“The gates are shut,” Anwyll said. “The town has turned out in the street, Your Grace, with knives and staves, all shouting for your lordship, but we dare not let the mob in.”

He could hear the uproar past the throbbing in his ears—heard it now beginning beyond the East Gate, in that blind and little-used street that tucked up between storehouses and Zeide defenses. The aid the town offered was dangerous, and he needed none of it now.

But the town also had need of reassurances. He strode down the steps, his personal guard hastening to overtake him, and went past the heap of weapons, into the columned end of the courtyard. At the gatehouse and its first defenses, three of Cossell’s men had stayed and gotten the oaken gate shut again.

“Open the inner gate,” he said, and they raised the bar and dragged the oak doors back.

Townspeople pressed at the bars beyond the portcullis, a mob with the hazard of torches, and bearing all manner of weapons. But seeing him, they began to shout, “Lord Sihhë!”

He lifted his sword, and gained a silence enough to speak. “The earl’s men have surrendered and I have taken them under my protection—do no harm! Hear me! Do no harm! Tell it through the town!”

“ Lord Sihhë!” the answer came in jubilation—and he walked back through the East Court as he had come, leaving the gates open for the crowd to witness through the bars whatever might befall here.

“Take these men to safekeeping,” he ordered Anwyll regarding the prisoners. “Uwen! Bring the thane with us. And bear a light inside. Five men with us, to persuade the earl to surrender and end this.”

“Lights,” Uwen called out as he climbed the steps and men opened the doors into darkness. “Light, there, on the duke’s order! ”

Then: “Bring a light here!” he heard soldiers echo inside, up the short stairs and down the hall.

He went in, up dark and bloody steps, past moaning wounded, with men treading cautiously beside him, until he reached the level of the main hall and a crazily spreading firelight along the ceiling. From the far other end of the corridor a man came carrying a torch.

Illumination flared erratically along a hallway littered with wounded and dead, shone on polished floors, on ornate carvings. “Light the hall!” he heard men still shouting to the farthest doors as they trod a crooked course among the dead. The light-bearer reached them, then guided them to the center of the building.

“Come with us,” Tristen said to the man with the torch, and started up the left-hand stairs, with Uwen, with his guards, with Crissand. He had his shield, and Uwen carried his own, but his guards, who had had the banners, had their hands unencumbered, and Sergeant Gedd took the idea to snatch a stub of a candle from its holder and borrow fire from the torch-bearer. Then Gedd went ahead, enterprisingly setting light to at least one candle in every sconce, all the way to the upper floor, making the steps more visible, bringing a wan, ordinary light to the heart of the Zeide.

But from above another source of light spread along the ceiling, and that proved to be a torch in the hallway, where three men of the viceroy’s Guelen Guard besieged the door of the Aswydds’ old apartment.

“Your Grace,” their sergeant said, recognizing him, “we’ve sent for axes.”

“No, sir. By no means.” He was appalled. They were beautiful doors, carved and very heavy. “Not yet. —Have you spoken with the earl? And has he answered at all?”

“His servants answer, your lordship, and won’t open for our asking.”

That was no surprise. He beckoned the young thane forward, among the viceroy’s guard and his own. Crissand rapped uncertainly at the door.

“Father? Father? Do you hear me? Answer.” Crissand rapped harder. “Father? I need your advice, sir. Please.”

There was no response.

Uwen rapped the door with his sword hilt, no gentle tap. “You mayn’t stay there, your lordship. Open. Your son is asking. Soon it may be others wi’ less goodwill.”

There was no sound at all within.

“This is His Grace Tristen of Ynefel asking!” Uwen shouted this time. “His Grace has brought your son in his safekeepin’, and your son is asking ye kindly to open an’ surrender the king’s messenger, your lordship, which would be very wise to do, before His Grace’s patience runs out, an’ afore we spoil these fine doors. Ye come out, now!”

There was still no answer, but more, no sound within the apartment.

“Could they have gotten out beforehand?” Uwen asked.

“Not by us,” the viceroy’s men said.

Tristen knew the place. The same as most rooms of the Zeide, its windows had only a small vent, and if the earl and his men damaged them to get out that way, they were on the second floor above pavings and the courtyards occupied by king’s men. It was possible that they had escaped down the stairs into the dark before the fighting, but if that were the case, the earl and his company might be lying among the dead downstairs, or they might be anywhere in the upper floors.

Most urgently, there was the king’s messenger to account for.

Uwen thumped the door with his gloved fist, a frown on his face. “Now’s certainly a finer time to come out than tomorrow, your lordship, and it won’t get better. His Grace is patient, now. And your son is anxious for ye, wi’ increasin’ good cause.”

Still there was no answer.

“Open the door,” Tristen said. The question of Lord Edwyll’s fate had become more important than the fine doors, and one of the viceroy’s men had by now brought up an axe from a martial display down the hall.

“Father!” Crissand shouted out loudly, leaning against the door. “Will you not answer your son?”

There was still no response. Tristen gave the signal and the garrison soldier plied the axe, wonderful dark carving reduced to chips about the lock, and with a widening gap between the latch and the frame.

It was wrong, Tristen was increasingly convinced, remembering Lady Orien, who with her sister had had these rooms after her brother. It was all wrong. They would find nothing friendly in this room. And if not friendly, they had best not have the young thane loose in their midst.

“Sergeant,” he said to the viceroy’s man in charge, and quietly, as the blows continued and the chips flew, “move the young lord away.”

“No,” Crissand said, but the sergeant’s men laid hands on him, and moved him firmly back.

In that same moment the axe had cleared enough wood from the edge for a sword to lift the bolt, and the soldiers shouldered in an armored rush into a dim, narrow foyer leading to a well-lit room.

Men lay all about that room, dead, down to the man tied with ropes to a chair, near the tall, green-draped windows.

Tristen stood still, surrounded by the green-velvet drapery and the rich bronze-and-gold furnishings of Lady Orien’s residence… and the ill feeling in the room was stifling. He had not tried the gray space, until now—and it was cold, and ominous. He let down his shield, let it stand against the side of a chair, but he did not let down his defense against the insubstantial hazards he felt.

There began to be an argument outside, passionate and suddenly loud. “No, Your Honor!” someone said, and Crissand reached the foyer in his struggle, stopped as Lusin allowed him no further progress.

“Where is my father?” Crissand cried.

“Dead,” Tristen said. “Dead, I fear, every one of them. —Let him go.”

Lusin released him, and in a sudden rush Crissand went through the apartment searching. They followed as far as the bedroom that had been Lady Orien’s, and there they found Crissand on his knees by the bed, where an old man lay atop the bedclothes, fully clothed, but composed, unlike the others.

“The earl died first,” one of the viceroy’s Guelens surmised. “An’ they followed.”

“This ain’t a young man to loose in the town tonight,” Uwen said, moving close to Tristen’s side, speaking to him with his back to the young man and quietly. “I ask ye, m’lord, send the lad wi’ these lads down to the guardroom an’ put a watch on him, or he’ll do someone hurt, hisself an’ his own men like as any.”