“No,” said Ulvana in a monotone. “My family has washed their hands of me. My life is yours.”

“The Graith will give you death or exile, on my recommendation. Will you answer my questions?”

“I don’t care. Yes. Ask them.”

“Did you participate in the murders of Summoner Earno and of Necrophor Oluma Cyning?”

“No! Not exactly.”

“Did you participate in any way in those murders? Did you know about them in advance? Did you assist the murderer afterwards?”

Ulvana looked down for a moment, saying nothing. Then she raised her head again and gave each of the Guardians a defiant look. “The murderer. The murderer. Can’t you say his name? Is he nothing more to you than that?”

“Tell me his name. Tell me what you know about this business, and I will exercise the Graith’s mercy. If not, I will execute the Graith’s vengeance.”

“Mercy!” said Ulvana, and laughed sobbingly. “Mercy! What can you do to me that’s worse than what you’ve already done?”

“Why, I don’t know,” said Aloê courteously. “I would ask Earno and Oluma what they think, only they’re dead, you see.”

“It had to be you,” Ulvana moaned. “The both of you. The unattainable ice princesses, white and black. The ones he never felt worthy of, so that he had to grovel in the muck. Muck like me. Like me.”

“Listen, Ulvana, I’m no princess. I work for a living. And I’m not unattainable; just married.”

“To that thing. That Morlock. He’s probably had you both.”

Grim, white-haired Noreê, one of the great seers of the world and one of the three Victors of Kaen, snorted with surprised laughter. She turned away to regain her composure.

“Here’s where it stands with me, Ulvana,” Aloê said. “I am the Graith’s vengeancer. I could kill you now, if I chose, with only the Graith to answer to.”

“Go ahead. I want you to. I’m sick of everything.”

“I could, and I may do the same thing to Naevros syr Tol.”

Ulvana grew very still.

“Or,” Aloê added, “I could exile you both. Strictly speaking, that prerogative rests with the Summoner of the City, but he is in disgrace at the moment and the Graith has delegated his power in this matter to me. I can kill you, and I assure you it will be an easy death. But I would prefer to send you into exile. With Naevros, if possible. But I need a reason to do so, a reason for the Graith to forego vengeance. Tell me what happened. Make me understand.”

“He’d hate me,” Ulvana said, looking at something far beyond the walls of this room. “He’d hate me for the rest of his life.”

Taking a risk, Aloê said, “He hates you now. If he loved you, he would not have put you in this hole. The question is not what he wants for you. The question is what you want for him—and what you still may get from him. If he dies, all hope dies with him. If he lives, someday he may turn to you. Who else would he have?”

Ulvana completely broke down, weeping into her hands for what seemed an endless time. At last, she told Aloê everything she knew.

Naevros had come back into her life a year ago, riding up to Big Rock from A Thousand Towers on some sort of business. He said he had come to respect her for making her own way in the world—that he was sorry for the way he had treated her—that he hoped it could be different now. He deployed as many lies as he needed to seduce her again, and Aloê got them all from Ulvana.

It was about five months ago that he revealed he had an ulterior purpose in resuming the affair. That was when she knew everything he’d said was a lie. And he knew that she knew—smiled to himself as he watched her realize it. But she had already yielded her pride to him, and found that she couldn’t reclaim it—didn’t want it.

Ulvana said, “I could feel again—really feel—surrender myself to it—not have to, to watch myself and correct myself, but be what I was meant to be! I don’t suppose either of you can understand that.”

Aloê wasn’t interested enough in the subject to express a thought on it. What she wanted to know was what Naevros had said and done before the murder. She said placatingly to Ulvana, “We want to understand your experience so that the Graith can judge you fairly. What did Naevros say to you about the plot? What did he want done?”

Ulvana sighed. “He said he and his allies had a plan to save the Wardlands, but that it was risky, and not all of the Graith would be willing to take the risk. He said that he was to eliminate the Summoner Earno, and perhaps others if it came to it. He said—he said—I was the only person he could trust!”

“I’m sure he did.”

“Are you? Are you? I wish I could be. I had timber lodges near the Road, and he knew it. I knew the lands all around here, and he knew it. I was Arbiter of the Peace, charged with investigating murders hereabouts, and he knew it. But I think he trusted me, too. Don’t you think so?”

“He must have, to let you so deeply into his counsels.”

“Yes. Yes, exactly!” Ulvana’s reply was frantic—so frantic that Aloê wondered if she was also worried about the alternative: that Naevros told her so much because he planned to stop her mouth with death when he was done with her.

“What did he tell you about Oluma Cyning?”

“Nothing, except that he had corrupted a necrophor and that she would assist in the investigation of Earno’s murder. Or do you mean afterward? When he. . . . When he. . . .”

“Tell me about all of it.”

“Well—he told me what I told you. When the necrophor—”

“Oluma?”

“Yes, her. When she came to town she told me what she knew about the plot, and warned me not to trust the healer—”

“Denynê.”

“Yes, her. The necrophor warned me not to trust the healer, as Naevros had been unable to get at her.”

“Seduce her, you mean?”

“I suppose. I suppose that was what she meant. She laughed when she said it.”

“Oluma herself succeeded at that, didn’t she?”

“Yes.” Ulvana wrinkled her nose in matronly disapproval. “She bragged about it to me—thought it was funny. That’s what the whole business was for her; a grim sort of, of lark.”

“But Oluma didn’t manage to drag Denynê into the conspiracy?”

“As far as I know, she didn’t try. She wasn’t that interested; it was just one more game in all the games she was constantly playing. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Naevros had to kill her.”

“But you were surprised?”

“Yes, it. . . . I was surprised, yes.” And frightened, too, Aloê thought, looking at Ulvana’s face now and remembering it then, when they had found Oluma in the corpse-house. Frightened that Naevros was getting rid of his fellow conspirators: that was Aloê’s guess. Ulvana lived simultaneously with two different versions of Naevros: the hero of her love-romance, and the cold-hearted seducer and murderer.

“What was your role in all this?” Aloê asked. “What did he want you to do?”

“I showed him the . . . the lay of the land, I suppose. He spent some time at my old lumber camps. He wanted me to report to him how the investigation went. And, of course, he stayed with me after it, after the thing.”

“After he had murdered Earno.”

“Yes, that. He could not afford to be seen—there was a simulacrum of himself he had left in the North to give himself an alibi. So he was with me for a number of days. That was. . . . That was a good time.”

Because she’d had her beloved all to herself, Aloê thought. And, of course, he would have been at his most charming; his plan depended on keeping Ulvana happy.

“Did you attempt to mislead me at any time?” Aloê asked.

“Only by omission. Naevros warned me about that in a letter, as soon as he found out that you would be the Graith’s vengeancer. He said I should act as I would if . . . if I were not involved. He said you would know if I did not. He rates your cleverness very highly. More highly than he does mine. And he’s quite right, of course. I still don’t understand what you discovered in our journey together. Was it something you saw in your vision? He said he had a way of concealing his talic imprint from a seer. Did it fail him?”