UrLeyn, dressed in a very fine riding outfit, strode into the room. "Where's that boy of mine?" he shouted.

"Father!" Lattens ran to him and threw himself up into his arms.

"Oof! My, what a weight you're getting!" UrLeyn looked over to DeWar and Perrund, and winked. He sat down with the boy on a couch near the doors and they huddled together.

Perrund stood up, by DeWar's side. "Well, sir. You must promise me faithfully you'll take good care of both the Protector and yourself," she told him, raising her face to him. Her eyes looked bright. "I shall be most cross should any harm befall either of you, and brave though you may be, you are not so brave, I hope, as to risk my ire."

"I shall do all I can to make sure we both return safely," DeWar told her. He rearranged his cloak, hat and bags, putting one on one arm, the other two on the other, before putting the saddle bags over his shoulder and the hat over his head to hang down against his back on its cord.

Perrund watched this shuffle of impedimenta with a sort of sad amusement. She put her good hand on his, stilling him. "Take care," she said softly. Then she turned and went to sit where she could see UrLeyn and he could see her.

DeWar looked at her for a moment as she sat there, straightbacked in her long red gown, her face calm and beautiful, then he turned away too, and walked to the doors.

Master, a killer for Duke Walen was of course eventually procured. It could not be otherwise. The murder of one so prominent cannot simply be left unavenged. As surely as the heir to a vacant title of note must be found, such an event leaves a hole in the fabric of society which has to be repaired with the life of another. It is a vacuum into which some soul must be sucked, and the soul in this case was a poor mad fellow from the city of Mizui who with every appearance of happiness and even fulfilment willingly threw himself into that void.

His name was Berridge, a one-time tinder-box maker of some age who was well known as a mad fellow in the city. He lived under the city's bridge with a handful of other desperates, begging for money in the streets and scavenging the market for discarded or rotten food. When the death of Duke Walen was made public knowledge in Mizui on the day following the masked ball, Berridge presented himself at the sheriff's office and made a full confession.

This was not a cause for any great surprise on the sheriff's part, as Berridge routinely claimed responsibility for any murder in or near the city for which there was no obvious culprit, and indeed for some where the murderer could not have been more obvious. His protestations of guilt in court, despite the fact that a husband of known viciousness had been discovered comatose with drink in the same locked room as the body of his butchered wife with the knife still clutched in his bloody hand, were the cause of much hilarity amongst that part of the populace which treats the King's courts as a form of free theatre.

Normally, Berridge would have been thrown out of the door and into the dust of the street without the sheriff giving the matter a second thought. On this occasion, however, due to the gravity of the offence and the fact that Duke Quettil had only that morning impressed upon the sheriff the extremity of his annoyance at a second unsanctioned murder taking place within his Jurisdiction within so short a time, the sheriff thought the better of treating the madman's claims to such automatic dismissal.

To his immense surprise and satisfaction, Berridge was incarcerated in the town jail. The sheriff had a note sent to Duke Quettil informing him of this swift action, though he did think to include mention of such confessions being a habitual feature of Berridge's behaviour and that it was correspondingly unlikely that Berridge was really the culprit.

Guard Commander Polchiek sent word to the sheriff to keep Berridge in jail for the time being. When a half-moon had passed and no progress had been made discovering the murderer, the Duke instructed the sheriff to make further investigations into Berridge's claim.

Sufficient time had passed for neither Berridge nor any of his under-bridge-dwelling companions to have any recollection whatsoever of the movements of any of them on the day and evening of the masked ball, save that Berridge insisted he had left the city, climbed the hill to the palace, entered the private chambers of the Duke and murdered him in his bed (this quickly changed the better to fit the facts when Berridge heard that the Duke had been killed in a room just off the ballroom, while awake).

In the continuing absence of any more likely suspect, Berridge was sent to the palace, where Master Ralinge put him to the question. What good this was supposed to do other than to prove that Duke Quettil was serious about the matter and his appointees thorough in their investigations is debatable. Berridge presented no satisfying challenge at all to the Duke's chief torturer and from what I heard suffered relatively little, though still enough to unhinge his feeble brain still further.

By the time he appeared before the Duke himself to be tried for the Duke's murder, Berridge was a thin, bald, shaking wreck whose eyes roved about with seemingly complete independence from each other. He mumbled constantly yet spoke almost no intelligible words and had confessed not only to the murder of Duke Walen but also to that of King Beddun of Tassasen, Emperor Puiside and King Quience's father King Drasine, as well as claiming to be responsible for the fiery sky rocks which had killed whole nations of people and ushered in the present post-Imperial age.

Berridge was burned at the stake in the city's square. The Duke's heir, his brother, set the fire himself, though not before having the sad wretch strangled first, to spare him the pain of the fire.

The rest of our stay in the Yvenage Hills passed relatively uneventfully. There was an air of unsettled concern and even suspicion about the palace for some time, but that gradually dissipated. There were no more unexplained deaths or shocking murders. The King's ankle healed. He went hunting and fell off his mount again, though without incurring any injuries beyond scratches. His health seemed to improve generally, perhaps under the influence. of the clear mountain air.

The Doctor found she had little to do. She walked and rode in the hills, sometimes with me at her side, sometimes, at her own insistence, alone. She spent some considerable time in Mizui city, treating orphans and other unfortunates at the Paupers" Hospital, comparing notes with the local mid-wives and discussing remedies and potions with the local apothecaries. As our time at Yvenir went on, a number of casualties from the war in Ladenscion arrived in the city, and the Doctor treated a few of those as best she could. She had little success at first in trying to meet with the doctors of the town, until with the King's permission she invited them to his counsel chamber, and had him briefly meet with them before he went off to hunt.

She accomplished less than she'd hoped to, I think, in terms of changing some of their ways, which she found even more old fashioned and indeed potentially dangerous to their patients than those of their colleagues in Haspide.

Despite the King's obvious health, he and the Doctor still seemed to find excuses to meet. The King worried that he might run to fat, as his father had done in later years, and so consulted the Doctor on his diet. This seemed bizarre to those of us for whom growing fat was a sure sign that one was well fed, lightly worked and had achieved a maturity beyond the average, but then perhaps this showed that there was a degree of truth to the rumours that the Doctor had put some strange ideas into the King's head.