"As you can imagine, I had to be quite rough with Barad. He's a big man, you see, so I had to be careful. Anyway, he was a little bit out of it, and he asked me, 'Did he betray me to her?' I had explained to him that I was in your employ. When he asked, I almost asked him, 'Who?' The word was on my tongue, but I snipped it." Delivegu demonstrated just how precisely he did so by making scissors of his fingers. "Instead, I said, 'Of course, he betrayed you. He's royalty after all. Why would he side with commoners?' I said this to provoke confusion or disagreement or something. But he responded with none of those. He simply accepted it sadly.

"So…" Delivegu inhaled a long breath, then said plainly, "There can really be no doubt, Your Majesty. Barad, your enemy among the people, was in a partnership with King Grae. As I traveled with Barad I returned to this subject several times. He didn't give much, so I told him how it was. How King Grae had come to you speaking of a plot they had concocted together. How you and he worked to find a way to capture him. I even said that you and the Aushenian were secretly engaged. It's a skill I have, finding the truth even when the one I'm interrogating doesn't say a thing. There's no question, though. He was in league with Grae, and now he believes Grae betrayed him. I deliver him to you in the hope that you will mete out justice as is right."

Inside Corinn's head a hundred different thoughts assailed her. On her face she made sure that nothing could be read. Despite the internal turmoil, she heard herself say calmly, "We'll see about all this soon enough. I will speak with him now."

Delivegu straightened like an obedient servant, eager to please and seemingly happy at her reaction-or lack of reaction. Corinn paused at the door and let Delivegu advance ahead of her. Leaning close to Rhrenna, she whispered, "While I am with him, bring Grae to the upper terrace. Let him see to whom I'm speaking. Watch his face. Tell me if he shows signs of recognizing him."

Time must have passed, but she lost track of it. Why it was so hard to concentrate she could not say. Her mind felt sluggish but also touched with a panic that might spread if she were not careful. It was not just thinking of Grae, not just the disbelief that she might have read him so wrongly, not just the gasping knowledge that he had held steel and fenced with Aaden, not even realizing how very close she had come to folly.

In addition to all this, emotions she had not allowed within herself for years rushed in. Memories of her father, of Igguldan, of Hanish: the men who had betrayed her, each in his own way. Was Grae another of these? Was she still the fool she had been at sixteen? More, images of her mother during her illness, the memory of crying and crying and crying on her bedspread as the woman-she who was dying-tried to comfort her. More, there came a bone-deep longing, which she almost never acknowledged, to sit and speak with Aliver, right now, as adults, both of them living.

And then she was striding through the doorway behind Delivegu. She walked into the room and circled around to the front of the chair. The guards followed her with their eyes, and she watched as the prisoner's square profile came into view and then changed as it filled out. She pulled in her attention, blocked out the noise, and concentrated all her being on the exchange she was about to have. It felt necessary to focus her eyes on a single point, while the rest of the world blurred. The man's eyes were brown, spaced wide. Rolling toward her, they looked heavy, as if just moving them would be a monumental task, as if they were stone. She could almost hear the grinding rumble as they shifted.

She said, "Lower your eyes." The man stared at her a moment longer and then obeyed. "How could you think the monarch of one kingdom would betray the monarch of another… for peasants? Don't you see how foolish that is? How impossible? And they told me you were bright. Devious. Cunning. Instead, you're none of these things."

Had she really gotten all that out without a hitch or quaver of emotion? She had. The man's steady attention confirmed it. He stared at her feet but said nothing.

"You may speak freely to me," Corinn said, trusting her voice a little more now. "I am not easy to offend. Nor do you frighten me. If your language is coarse, so be it. I have some rough about me as well."

One corner of the man's mouth crooked upward. It looked like a tic, a jerk of his cheek muscles, but the expression held. A lopsided smile.

"Well, speak. That's what you like to do, isn't it? Make up speeches. Exhort. Rant to the masses! Try it on an audience of one."

The man bowed his head, moving that smile out of her view. She watched him gather himself with a series of inhaled breaths. She could have him beaten, she thought. Mutilated. Killed. She could-right now, right here-order his tongue cut out. No more speeches then. And, she realized, part of what was jumbling her mind was the song. It was high in her, roiling about the curve of her skull like liquid flame mixed with sound, hungry to get out. She did not even need to order another to act for her. She could open her mouth and sing him into oblivion.

"You have betrayed your brother's dreams."

She saw the words on his lips, and then she heard them, and then put the two together and understood them.

"Have I? And did my brother detail his dreams to you?"

Barad took a few breaths before answering, but his voice was sure when he did, no hint of deceit or hesitation in it. "Yes. Many nights he spoke to me in dreams." He looked up. "I make up no speeches, Corinn Akaran. I simply recite what I remember, what Aliver wished me to say to the world. You would do well to listen yourself. It is not too late to save yourself from ruin."

Corinn was quicker even than the Marah in responding to this insult. She said nothing. She only opened her mouth slightly and let out the ribbon of song already waiting. It slipped through the air on a whisper, and the thing she had but thought was done. The eyes that had dared to look up at her were eyes no longer. They were stone replicas, frozen in place. Delivegu gasped. One of the guards whispered a curse of amazement. Barad himself did not move at all. His stone eyes stared at her, his expression otherwise unchanged.

She spun away.

In her offices an hour later she recalled the dream she had just that morning. In it, she had arranged to meet Grae in her chambers. She had not explained why, but when he arrived, the room was lit with low lamps, heavy with incense. A single musician in a hidden closet piped a faint tune on a bone whistle. And she stood in a thin shift, a diaphanous garment.

His eyes had widened into two blue saucers when he saw her.

She was naked beneath the dress. She could see by the nervous difficulty Grae had controlling his eyes that he had noticed this. The light from the candle beside her, she knew, would be languid around her curves, and the thought of the power she had just standing there pressed her nipples erect against the thin fabric. He noticed that as well.

"I am no virgin," she had said. "I am no blushing maiden. I have no desire to be in love again. Such things are of my past. I come to you as I am. A queen. A mother. A woman. Those three things may be too much for you to handle, but if you think yourself monarch enough for it, I will have you as a husband. This is me. Consider."

With that, Corinn had slipped loose the knot at her waist and shrugged the silken shift from her shoulders. Corinn let Grae take her in from head to toe. It pleased her to have his eyes adoring her-that prodded her to cut his examination short.

"I'll have your answer now, by the way."

His answer, in the dream, had been to rise and walk toward her, swaying oddly as he did, raising first one arm and then the other. It was a strange ballet that she understood as a custom of his people, a dance of the cranes or some such. She had thought it lovely, and began to return it.