him to fight, and went down to his punch.
The others, however, took him like a flood.
Ren had dithered.
It would shame her to the end of her days, that the man she loved had sent for her, and she hadn’t hurried to him, almost ignored his message completely.
Ren found the palace in chaos, the guard bristling with weapons, charging across the grounds. Barnes hurried out to meet her as she dismounted, pain filling the old woman’s face.
“Your Highness, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. We tried. We could hear him calling for help, but we couldn’t get through the door. I’m sorry.”
Ren stared at her in horror, trying to understand, but it was like hearing a foreign language; the words wouldn’t take meaning. “What?”
“We broke the door down, but by then-” Barnes spread her hands helplessly. “We were too late.”
“No.” Nothing could have happened to Jerin. She just saw him this morning. She was coming to talk to him. “No.”
Then her legs started to run, taking her racing through the palace before she even knew where she was headed. She was calling his name.
The door to the husband quarters lay on the floor, the doorframe in splinters where the hinges had been pulled out. She paused in the doorway, suddenly fearful of what she’d find. The room was tomb silent.
An overturned divan was the only sign of violence.
Footsteps ran up behind her. “Your Highness.”
“Where is he?” she whispered.
“They took him.” Barnes’s voice cracked, and she worried her hands together. “They must have come in through the bolt-hole, caught him, and taken him out. I delivered a letter from his sisters around ten. A few minutes later he sent for you. The messenger had no more than ridden off when he started to cry for help. The guard heard other voices in with him. We broke down the doors-but it was too late.”
“He’s not dead!” She clutched at that. It was nearly one now-he had been gone for less than three hours.
“They’ve gotten clean away. We’ve sent messengers to the Queens Justice. We’re starting a citywide search.”
Ren dashed to Jerin’s bedroom and the dressing room beyond. “The gardens. The bolt-hole comes out in the gardens.”
“We’ve searched the grounds.” Barnes stayed at the door out of habit. “There were eight or nine in all.
They split up. Half went over the back wall with him. The rest decoyed the guard away. We were able to kill one. River trash! Common river trash!”
The bolt-hole door stood open. Ren stopped at the sight of it. Surely the guards already checked the passage. Black handprints surrounded the door, as if someone with soot-covered hands had struggled to keep the door closed. Jerin? But why the soot? She looked carefully at the marks. Among the many handprints, the word “Kij” had been hastily written, sooty fingerprints dotting the i and j.
Kij? Kij had taken Jerin? The Destiny had steamed out of Mayfair yesterday, and the palace guards knew her former sisters-in-law on sight.
The consort has something urgent to tell you.
“Barnes?”
“Yes, Your Highness?”
“You said a letter came from his sisters?”
“Yes. I handed it to him personally.”
“And a few minutes later, he sent for me?”
“Yes.”
In the fire pit, she found the remains of the letter; a single piece of curled blackened paper remained intact. Very little remained legible… fathered by a Tibler… pushing to find this lover, then the Porters must act. Tell this information to your wives in private. Warn them to be careful. The Porters have proved to be extremely dangerous… Remember your aunts are as close as Annaboro .
Kij? With sickening clarity, she knew then. The Porters had lured the princesses into marriage, and then used Keifer to deal them death. He poisoned her father. He had been the one who demanded they go to a theater filled with explosives. He had been the one who delayed their arrival, preventing any search for danger. The royal family never suspected the Porters-too many of them had died that night too.
Thinking back, now knowing Kij’s ruthlessness, Ren realized that only the feeblest of the Porter mothers had been at the box. Had Keifer known that he had been walking into a death trap? Or had Kij kept him ignorant of it all?
No, Ren couldn’t believe Keifer was innocent. He took too much pleasure in hurting her and her sisters.
Keifer’s and Eldest Porter’s deaths must have been an accident-perhaps Keifer misunderstood the Porters’ instructions and wasn’t supposed to go himself. Certainly the Porters never tried to explain why Eldest Porter had arrived so late, or used the back entrance. Had she been rushing to save Keifer, who wasn’t where they planned him to be?
If Keifer hadn’t died in the theater, who would have been next on the Porters’ list? Her mothers and all the adult princesses, leaving the Porters regent to the youngest? The entire family?
Yes. the entire family. Sisters-in-law inherit an orphaned estate. They were an ancient and powerful family, lacking only a royal marriage, thus Jerin’s kidnapping.
If the Porters planned to marry Jerin, then there was hope. They would keep him alive, and hopefully clean. Logic suggested that they would take him to the Destiny, and from there, upriver to above Hera’s Step to the ducal seat, Avonar. She needed only to catch up with them before they could force the marriage.
And then she had vengeance to wreak.
Jerin woke to female voices arguing. For a moment of complete disorientation, he thought he was home with his sisters squabbling as usual. Then he remembered the attack at the palace, the desperate struggle to leave a warning for Ren as they dragged him from his rooms, the entry door booming like a great drum as the guard tried to force their way in. His attackers had been hampered by the fact that they wanted him unharmed-if they had wanted him dead, he would have never been able to fight free long enough to write his message on the wall.
At one point, though, one of them had whined. “Give it to him, already!” and a needle had jabbed into him like a wasp’s sting. Everything went weird and dreamy after that. A race down a dark tunnel. The garden from an upside-down perspective. A wagon ride with wheels rumbling like unending thunder. It seemed as if the true him had been shrunk down, caught like a butterfly in a glass jar. and was riding in the large shell of his body. That tiny him, unable to act. watched with helpless alarm as they slipped out of the city and took to the Queens highway before sleep finally spared him the agony of witnessing his own abduction.
“Just tell us straight-how did ya know it was us that nabbed the royal mount?” a woman was saying as he woke up.
“I guessed,” a second woman answered in a cultured alto that seemed familiar, as if Jerin had talked to her before. “Anyone with two ears and two eyes could see that the Hats tapped you for something big, and then this turns up.”
There was a rustle of newspaper.
“Ya know we can’t read, Miss High-and-mighty.” a third female speaker growled.
“Well, Bert, if you could read anything but Hat cant, you’d see that you now have what the entire Queensland is looking for.” Miss High-and-mighty stated in her strangely familiar voice. “The Hats told you to take him. Fen? Or you just figured to do a little husband raiding while you were in the palace?”
“We did exactly what we were supposed ta do. Take the boy.” Fen proved to be the first speaker.
“Iffen ya want ta know more, ya can ask the Hats when they come for him.”
“What do they want with him?”
A short nasty laugh, and a fourth woman said, “I expect what any healthy woman would want with a man that pretty.”
In the general laughter that followed, Jerin picked out at least seven separate female voices. Seven strangers! Oh, merciful gods, he was lost. He wished he could sink back into oblivion, but now that he was awake,
