“Are you hurt?” Mace demanded. “Niya? Niya! Are you hurt?”
Niya shook her head, then realized that she could speak again. The vise around her throat had loosened. Looking down at Kelsea, she saw that the baby was injured, a long scratch down her forearm . . . bloody, but not deep enough to be critical. Niya wrapped it in the excess material of the girl’s nightdress, holding it tight.
“Thorne,” she murmured, beginning to weep now, understanding how near disaster had been . . . how close Brenna’s instrument had come. “It was the witch, and Thorne.”
Mace looked down at the dead woman on the ground, and with something beyond relief, Niya realized that she would not have to explain. She still didn’t know what lay between Mace and Thorne, but he had clearly known the pimp well enough to believe her now, for he moved away without comment, shutting the door that led to the antechamber. The wet nurse’s face had been obliterated; Niya turned Kelsea away, hiding the gruesome scene.
“What reason could Thorne have to attack the child?” Mace asked, his voice mercifully businesslike.
“I don’t know,” Niya admitted. “He means to move in here and rule the kingdom in all but name. Perhaps an heir threatens him?”
“Perhaps,” Mace replied, helping her to her feet. “I always heard he had noble blood, and Arliss said he did, for certain.”
“You know Arliss?” Niya asked, surprised. Then she wondered why she should be. Arliss knew everyone; that was part of his value to the Blue Horizon.
Was, her mind repeated sadly, as she carried the baby over to the armchair. Was, Niya. Was.
“I know him,” Mace returned gruffly . . . and then, after a long moment: “He saved my life.”
“Arliss is a good man.”
“He’s a poppy dealer,” Mace said. The words came out as profanity, but Niya checked her own angry reply, suddenly remembering the wasted woman lying in the infirmary, the lines of morphia etched into her face.
“If I were ever in trouble,” she replied carefully, “I would go to Arliss. He deals poppy, yes. But I thieve, and you kill.”
Mace looked at her sharply, and Niya was struck again by the strange mix of jade and innocence he represented. Did he truly think that she would not have heard?
She bent to inspect the wound on Kelsea’s arm more closely. It was ugly and would need stitches, but not many; Coryn could do it. She wrapped it tight again, rocking the girl to quiet her whimpers.
“Arliss is a good man,” she told Mace. “Once, when I was a girl starving on the streets of the Gut, he saw me and gave me an apple from his pocket.”
Mace grunted. “The whole city is starving now. What does he give them?”
The better world! Niya began to snap, and then held her tongue. There was no better world; hadn’t the Gadds Fire and Elyssa’s fall proven as much?
Wake up, Niya. Wake up.
She blinked, then looked down at the baby again, seeing the green eyes, the blue jewel, the pink, stubborn face . . . all of the colors that would one day combine to make the tall, grave woman in black. The True Queen. She was come out of her time, yes, but not too late, not if they could be brave, not if they could—
“Take care of each other,” Niya whispered. She looked up at Mace, seeing her friend of the past weeks, but even more: the man of that other life, the one who had burned in some cold darkness until he was tempered steel, a man who would never bend for his own safety, or even his own survival.
This is the man I need, Niya thought.
“Thorne doesn’t take chances,” Mace remarked. “If he wants the baby dead, there will be another attempt, and another. I’ll talk to Carroll. We should increase her guard—”
“No,” Niya told him firmly, for she had suddenly seen what to do . . . what must be done, if there was to be any hope for the future at all. “More guards won’t keep her safe. We must get her out of here.”
“Out of the Keep?” Mace asked. He, too, had clearly become a creature of the castle, for the bewilderment in his voice made plain that this solution had never occurred to him. “But where? Where could she go?”
“I don’t know. Far away, where even the witch can’t find her.” Niya frowned, thinking of how many people roamed