In the little park near the entrance, there were Umbo and Loaf, waiting right where he told them to wait.

And as they moved toward the passage leading up to the park, Rigg saw a group of a dozen soldiers move into the park and leave at once with Loaf and Umbo surrounded.

As Param had warned him. General Citizen was not one to leave things to chance. He must have been observing Loaf and Umbo all along. Maybe he even had spies watching when Rigg met with them, so he knew right where to send his soldiers.

Even if Rigg were as ruthless as Mother, willing to let them die while he made his escape, he knew that in the long run such a course would never work. He needed Umbo to get him through the Wall. And if they didn’t get through the Wall, eventually they would be found and killed. The new dynasty demanded it.

Rigg immediately backtracked. While General Citizen’s soldiers did not know how to open the passageway in the park, there were still a dozen of them waiting there in case Rigg was so foolish as to blunder out into the open without checking.

“They got my friends,” he said to Param. “We have to go another way.”

She mutely followed him along another path. He only knew two dry paths—the others involved getting into the city’s sewers, which was not just wet but also disgusting. What if General Citizen knew this as well? What if he was watching all the sewers and the only other dry entrance?

No. The sewers he might watch, but General Citizen could not know about the dry tunnels, because there had been no traffic through them for more than a century—long before the People’s Revolution. Perhaps the last monarch who knew of the paths died without telling anyone. So the other entrance would not be watched—though that was no guarantee someone would not notice them by accident.

It was a long walk, and Param was not used to covering so much ground, or walking for so long at a time. Even though it took her ages to cross a room when invisible, to her it was a few quick steps. Where could she have walked, inside Flacommo’s house, that would give her any exercise? Rigg had been able to run with Olivenko back and forth between the library and Flacommo’s house, building up his endurance again, but Param had had no such opportunity.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s hard, and I wish I were as big as Loaf, so I could carry you.”

“You’re saving my life,” said Param. “But since I’m getting so tired, why not rest a while? The only urgent appointment we had won’t be kept now anyway.”

Rigg saw the wisdom of this, and found a short flight of steps where they could sit down.

To Rigg’s surprise, Param climbed the stairway and lay down on the floor of the upper part of the tunnel.

“There might be rats,” Rigg warned her.

“If a big enough one comes along, kill it so I can use it for a pillow,” she said.

All right, so she wasn’t bothered by rats. Or maybe she’d never actually encountered one, so she didn’t know whether it would bother her or not. She fell asleep quickly.

But it was too early in the day for Rigg to want to nap. He had schooled himself not to need sleep again until after noon. So he sat on the top step with Param sleeping behind him.

At first he couldn’t stop his thoughts from going back to Mother and General Citizen. He had known Citizen to be a formidable opponent—but he was nothing compared to Mother, because he hadn’t thought she was an opponent at all. Oh, yes, he had entertained the possibility that she was untrustworthy—even that she might harbor plans to kill him. But after months of being with her often, he had come to like her, to love her, to trust her. And all the time, she was . . .

No, not lying. Not really. She really did like him, and love him, and she certainly trusted him. She was simply doing the same thing Rigg had done, and Father, too, for that matter—holding her most secret plans in reserve. The real difference between Rigg and Mother was not that one of them was more dishonest or untrustworthy. It was that Rigg’s plans included saving his mother, and her plans included letting him be killed. No, arranging for him to be killed.

I can’t keep thinking about this. I certainly can’t let myself keep feeling things about it.

But he was almost as panicked and grieved and angry about this betrayal as he had been about Father’s death nearly a year before. And, like then, he was immediately plunged into the problem of staying alive when there were people who wanted him dead. He had thought the villagers—including Umbo’s father—posed a real threat to him when they wanted to kill him for failing to save Kyokay. Now their threat seemed laughable compared to what Mother had tried and Citizen intended. But if the villagers of Fall Ford had killed him, he would have been just as dead as if Mother’s brutal plan with the iron bars had blown him and Param to smithereens.

Rigg forced himself to scan the city, looking for Loaf and Umbo. It wasn’t hard to find them—General Citizen knew whatever Mother had told him about Rigg’s ability to find people, so he hadn’t bothered any kind of concealment. Besides, he wanted Rigg to find them, so he would come to save them.

They know I’ll come and save my friends. That’s something. They know that, unlike them, I have honor.

Of course, that honor’s going to get me killed.

Mobs were still prowling the streets, and more and more soldiers were coming into the city to restore order. Those large interwoven paths were easy to see and trace. But as Umbo’s and Loaf’s paths passed through other recent ones, it took all Rigg’s concentration, at such a distance, to stay focused on them.

At last the paths came to an end. Loaf and Umbo were being held in a large room with a strange pattern of paths in it. A large seating area, almost like one of the theaters in the city, but nowhere near as thickly attended. And down front, instead of the paths of actors or musicians on a stage, there was a large clear area where no one went, and around it, various stations where the same people returned and stayed for hours at a time, again and again.

Only when he recognized the path of Erbald, the Secretary of the Council, did he realize where Umbo and Loaf were being kept—in the Council House itself. They were seated right at the table, as if they were part of the government. And the rest of the Council was seated around them, with soldiers standing against the walls. No one at the table left, though servants came and went—feeding them?

Then one of the council members got up from the table and guards went with him as he walked to a place whose function Rigg recognized. It was the indoor lavatory. And if the councilors were being escorted by guards, it meant that they, too, were in custody.

Rigg could imagine what story was being circulated. The Council was under the “protection” of the People’s Revolutionary Army. Or had he gone farther? Had he announced that it was agents of the Council who had assassinated Flacommo and meant to kill the royals? Had he announced the restoration of Hagia Sessamin as Queen-in-the-Tent?

No, not yet. Because he couldn’t make any announcement about the royals until he could safely accuse the Council of having killed Rigg and Param. It wouldn’t do at all for him to claim they were dead, only to have them turn up somewhere very much alive.

And now Rigg realized that he and Param might not have to fear as extensive a search for them as he had expected. Citizen could hardly tell hundreds of soldiers to be on the lookout for the son and daughter of the queen! Word would spread very quickly—few soldiers were good at keeping their mouths shut. Soon there would be other groups searching for them for other reasons—some to kill one or the other of them, but others to save them, and maybe even some who would want to make Rigg King-in-the-Tent in place of Mother.