“Ah-ha!” said Hallana, sitting up in sudden enthusiasm. “That is one part of my dream I should not object to finding prophetic. Is he as darling as he seemed?”

“I… don’t think I can answer that,” said Ingrey, after a bemused pause. He swung out of the wagon, slipped around its side, and took the shortcut up the alley toward the Horseriver mansion.

The Earl’s porter admitted him with a murmured, “My lady and the prince-marshal await you in the Birch Chamber, Lord Ingrey.”

Ingrey took the hint, nodded, and ascended the stairs at once. The room was the same in which he had surprised Fara on the first day of his so-called service—perhaps its quiet colors and sober furnishings made it a favorite refuge of hers. He found the little company gathered there, Biast and Symark conversing over a tray of bread and cheeses, Fara half-reclining upon a settee while one of her women pressed a damp cloth to her forehead. The scent of lavender was cool and sharp upon the air.

Fara collected herself and sat up as Ingrey entered, regarding him with a worried glower. Her face was pale, the skin around her eyes a smudged gray, and he recalled Ijada’s report of the princess’s tendency to sick headaches.

“Lord Ingrey.” Biast graciously gestured him to sit. “The learned divine kept you long.”

Ingrey let this pass with a nod; he had no desire to explain Hallana.

Fara was not inclined to await a diplomatic lead-in. “What did he ask you? Did he ask you anything else about me?”

“He asked nothing further of you, my lady, nor of anything that happened at Boar’s Head,” Ingrey reassured her. She sat back in evident relief. “His questions were largely”—he hesitated—”theological.”

Biast did not seem to share his sister’s relief. His brows drew down in renewed concern. “Did they touch on our brother?”

“Only indirectly, my lord.” There seemed no reason not to be frank with Biast about Oswin’s inquiries, although Ingrey was not at all sure he wanted to reveal his other connections with the scholarly divine just yet. “He wished to know if I could cleanse Lady Ijada’s soul of her leopard spirit, in the event of her death, as I had seemed to do for the late prince. I said I did not know.”

Biast dragged one booted toe back and forth over the rug, frowned down and seemed to grow conscious of the tic, and stilled his foot. When he looked up, his voice had grown quieter. “Did you really see the god? Face-to-face?”

“He appeared to me as a young woodland lord of surpassing beauty. I did not get the sense… “ Ingrey paused, uncertain how to express this. “You have seen children make shadow puppets upon a wall with their hands. The shadow is not the hand, though it is created by it. The young man I saw was, I think, the shadow of the god. Reduced to a simple outline that I could understand. As if there lay vastly more beyond that I could not see, that would have appeared nothing at all like the deceptive shadow if I could have taken it in without… shattering.”

“Did He give you any directions for… for me?” Biast’s tone of diffident hope robbed the question of hubris. He glanced over at his intently listening sister. “For any of the rest of us?”

“No, my lord. Are you feeling in need of some?”

Biast’s lips huffed on a humorless laugh. “I reach for some certainty in an uncertain time, I suppose.”

“Then you come to the wrong storehouse,” said Ingrey bitterly. “The gods give me nothing but hints and riddles and maddening conundrums. As for my vision, I suppose I must call it, it was for Boleso’s funeral. In that hour, the god attended to his soul alone. In our hours, we may receive the same undivided scrutiny.”

Fara, rubbing her hand along one skirt-clad thigh in a tension not unlike her brother’s, looked up. The vertical grooves between her thick eyebrows deepened, as she considered this dark consolation with the wariness of a burned child studying a fire.

“I spoke at some length last night with Learned Lewko,” Biast began, and stopped. He squinted at his sister. “Fara, you really don’t look well. Don’t you think you had better go lie down for a while?”

The lady-in-waiting nodded endorsement to this idea. “We could draw the drapes in your chambers, my lady, and make it quite dark.”

“That might be better.” Fara leaned forward, only to sit staring down at her feet for a moment before allowing her waiting woman to pull her reluctantly upright. Biast rose also.

Ingrey seized the moment to conceal calculation in courtesy. “I am sorry you are so plagued, my lady. But if the inquest returns a verdict of self-defense, there might be no need for you to be so imposed upon again.”

“I can do what I have to do,” she replied coolly. But she looked as though a dismissal of charges was, for the moment, a newly attractive notion. She gave him a civil enough nod of farewell, though it caused her to raise one hand to her temple immediately thereafter. Biast’s glance back at Ingrey was more curious. Ingrey wondered if he might, after all, remove the threat of a trial from Ijada by one strand of persuasion at a time, like a web, rather than in some more concentrated and dramatic manner: if so, well and good. The parallel with Wencel’s preferred techniques of indirection did not escape him.

Biast saw his sister out, but then left her to her waiting woman; he looked up and down the corridor a moment before returning to the chamber, shutting the door firmly behind him. He frowned at his bannerman Symark and then at Ingrey, as though considering some comparison, though whether of physical threat or personal discretion, Ingrey could not guess. Symark was a few years older than his lord and a noted swordsman; perhaps Biast imagined him a sufficient defense from Ingrey, should the wolf-lord run mad and attack. Or Symark and Biast together so, at least. Ingrey did not seek to disabuse the prince-marshal of this comforting error.

“As I said, I had some conversation with Lewko,” Biast continued. He sat again by the low table with the tray, gesturing for Ingrey to do likewise. Ingrey pulled his chair around and composed himself in close attention. “The Bastard’s Order—which I take to mean, Lewko and a couple of forceful Temple sorcerers—have questioned Cumril in greater detail, at length.”

“Good. I hope they held his feet to the fire.”

“Something of a sort. I gather they dared not press him to the point of such disarray that his demon might reascend. That fear alone, Lewko assured me, was a greater goad to him than any threat to his body that any inquirer might make.” His brow wrinkled doubtfully.

“I understand this.”

“So you might.” Biast sat back. “More disturbing to me was Cumril’s assertion that my brother had indeed planned my assassination, as you guessed. How did you know?”

So that’s why he had urged Fara out, that he might address these painful matters discreetly. Ingrey shrugged. “I am no seer. For anyone seeking the hallow kingship with less backing than you already have, it’s a logical step.”

“Yes, but not my own—” Biast stopped, bit his lip.

Ingrey grasped the chance to cast another thread. “So it seems Lady Ijada saved your life, as well as her own. And your brother’s soul from a great sin and crime. Or your god did, through her.”

Biast paused as though thinking uneasily about this, then began again. “I do not know how I earned my brother’s hatred.”

“I believe his mind was well and truly unhinged, toward the end. Boleso’s fevered fancies, not any actions of yours, seem to me the springs of his behavior.”

“I did not realize he was so—so lost. When that first dire incident with the manservant happened, I wrote my father I would come home, but he wrote back ordering me to stay at my post. Reducing one rebellious but ill-provisioned border castle and a few bandit camps seems to me now a less vital tutorial than what I might have been learning in the same time at Easthome. I suppose my father wished to insulate me from the scandal.”