"So you learned nothing," Corinn said.

"I wouldn't say I learned nothing. In fact, I did learn something, something quite important."

Corinn rounded on him as if she might hurl a stone at him. "Tell me, then, before I get angry." She had a notion that she could sing something vile, something to undo him right here if she wanted to. He seemed to feel that possibility as well.

Delivegu bowed his head, backed away a step, and took the pleasure out of his voice. "At the beginning he denied any knowledge of any conspiracy. By the end, though, he did not deny that there was a conspiracy, he just refused to tell me anything about it. Indeed, he took his pleasure from spitting his refusal in my face. What I mean, Your Majesty, is that he proved there is some conspiracy afoot. You are not wrong to suspect as much. Quite the contrary."

In annoyance, she flicked her wrist and sent the stone twirling toward the monkey, which had sat down as if it were sharing their conversation. The creature jumped nimbly away, screeching as it did so, contorting its face into an expression very much like human effrontery. It grunted and bared its teeth, but it also withdrew even farther when Corinn bent for another stone. Delivegu watched it all with amusement.

Corinn glared at him. "This is foul news. Why do you take such pleasure in delivering it to me?"

"I take no pleasure in the news itself. If I am enthusiastic about it, it is because I have helped shed light on the presence of rats in the basement. Oh, and I got the bastard's name." He said the last bit as an afterthought but could barely hide his pleasure with himself.

"What name?"

"The blacksmith didn't give it up intentionally. He let it slip once, when he was babbling to himself. Ever heard of Barad the Lesser? He used to foment trouble in Kidnaban. It seems he's expanded his ambitions." Delivegu grinned again, wider this time. "First the name and then the man. Tell me the truth: I do good work for you, don't I? May that always be true."

Corinn did not have to respond to this. Rhrenna-the only other person who knew whom she met here on the balcony-descended the staircase, one hand lifting her dress so that she could move faster, the other holding a rolled parchment. She glanced at Delivegu for just an instant and then focused on the queen. "A message," she said. "It's about Mena."

C HAPTER

Mena awoke with a hot hand grasping her skull, searing her where it squeezed. She was on her side, and when she tried to swat the thing she realized through a rush of pain that her left forearm was broken. In the dim light of the predawn hour she stared at the strange droop of the limb, bent where it should have been straight, limp where it should have been firm. It was most definitely broken. Realizing that, she also knew that no physical being held her. It was just the pain from bashing her head on stones in the hillside. The burning on her thigh was from an impact abrasion. The soreness in her shoulder was from when she had dislocated it. She remembered the complete agony of it and the sweetness of relief when the tumbling motion of her fall had reset it. The rawness in her throat was from sleeping in the jumbled position in which she landed, with her mouth open to the dry rasp of a Talayan breeze. She knew a lot of things, but they were so cluttered in her head that she could not grasp the entirety of it.

Instead, she focused on a small thing. The little finger of her left hand had snapped at the base and canted off to the side in defiance of its siblings. It was red and swollen and did not really seem to belong with the others. It was a minor injury in some ways, but the unnatural shape of it captured all Mena's attention, forced her to focus through the pounding bands squeezing her skull. Slowly, she reached out and took the finger in the palm of her other hand. She held it a long moment, awed at how fat it felt. Then she twisted it back into position. As it popped into place she exhaled a jagged curse-not so much at the finger as at the searing splinters of pain that shot up her forearm and into her shoulder and throughout her entire body.

She lay on her back, breathing, holding still so that the pain might forget her and slip away. The gray sky above her was scalloped with high clouds tinted pink by the rising sun. They looked soft. They reminded her of something. As she tried to think what, a few moments passed, and then she raised herself awkwardly. Things to do. She had things to do. Despite and because of her pain, she had things to do.

Over the next hour, Mena limped about, gathering the supplies she would need to splint her arm. There were no trees nearby, and she did not yet want to raise her eyes and look beyond her immediate surroundings. Instead, she found several slim lengths of stone, along with ribbons of mossy turf that she sliced one-handed with her short sword. She was not far from a small stream. Its gentle gurgle called to her, and she hobbled toward it, cringing at the thirsty convulsions of her parched throat.

She stood beside the stream for a longer moment than she wished, unsure whether to drink from it or tend her arm first. Eventually, she did both. She unbuckled her sword belt, let it drop, and contorted her way out of her clothing. She stepped into one of the deeper pools wearing only her eel pendant, the one she had found gripped in a child's withered hand at the base of Maeban's aerie. The water bit her with cold, but that was good. She would be wet all over, but that was good, too, good to wash the filth and sweat and blood from her body. Letting her broken arm float, she scooped fingerfuls of water into her mouth with her right hand. She did so slowly, pausing to breathe between swallows, not rushing.

When she was as numb as she could bear, she crawled from the stream and-still naked and grateful for the touch of the morning sun-tended her arm. The flesh was not broken, but she could see the misshapen bone beneath her skin, which was bruised in blooms of ugly blue and green and red and yellow. Laying the limb on the ground, she worked around it, a one-armed being caring for a separate entity to which she was bound. She positioned the moss as padding, and lined the stones around it to make a splint. She used a length of string from her waist to bind it tight, a slow, slow process that left her fingers aching, hard as it was to tie with only one hand. She pulled on her left hand as she pressed the splint down with her chin, an attempt at straightening the bone, and then tightened the strings again.

By the time she was finished-dressed again, with the arm in a sling fashioned from the long ribbon of fabric that had been her belt-the sun was high and strong, and she was sweating from her efforts. Was the bone set straight? She could not be sure, but it was the best she could do. She might have looked to her small injuries as well, but that would just be avoidance of the more important thing. She knew these actions were small details, delays before she faced what she had to face. Her body would be bruised and battered for some time, but with the arm splinted she had no reason not to raise her eyes and look for it-for the foulthing.

Climbing up to a ridgeline and trudging along it toward a higher vantage, Mena took in the country around her. It was a temperate landscape of sharp, grass-covered hills. The soil was shallow, and the rocky frames of the slopes protruded here and there. She could not be sure, but she thought they had flown west, into the hills of northern Talay, perhaps not far from Nesreh and the western coast. She remembered glimpsing the sea on the distant horizon. That was before the beast-and she with it-had crashed to the earth in fatigue.