“Fine. Hear me, Princess Betrayer: You deceive my brother with a peasant upstart!”

Alarmed anew, she drew back a step. Nazramin advanced the same distance. He was taller than his half-brother Amaltar, and more strongly built.

“Mind what you say,” she snapped, eyes narrowing. “I am not some serving wench you can bully into submission!”

Nazramin came closer. “You and that farm boy are lovers, and have been for years.”

“Spare me your dirty insinuations. I know the penalty for infidelity.” Under Ergothian law such petty treason was punishable by burial alive. Haughtily, Valaran added, “Would I risk disgrace and death for any man? Now stand aside and let me pass!” He advanced on her until she was pressed against him. She stared up at her tormenter not with fear but stubbornness and contempt. Nazramin rested his hand on the wall, just over her shoulder, and smiled.

“Princess, I have informants everywhere. I’ve known about you and the peasant from the first. Days, places, how long you were together-would you like to see the catalog of specific infidelities I’ve compiled?”

Valaran regarded him without any change of expression, yet inside she was quaking, her heart hammering against her ribs. She didn’t doubt for a moment Nazramin had her and Tol dead to rights. He could have denounced them already, but he hadn’t, which meant he wanted something other than their destruction.

After only a moment’s pause, she spoke, and was proud that her voice still sounded cool and steady.

“What do you want?” she asked. “Gold? You’re richer than my entire family. Power? You’re second in line to the throne, with all the privileges and none of the responsibilities my husband has to bear. What more does a serpent like you crave?”

He smiled, a flash of teeth behind his red mustache. His breath smelled of stale beer. “I’m not here to avenge my dear brother’s honor,” he admitted. “I’m more interested in having an informant in his innermost circle.”

Now she was confused. “Amaltar tells me nothing-”

“Not your husband’s circle, lady, your swain’s.”

Fury rose up in Val’s breast and she cried, “I’ll not betray Tol!”

“Mishas bless you, lady, of course you won’t!” he said, chuckling. “And if I wanted to hurt him, I would simply reveal what I know to the prince. So please do continue your dalliance with Lord Tol. All I want from you is a record of his plans and movements-plus any letters he writes to you. Share that with me, and I won’t ruin you both.”

“Lord Tol” was a deliberate insult, but Valaran hadn’t heard it. She was busy turning over in her mind how to escape Nazramin’s suffocating coils. In spite of her outward show of bravery, she knew her fate was in the prince’s grasping hands. He would certainly be believed, especially if he had specific information about her activities. For what she’d done, there was no clemency. Amaltar could not spare her even if her wanted to. She’d he entombed alive in the palace wall, and Tol would lose his head. But if all Nazramin wanted was information about the Hylo campaign-?

He read her thoughts in the frown of concentration on her face. His look of triumph infuriated her all the more.

“There may not be any letters! He’ll be much too busy to bother writing me,” she snapped.

“Not write to his beloved? What country swain would fail in such a pleasant duty?”

Nazramin put his hand to her throat. Valaran immediately knocked it away and ducked under his outstretched arm. The prince’s low voice carried to her as she hurried up the wide stairway.

“You cannot refuse me, Princess Betrayer. My eyes and ears are everywhere. I’ll know when every letter arrives. Try to hide them from me, and I’ll tell a pretty tale to my brother and father.”

Valaran lifted her skirt high and ran the rest of the way to her rooms. Nazramin’s deep chuckle followed on her heels, terrifying, inescapable.

Without fuss or fanfare, Tol’s expedition departed Daltigoth at dawn. They passed through the Old City and out the main north gate, known as the Dermount Portal, for Emperor Ackal II Dermount was entombed there directly under the gate. As an old man, he’d prepared for one last campaign against his lifelong enemies, the Wak-shu tribe. Moments after declaring he would return victorious or be buried where he fell, he dropped dead from his horse as he rode out the north gate of his own capital. His loyal retainers honored his word and buried the doughty old warrior exactly where he died.

For the first time, Tol led his three hundred men from horseback, riding Cloud, a fine dappled-gray stallion and the son of his old mount Smoke. Egrin had brought the horse with him from Juramona.

The bulk of the men given to Tol were city guardsmen, hired commoners like the foot guards he’d once led in Juramona. They were tough and competent fighters, but few had seen any campaigning outside the city. Some had never been out of Daltigoth in their lives. To guide and instruct them in foot soldier tactics, Tol appointed each man of his personal retinue, as well as Egrin, to command a company of thirty men. Each commander was also mounted.

Unlike a typical Ergothian army, Tol’s demi-horde boasted no cumbersome baggage train. Each man carried ten days’ supplies, his arms, and a bedroll. If more was needed, they would have to forage. Once his band left the imperial road, Tol wanted the soldiers to be able to move fast, unencumbered by slow-moving wagons or gaggles of camp followers.

Kiya and Miya walked with the soldiers. Horses weren’t used in their dense forest homeland, and both women disliked the animals. They trusted their own two feet to get them where they needed to go.

Flanked by Egrin and Narren, Tol surveyed his men as they marched past. Alongside him as well were the two kender mounted on their own ponies. Forry was still clad in fringed buckskin, but Rufus had exchanged his oversized turban for a pointed cap with a sweeping plume as long as Tol’s arm. Both cap and feather were a startling shade of yellow-green.

Tol found his eyes drawn away from his passing troops to the walls of the Inner City, tinted rose by the rising sun. It was ridiculous to think he might spot Valaran on the palace battlements from this distance, but he cherished the hope.

Leaving Daltigoth behind, the demi-horde marched due north, along the unfinished Kanira Path. This broad paved road, begun by the Empress Kanira over one hundred years ago, was supposed to connect Daltigoth with Hylo by way of a new city, Kaniragoth. Neither road nor city was ever completed, however. Sixteen years after deposing her husband, Emperor Mordirin, Kanira was in turn overthrown and imprisoned by Ergothas II, a fine ruler much revered in the provinces. Kanira’s extravagant building schemes were quietly forgotten, and the erstwhile empress finished out her life imprisoned on a rocky pinnacle overlooking Sancrist Bay.

The distance from Daltigoth to Hylo was ninety-three leagues. At a foot soldiers’ pace, it would be an eighteen-day journey, and even without the paved road, this early part of their trip would have been an easy one. The land north of Daltigoth was all flat floodplain, watered by several tributaries of the Dalti. On both sides of the elevated Kanira Path enormous fields of green wheat and barley stretched to the horizon. Walnut and burltop trees lined the road as well. Planted by Kanira’s builders, they were lofty, mature giants now.

Raised in hill country, Tol found the utterly flat, ordered vista and open bowl of sky a revelation. All day he gazed ahead as clouds built from small, white streaks on the afternoon’s eastern horizon into vast towers of vapor by evening. The open terrain allowed them to view some spectacular sunsets, but offered little respite from the torrential downpours.