belonged, in some small portion, to the people who had loved her. The notes fell into the hall like rain into a well, and the Tyrant-Lord's hand stilled on the goblet, and his eyes half-closed, and for a moment he was only a man listening to music in a warm room, and Marda hated him for that moment more than she had ever hated him in the long cold hours of her exile.