With an effort, I came out of the delve, the room pitching sideways as I straightened. Gael caught me, her face etched with concern, and set me upright. She didn’t let go until I nodded.
Hradian still lay on the couch, blinking in puzzlement.
I pointed at his head. “His most recent memories have been scrambled.”
“What does his mind look like?” Bolt asked.
“Like a creek that someone stirred from the bottom.”
“Will he be alright?”
“He’s fine now,” I said, “just a little disoriented. He doesn’t remember how he got here, so everything seems more than passing strange to him.”
Bolt shook his head in resigned disgust. “I guess there’s no point in asking who did this. The question is why was Hradian coming to see us?” He turned to me. “Is it possible for you to piece his memories back together?”
I stared at my guard. “Could Pellin do it?”
Bolt shrugged and favored me with a noncommittal nod. “Probably.”
I shook my head. “I don’t have seven hundred years of experience. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.” I started for the door. “But as a reeve, I’d find out exactly who came here with him. We’re in the queen’s palace. You can’t cross the hall without bumping into a guard or servant.”
We left our rooms and made for the nearest entrance, the south one, where a pair of ceremonial guards with sparkling swords that never needed sharpening stood like tailor’s dummies. I nudged Bolt and pointed in their direction. “I think the last Errant has a better chance of getting the truth out of those two than a minor lord from a northern backwater.”
I stepped across the grand entrance to a pair of servants who were busy polishing the brass of the candelabra along the wall. I stepped to the side, pretending to focus my attention on the brilliantly colored tapestry to their right. I reached into my purse and dropped a silver half crown on the floor, the quiet ring of the metal pure and sweet against the polished stone.
I bent to retrieve it, but instead of picking it up, I flicked it toward the servants. One of them glanced at me before dropping her polishing cloth over the coin. She made no move to return it to me, but both women had their heads cocked in my direction.
“Beautiful,” I gestured toward the tapestry. “A visitor to Cynestol would be so caught up in its detail they might not notice the comings and goings in this very hall.”
One of the women, short with close-cropped brown hair, nodded without looking my way. “Aye, Cynestol is full of sights that might distract a visitor.”
“But everything becomes commonplace when you’re around it long enough,” the other woman said. She was thin, with sandy blond hair and hazel eyes.
“True enough,” the first woman said, pretending to work a spot on the metal. “They’re just things after all. People are more interesting.”
I leaned forward to peer at the depiction of a man on horseback, but I jingled my purse with the other hand. “A member of the cosp came to my room,” I said. “It would be important to me to know if he passed through this room.”
“How important?” the blond-haired woman asked.
I let another half crown drop to the floor and nudged it with my foot, sliding it her way. Without missing a stroke with her cleaning rag she stepped on it while it was still moving.
“Hradian,” the woman said. “Hard to miss, that one. Looks like one of the queen’s racing hounds, he does.”
I nodded. “Was he alone?”
The women said nothing until I relieved my purse of some more of its weight. “No,” the shorter one said. “There was a woman with him, young.”
I stepped back, letting my gaze run the length of the tapestry and pretended to notice the women at their work for the first time. Before they could respond, I stepped their way, nodding at the mirror-bright candelabra. “You missed a spot.” I pointed, letting my finger touch the hand of the shorter woman, the one who’d spoken first.
The room receded as I entered into her memories. I had no need to determine guilt or innocence, just the truth of what she’d told me, but her memory of working in the palace held the tenor of the unfamiliar. As time passed in the delve, faster than the blink of an eye, the merest fraction between heartbeats, I found the memories that confirmed my suspicion. Mirren had been with Hradian.
I searched for the answer to my next question within her mind, but the knowledge wasn’t there. Disappointed and unwilling to put her at risk, I turned away, bending to check my boots and pulled a full crown from my purse. I put the coin on the floor next to the brassy metal of the candelabra. “I don’t talk to servants,” I said.
“True enough, my lord, but thank you.” The crown disappeared beneath the cloth and I moved away.
Chapter 32
We gathered Hradian and left the palace for the cathedral, hoping to meet with Bishop Serius. The lieutenant retained enough sense to sit a horse, but he rode through the streets of Cynestol with the befuddled look of a man who’d expected it to be night exiting a house at noon.
By the time we arrived at the six-sided monolith that commanded the most dominant order on the continent, his eyes had cleared enough so that he rode his mount with familiarity, if not confidence.
“Hradian,” Bolt called as we dismounted in front of the cathedral. “Can you take us to see Bishop Serius?”
His brows furrowed over his long nose, and he nodded, but I could see the makings of a question in his eyes that he couldn’t frame. “Why am I doing that?” he asked.
“You came to my quarters,” Bolt said. “Do you know what purpose brought you there?”
The lieutenant shook his head. “I remember being in your apartment.” He looked at Gael, Rory, and me in turn. “And
