"The wedding is in two days. As soon as it's over we will move. It's best if neither of you know any details ..." He raised a hand to forestall her. "Please, Claudia, don't even ask me. If it should go wrong, if you are questioned, this way you can give nothing away. You won't know the time, or the place, or the method. You have no idea who the Steel Wolves are. You cannot be blamed."

By no one but herself, she thought bitterly. Caspar was a greedy little tyrant and would grow worse. The Queen a silky murderess. They would always enforce Protocol.

They would never change. And yet she didn't want their blood on her hands.

The trumpet rang out again, urgent. "I have to go," she said. "The Queen is hunting and I have to be there."

Evian nodded and turned away, but before he had taken two steps she forced the words out. "Wait. One thing."

The peach silk shimmered. A butterfly fluttered at his shoulder, curious.

"My father. What about my father?"

In the beautiful blue sky a flutter of pigeons rose from one of the Palace's thousand towers. Evian did not turn and his voice was so quiet she barely heard it. "He is dangerous. He is implicated."

"Don't hurt him."

"Claudia ..."

"Don't." She clenched her fists. "He is not to be killed. Promise me now. Swear. Or I go to the Queen this minute and tell her everything."

That made him turn, startled. "You wouldn't..."

"You don't know me."

Iron-cold she faced him. Only her stubbornness would keep a knife out of her father's heart. She knew he was her enemy, her subtle foe, her cold opponent over the chessboard. But he was still her father.

Evian flashed a glance at Jared, then breathed out, a long uneasy breath. "Very well."

"Swear." She put her hand out and grabbed his and held it tight; it was hot and clammy.

"With Jared as witness."

Reluctant, he let her raise their clasped fingers. Jared put his delicate hand on top.

"I swear. As I am a lord of the Realm and a devotee of the Nine-Fingered One." Lord

Evian's small gray eyes were pale in the sunlight. "The Warden of Incarceron will not be killed."

She nodded. "Thank you."

They watched him detach his hand and walk away, wiping his fingers fastidiously with a silk handkerchief, disappearing down the greenness of the lime walk.

As soon as he was gone, Claudia sat on the grass and clutched her knees under the blue dress. "Oh, Master. What a mess."

Jared seemed barely to be listening. He shifted restlessly about, as if he was stiff. Then he stopped so abruptly, she thought a bee had stung him. "Who's the Nine-Fingered

One?"

"What?"

"That was what Evian said." He turned, and there was a tension in his dark eyes she knew well, like the burning obsessions that sometimes kept him at his experiments for days and nights. "Have you ever heard of such a cult before?"

Brutally, she shrugged. "No. And I don't have time to care. Listen. Tonight, after the banquet, the Queen holds a meeting of her Council, a great Synod, to prepare the deeds of the wedding and the succession. They'll be there, Caspar and the Warden and his secretary and anyone of importance. And they won't be able to leave."

"Not you?"

She shrugged. "Who am I, Master? A pawn on the board." She laughed, the laugh she knew he hated, hard and bitter. "So that's when we go into Incarceron. And this time we take no chances."

Jared nodded mildly. His face had fallen, but the edge of excitement still lingered.

"I'm glad you said we, Claudia," he murmured.

She looked up. "I'm afraid for you," she said simply. "Whatever happens."

He nodded. "That makes two of us." They were silent a moment. "The Queen will be waiting."

But she made no move to go, and when he looked at her, her face was taut and distant.

"That girl Attia. She was jealous. She was jealous of me."

"Yes. They may be close, Finn and his friends."

Claudia shrugged. She stood and brushed pollen from her dress. "Well. We'll soon find out." 

The Sapient's tower was odd, Finn thought. He and Keiro and Attia had taken the man at his word, and spent the day exploring all over it, and there were things about it that puzzled them.

"The food, for instance." Keiro picked a small green fruit from the bowl and sniffed it cautiously. "This is grown, but where? We re miles in the sky and there's no way down.

Don't tell me he takes his silver ship to market."

They knew there was no way down because the basement rooms where the beds were had been built on the bare rock. Small stalagmites rose up between the furniture, icicles of calcium hung from the ceiling, sediments laid down over the century and a half of the

Prison's life, though Finn had thought it took longer, millennia even, for such things to form.

As he wandered behind Attia from kitchen to storeroom to observatory he let himself slip for a moment into a daydream of fascinating horror; that Incarceron was indeed a world, ancient and alive, that he was a microscopic creature inside it, tiny as a bacterium, and that

Claudia too was here, that even Sapphique was a dream dreamed by Prisoners who could not face the dread of there being no Escape.

"And then the books!" Keiro thrust the door to the library open and gazed at them all in disgust. "Who needs so many books? Who could ever be bothered to read them?"

Finn moved past him. Keiro could hardly read his own name, and was proud of it. He had once gotten into a fight about some supposed insult about him scribbled on a wall by one of Jormanric's bullies; Keiro had come out of the fight alive but badly beaten. Finn remembered being unable to tell him that the graffiti was harmless, even grudgingly admiring.

Finn could read. He had no idea who taught him, but he could read even better than

Gildas, who muttered the words half aloud and had only seen about a dozen books in his life. The Sapient was here now, sitting at the desk in the library's heart, his knobbly hands turning the pages of a great codex bound in leather, his eyes close to the handwritten text.

Around him, on shelves that reached to the shadowy ceiling, Blaize's library was immense, towers of heavy volumes all numbered in gold and bound in green and maroon.

Gildas raised his head. They had expected him to be in awe, but his voice was acid.

"Books? There are no books here, boy."

Keiro snorted. "Your eyes are worse than you think."

Impatiently, the old man shook his head. "These are useless.

Look at them. Names, numbers. They tell us nothing."

Attia took a book from the nearest shelf and opened it, and Finn looked over her shoulder. It was thick with dust, and the edges of the pages were eaten away, so dry they fell into flakes. On the page was a list of names:

MARCION

MASCUS

MASCUS ATTOR

MATTHEUS PRIME

MATTHEUS UMRA each followed by a number. A long, eight-digit number. "Prisoners?" Finn said.

"Apparently. Lists of names. Volumes of them. For every Wing, every Level, going back centuries."

Beside each name was a small square image of a face. Attia touched one and almost dropped the book. Finn gave a gasp, which brought Keiro over to the table, kneeling up behind them.