been ripped out. It wasn’t her first look at Welwyn Culp’s work, but she had never seen it so vicious before. Several ladies of the court had screamed at the man’s appearance. Even Niya, Elyssa’s own head maid, who reacted to all upset with a face of stone, had not been unmoved, hissing under her breath as Culp pulled the man’s hood off.
But Elyssa’s mother was not one to be moved by pity. A long time before, when Elyssa was only a child, a singer had composed an ironic song about the Queen, a ballad called “Arla the Just.” The singer had died in the Queen’s dungeons, but the nickname had stuck, and Elyssa’s mother was no more merciful now than she had been then. Queen Arla the Just sat easily on the throne, drinking her tea, apparently unperturbed by the bruised and bleeding man before her. The entire court stood waiting, silent, while the Queen took small sip after small sip, the sapphire crown twinkling on her head. After several minutes she placed the mug back in its saucer, and then set both carefully on the table beside her.
“Who is he?”
“His contact gave us the name Gareth, Majesty. But that may be an alias.”
“And where was he found?”
“Off the Cord Launch, Majesty,” one of the soldiers below the dais replied. “Trying to escape in a skiff. We found more than a thousand pounds in the bottom of the boat.”
“Indeed? And where did this thousand come from?”
“Bishop Laurence’s manse. The bishop has confirmed that this is the fortune that was stolen from him several nights ago.”
Low murmuring passed through the court. News of the robbery of Bishop Laurence had traveled the city like wildfire, despite the Church’s attempts to keep it quiet; the bishop’s servants were not discreet, and it was too good a tale. The bishop had invited a pro into his chambers, a woman dressed as a priest. The costume was clearly the most scandalous part of the tale, though Elyssa had hardly been surprised to hear it; God’s Church was a collection of fetishists if she had ever seen one. When the servants came the next morning, they found Bishop Laurence unconscious, badly beaten, and his private store of gold cleaned out.
“Well, we all know that tale,” Queen Arla remarked. Elyssa sensed private glee beneath her mother’s words; the Queen loathed the Church. She might claim that her objections were philosophical, but Elyssa knew that the matter was jealousy. Her mother hated the priests’ hold over the kingdom, hated the fact that there was widespread fear not inspired by herself. The Queen had to play sweet with the Arvath in public, to keep the Holy Father happy, but she loved to see the Church humiliated as much as anyone else.
“But this is no woman,” the Queen said after a moment. “Where is his accomplice, the prostitute who dressed up as a frock?”
There was a long silence, and then Welwyn Culp replied stiffly. “I have been unable to compel that information, Majesty.”
This time, the murmuring was louder. Culp was a virtuoso among interrogators; he never failed to produce answers. The Queen often declared Culp one of her most valued assets, but Lady Glynn, Elyssa’s old tutor, had been a staunch opponent of torture, and Elyssa had taken her beliefs to heart. She hated Welwyn Culp, hated everything his lower dungeons represented, so much so that she had once presented her mother with a passage, carefully copied in her own hand from one of Lady Glynn’s books, a historical analysis on the inefficacy of torture in interrogation. Elyssa had been only eleven or twelve then, still young enough to believe that her mother would be swayed by the passage’s logic, its faultless combination of numbers and reason. Instead, the Queen had ordered her locked in Culp’s dungeons for the night. It was Culp himself who had dragged Elyssa downstairs, past the regular dungeons and into the sunken chambers beneath: mold-encrusted rooms where the smell of blood hung in the air like rotten incense and the paving stones still bore traces of decades-old gore. Culp had locked Elyssa into an empty cell . . . empty save for a long, raised wooden board, set with manacles at hand and foot, which stood in the center of the room.
Elyssa had stared at that board all night, her eyes wide, unsleeping. She sensed ghosts in the room, not spectral beings but something much worse: an echo of endless suffering, as much a