"I go, I think. I'll ride down with Marchess dy Heron as far as Heron itself, and then cut over the lower passes to home. The old lady might be glad enough of another sword in her party that she'd even invite me to stay." He took a swallow of wine and lowered his voice. "If not even the Bastard would take Lord Dondo off our hands, you realize he must still be about somewhere. One trusts he'll just haunt Jironal's palace where he died, but really, he could be anywhere in Cardegoss. And he was vicious enough before he was murdered; he's bound to be vengeful now. Slain the night before his wedding, gods!"

Cazaril made a neutral noise.

"The chancellor seems set on calling it death magic, but I shouldn't wonder if it was poison after all. No way of telling, now the body's burned, I suppose. Convenient for somebody, that."

"But he was surrounded by his friends. Surely no one could have administered—were you there?"

Dy Rinal grimaced. "After Lady Pig? No. Thanks be to all her squeals, I was not present at that butchering." Dy Rinal glanced around, as if afraid a ghost with a grudge might be sneaking up on him even now. That there were half a dozen within his arm's reach was evidently not apparent to him. Cazaril brushed one away from his face, trying not to let his eyes focus on what, to his companion, must seem empty air.

Ser dy Maroc, the roya's wardrobe-master, strolled up to their table saying, "Dy Rinal! Have you heard the news from Ibra?" Belatedly, he observed Cazaril leaning with elbows on the board opposite and hesitated, flushing slightly.

Cazaril smiled sourly. "One trusts you're getting your gossip from Ibra from more reliable sources these days, Maroc?"

Dy Maroc stiffened. "If the Chancellery's own courier be one, yes. He came in pell-mell while my head tailor was refitting Orico's mourning garb, that he had to let out by four fingerbreadths—anyway, it's official. The Heir of Ibra died last week, all suddenly, of the coughing fever in South Ibra. His faction has collapsed, and rushes to make treaty with the old Fox, or save their lives by sacrificing each other. The war in South Ibra is ended."

"Well!" Dy Rinal sat up and stroked his beard. "Do we call that good news, or bad? Good for poor Ibra, the gods know. But our Orico has chosen the losing side again."

Dy Maroc nodded. "The Fox is rumored to be most wroth with Chalion, for stirring the pot and keeping it boiling, not that the Heir needed help putting wood on that fire."

"Perhaps the old roya's taste for strife shall be buried with his firstborn," said Cazaril, not too hopefully.

"So the Fox has a new Heir, that child of his age—what was the boy's name?" said dy Rinal.

"Royse Bergon," Cazaril supplied.

"Aye," said dy Maroc. "A young one indeed. And the Fox could drop at any moment, leaving an untried boy on the throne."

"Not so untried as all that," said Cazaril. "He's seen the prosecution of one siege and the breaking of another, riding in his late mother's train, and survived a civil war. And one would think a son of the Fox could not be stupid."

"The first one was," said dy Rinal, unassailably. "To leave his supporters in such naked disarray."

"One cannot blame death of the coughing fever on a lack of wit," said Cazaril.

"Assuming it really was the coughing fever," said dy Rinal, pursing his lips in new suspicion.

"What, d'you think the Fox would poison his own son?" said dy Maroc.

"His agents, man."

"Well, then, he might have done it sooner, and saved Ibra a world of woe—"

Cazaril smiled thinly, and pushed up from the table, leaving dy Rinal and dy Maroc to their tale-spinning. His wine-sickness was past, and he felt better for his dinner, but the shaky exhaustion that remained was not anything he was accustomed to calling well. In the absence of any summons from the royesse, he made his way back to his bed.

Wearied beyond fear, he fell asleep soon enough. But around midnight, he was brought awake with a gasp. A man's screams echoed distantly in his head. Screams, and broken weeping, and choked howls of rage—he bolted upright, heart pounding, turning his head to locate the sound. Faint and strange—might it be coming from across the ravine from the Zangre, or down by the river below his window? No one from the castle seemed to respond, no footsteps, or cries of inquiry from the guards... In another few moments, Cazaril realized he was not hearing the tormented howls with his ears, any more than he saw the pale smudges floating around his bed with his eyes. And he recognized the voice.

He lay back down, panting and curled around himself, and endured the uproar for another ten minutes. Was the damned soul of Dondo preparing to break free of the Lady's miracle and haul him off to hell? He was about to leave his bed and run to the menagerie, all in his nightdress, pound on the doors and wake up Umegat and beg the saint for help—could Umegat do anything about this?—when the cries faded again.

It was about the hour of Dondo's death, he realized. Perhaps the spirit took up some special powers at this time? He couldn't tell if it had or had not done so last night, he'd been so sodden drunk. One uneasy nightmare had blended in mad fragments with all the others.

It might have been worse, he told himself as his heart gradually slowed again. Dondo might have been given an articulate voice. The thought of Dondo's ghost made nightly free to speak to him, whether in rage or abuse or vile suggestion, broke his courage as the plain howls had not, and he wept for a little in the sheer terror of the imagining.

Trust the Lady. Trust the Lady. He whispered some incoherent prayers, and slowly regained control of himself. If She had brought him this far for some purpose, surely She would not abandon him now.

A new horrible thought occurred to him, as he told Umegat's sermon over in his mind. If the goddess only entered the world by Cazaril renouncing his will on Her behalf, could wanting desperately to live, an act of will if ever there was one, be enough to exclude Her, and Her miracle? Her protective encapsulation might pop like a soap bubble, releasing a paradox of death and damnation... Following this logic loop around and around was enough to keep him awake for hours, as the night slowly wore itself out. The square of his chamber's window was growing faintly gray before he dropped again into blessed unconsciousness.

SO IT WAS THAT, FLANKED BY HIS GHOSTLY OUTRIDERS, he climbed the stairs late the following morning to his office antechamber. He felt stupid and eroded from lack of sleep, and he looked forward without enthusiasm to a week's worth of neglected correspondence and bookkeeping, dropped in disordered piles on his desk from the hour of Iselle's disastrous betrothal.

He found his ladies up betimes. In the sitting room just past the frontier of his office, all his good new schoolroom maps were spread out on a table. Iselle leaned on her hands, staring down at them. Betriz, her arms folded under her breasts, stood watching over her shoulder and frowning. Both young women, and Nan dy Vrit, who sat sewing, wore the blacks and lavenders of strict formal court mourning, a prudent dissimulation of which Cazaril approved.

As he entered, he saw next to Iselle's hand a scattering of paper scraps with scribbled lists, some items scratched through, some circled or ticked with checks. Iselle scowled and pointed to a spot on the map marked with a sturdy hat pin, and said over her shoulder to her handmaiden, "But that's no better than—" She broke off when she saw Cazaril. The dark, invisible cloak still clung about her; only an occasional faint thread of blue light still glinted in its sluggish folds. The ghost-blobs veered violently away from it and, only partly to Cazaril's relief, vanished from his second sight.