She’s there, throwing daggers at a painting of a sunset.
“You didn’t like it?” I ask, pointing to the canvas.
“I liked it well enough,” she says. “Now I like it better.”
“I need a prisoner from the Tower of Forgetting. Do we have enough uniforms to dress up some of our new recruits? The knights there have seen my face. Vulciber can help smooth things over, but I’d rather not risk it. Better to forge some papers and have her out with fewer questions.”
She frowns in concentration. “Whom do you want?”
“There’s a woman.” I take a piece of paper and grid out the bottom floor as well as I can. “She was up the staircase. Here. All on her own.”
The Bomb frowns. “Can you describe her?”
I shrug. “Thin face, horns. Pretty, I guess. You’re all pretty.”
“What kind of horns?” the Bomb asks, tilting her head to one side as though she’s considering something. “Straight? Curved?”
I gesture to the top of my head where I remember hers being. “Little ones. Goatish, I guess. And she had a tail.”
“There aren’t that many Folk in the Tower,” the Bomb explains. “The woman you’re describing…”
“Do you know her?” I ask.
“I’ve never spoken a word to her,” the Bomb says. “But I know who she is—or who she was: one of Eldred’s lovers who begot him a son. That’s Cardan’s mother.”
I drum my fingernails against Dain’s old desk as the Roach leads the prisoner in.
“Her name is Asha,” he says. “Lady Asha.”
Asha is thin and so pale that she seems a little gray. She does not look much like the laughing woman I saw in the crystal globe.
She is looking around the room in an ecstasy of confusion. It’s clear that she’s pleased to be away from the Tower of Forgetting. Her eyes are hungry, drinking in every detail of even this rather dull room.
“What was her crime?” I ask, downplaying my knowledge. I hope she will set the game and show more of herself that way.
The Roach grunts, playing along. “She was Eldred’s consort, and when he tired of her, she got tossed into the Tower.”
There was doubtlessly more to it than that, but all I have discovered is that it concerned the death of another lover of the High King’s and, somehow, Cardan’s involvement.