accusatory anger in his gaze. None of these struck her as promising signs. Tara glanced at Anyara and nodded.
“Sire,” Anyara began, then paused to gather herself, for she realised her voice had sounded a little too urgent and assertive. “Sire, I know you will not be inclined to give credence to anything I say…”
Gryvan grunted a dry affirmation to that.
“… but I beg you just to hear me out. There’s something wrong about everything that’s happening, you must agree to that.”
“I must do nothing,” Gryvan interrupted her. “High Thanes are permitted to make their own choices about what they do.”
“Of course, sire,” Anyara said hurriedly. “Forgive me. I mean only that something seems amiss in the sudden rising to the surface of so many tensions, so much dissent. I believe I know the cause of some of it at least, perhaps all of it. That is all I came to tell you, sire, for though you doubt the loyalty of my Blood to yours, I can assure you — ”
“What nonsense is she prattling about?” Gryvan asked Tara.
The Chancellor’s wife inclined her head sympathetically, projecting complete understanding of Gryvan’s irritation.
“Well,” Tara murmured, “I have a suspicion there may be just a grain of truth in her ideas, sire. We may-we do-disagree, she and I, on the details, but I fear… I fear there is indeed an… an issue that may have to be resolved.”
“An issue?” Gryvan said, frowning.
“Your Chancellor, sire,” Anyara said. “He is not himself. Entirely and completely not himself. I think he has… may have been bound by a na’kyrim. As Tarcene was, sire. Orlane Kingbinder. There is a man, Aeglyss, who marches with the Black Road…”
“Bound?” Gryvan cried incredulously. “Have you come here to mock me?”
“Perhaps not bound, sire,” Tara said quickly. “Perhaps not that. But… my husband is behaving strangely, sire. Ever since his return. Much that he has done and said is… confusing.”
“Are you accusing your own husband of treachery?” Gryvan demanded.
“No, sire.” Tara’s edifice of control and good humour was at last crumbling. Anyara could see, and hear, the chinks in her armour widening. “No, not that. But something ails him. It might be wise to place less weight upon his advice than you have been accustomed to do in times past.”
“Oh, believe me,” said Gryvan in dark and threatening tones, “I already have ample reasons of my own to do just that. And doubts, lady. I have doubts. But binding. This… this prisoner is talking of binding. That would be… something else entirely.”
“You’ve no more cause to make a prisoner of me than you have to…” Anyara cursed herself for the sharp retort, but it was too late. Gryvan settled his full, glowering attention upon her.
“Your brother is outlawed.”
Anyara could clearly hear the danger in the High Thane’s voice, yet she could not stop herself.
“The accusations against him are lies,” she said bluntly.
“Lies? Then where is your brother?” The High Thane’s face was abruptly contorted by rage, stretched like a freshly scraped hide pegged out to dry. “Where is your brother?” he howled, spittle flying, a red blush of anger spreading through his cheeks, his neck. “I don’t see him here, where he belongs. Now, in time of crisis, in time of crisis… where’s the boy?” He stabbed a stiff finger in Anyara’s direction. Like a weapon. “We fight wars, we are beset by enemies, by traitors, and where is he?”
“I — ” Anyara began, but there was to be no voice in this echoing chamber save one.
“Traitors!” Gryvan snarled. He looked like a dog, Anyara thought. A dog hauling at its leash, all teeth and fury and foam. “This city… this city was founded by sailors and fishermen, before the Gods left this world. Long before the Kingships, there were markets here, and watchtowers, and granaries. The Aygll Kings kept a winter palace here for a time. The… the… Before the War of the Tainted, there were Kyrinin here, in these streets. They had huts down by the river. You see? Do you see how old this place is? How ancient?
“But it was my grandfather who built the wall. It was my father who raised the Moon Palace. It was us, our line, that made it great. I’ll not yield it now, if that’s what you think. I’ll not let everything be taken away from us. Not as long as I’ve strength in my arm and a fire in my heart.”
“Sire,” Tara began in a placatory manner, but Gryvan shouted over her.
“Out! Get out!”
Tara bowed and began to back away immediately. Anyara could not surrender quite so readily.
“Sire…”
“Out,” hissed Kale, the shieldman. The unexpected sound startled Anyara, as did what she saw in his eyes. She allowed Coinach to gently pull her out into the corridor.
“Mad?” Torquentine grunted. “Is she sure?”
“She seems so.” Magrayn nodded. She was watching with a somewhat sceptical, concerned expression as a dozen burly men attempted to ease her prodigious master sideways from his bed of thick cushions onto the massive trolley standing ready to receive his weight.
“And do we have any faith in her judgement in such matters?”
“Well, she is only a maid. But she has served in the Palace of Red Stone for some time. She should be capable of recognising… unusual, perverse behaviour on the Shadowhand’s part.”
“The man engages in little else,” Torquentine observed. “Move your hand, man. I’ve some… a rash, shall we say.”
The wheels on the trolley creaked ominously as the first of Torquentine’s buttocks was allowed to rest upon it. Magrayn grimaced. Torquentine noted this and frowned.
“You assured me this has been tested,” he pointed out.
“Indeed. It has.”
Torquentine found her tone considerably less reassuring than he would have hoped. But he had committed himself into his doorkeeper’s capable hands once he had made the decision to depart for pastures new. It was too late to lose faith in her competence.
“Do we trust her? This maid?” he asked. “She is not some ploy of the Shadowhand’s, turning our curiosity against us?”
“I think it unlikely. We have convinced her, I am sure, that her father’s life is forfeit should she fail us.”
“Hmm. The mattress on this trolley is distressingly thin. How long must I remain perched upon it?”
“Not long.”
He recognised her imprecision as predictive of extended discomfort. If not suffering, indeed. He chose not to press the matter, as the only alternative would be to remain here in his Vaymouth cellar, and that prospect pleased him still less.
“No reason, I suppose, that the Chancellor should be excused from falling prey to the malady of the mind claiming so many others, merely by virtue of his wit and title. When an entire city plunges into disorder and rapine and pillage, nothing should surprise us.”
“Particularly if the Chancellor concerned helped the plunge along himself,” Magrayn said. With Torquentine settled upon his unconventional transport, she nodded to the men standing ready by the far wall of his subterranean lair. Obedient to her command, they began to remove the false stones set in the wall, slowly exposing a tunnel running off south-westwards.
“Indeed, indeed,” Torquentine mused as he watched the men work. “There’s the most disquieting element in the whole affair. Still, I suppose if we conclude the Chancellor is mad, it clarifies a good deal. A madman may do anything. He may wantonly arrange the torture and murder of a rival Kingship’s Ambassador, thereby all but inviting them to make war. He may arrange for the escape of a rebellious minor Thane, thus practically ensuring the renewal of the rebellion so recently crushed.
“He may, if rumour is true, persuade the High Thane to withdraw a portion of his army from the field on the very eve of what consequently proved to be our Blood’s greatest defeat in battle. Leaving those intolerable Black Road creatures considerably closer to Vaymouth than to their own borders and with notably little between them and us to distract them. He might even, absurd as it sounds, find someone-some insufficiently cautious and rightly
