he told her to leave the Keep, she would, and gladly, but until then she was stuck in this vast room, surrounded by these horrible people.
She consoled herself with the thought that Arliss would be here later. Arliss had already begun to find his own odd entrée into court, wangling invitations from longtime clients. Tonight it was Lady Milford. The court maintained the polite fiction that Lady Milford was slowly wasting away of old age, but the lady was only fifty-two, her pallor and ruined heart the result of a late-stage poppy habit. In the better world, the sale of narcotics would be anathema, but Niya could not bring herself to dislike Arliss, who had an endearingly filthy sense of humor as well as a seemingly endless source of informants in the Gut. But he hadn’t arrived yet. A strong whiff of slow-cooked pork assaulted Niya’s nostrils, nearly making her ill.
“Can I get you some more wine, lady?”
Niya turned, bemused, and found a servant standing before her: a young man, his eyes lit with admiration; he had taken her for a noblewoman. Niya waved him off, returning her attention to Elyssa, who stood laughing several feet away, in a conversational cluster that included Lady Bennis and Lord Tare. As Niya watched, Elyssa downed yet another shot of whiskey.
Does she wish to kill the baby in the womb?
A month before, such a question would have been unthinkable, but oh, how things had changed. Niya found herself suddenly terrified for the tiny clump of cells behind the wall of Elyssa’s abdomen . . . a terror that had no clear shape. Despite Givens’s careful instruction to the Guard and the staff of the Queen’s Wing that Mhurn was the father of the baby, Niya knew better. In the clumsy ejection of Mhurn from the Keep, Niya sensed panic: Arla’s desperation to convince the Holy Father that the future heir to the throne was not a child of the Blue Horizon. Something had happened to Gareth; the entire movement knew it now, though they didn’t speak of it. Gareth was the only one who might have been capable of rallying them, even in the wake of Elyssa’s terrible proclamation . . . but he was gone, and the heart of the Blue Horizon had gone with him.
Near the far wall was Queen Arla, easily visible because of the red dress she wore: Elyssa’s present, a bright combination of silk and satin, hung with fine wisps of muslin. Even Niya had to admit that the dress was beautiful, but the sight of it angered her as well, for the dress had cost enough gold to give a solid meal to half the beggars in New London. Niya knew nothing of sorcery—would not even have believed, a few months before, that sorcery existed—but she could no longer deny that Elston and Barty and the rest were right: Elyssa had been witched. There was no other explanation for the utter reversal of personality, for what she had done. In Niya’s last message to the Fetch, she had told him the plain truth: they must kill the seer.
But she had not yet heard back.
A popping noise distracted her: Mace, the farm boy who was not a farm boy, stood only a few feet away, cracking his knuckles. He was big and broad, dark-haired, with long legs held constantly in the slightly bent-kneed posture of a man always at the ready for a fight. His face might have been handsome, were it not so truculent.
“You’re studying me,” Mace remarked, never taking his eyes from Elyssa.
“Indeed. Books with closed covers are the most interesting.”
A roar came from the assembled company; someone had proposed a toast to Queen Arla’s health. Prince Thomas had materialized from somewhere and now hung around the edge of the Queen’s entourage, peeping hopefully at his mother. But the vague outline of rapist was still visible on his forehead, and the Queen did not deign to notice him. Elyssa was speaking to Lady Willis; a nice enough woman who would never win any prize for brains, and beside her—
Niya’s breath caught. Sometime in the last few minutes, Arlen Thorne had joined Elyssa, and now his arm supported hers, while his other hand held a glass of champagne. Mace had noticed as well; his posture was tense, his eyes fixed on the pimp. But when Niya looked around wildly, seeking that broad tightening of the Guard that always occurred when dangerous people visited the Keep, she saw