“Nellia,” I said in a whisper, scarcely able to bring words to my tongue. “What is Gerick’s birthday?”

The old housekeeper looked at me as if I were afflicted with Mad Lucy’s malady. “Pardon, my lady?”

“The young duke… on what day and in what year was he born?”

I knew what she was going to say as clearly as I knew my own name.

“Why, it’s the twenty-ninth day of the Month of Winds, ten years ago, going on eleven in the coming spring.”

It was as if the world I knew dissolved away, leaving some new creation in its place, a creation of beauty and wonder that crumbled into horror and disaster even as I marveled at its birth. How could I find my place in such a world? What could I call truth any longer, when that which had been the darkest, most bitter truth of my life was now made a lie? To none of those questions could I give an answer, but I did know who had murdered Lucy and why, and it was, indeed, because of me.

Darzid had never expected to find me here, had not believed I could ever find out. When he discovered his miscalculation and my laughable ignorance of the truth sitting in my hand, he took swift action to remedy his mistake. Lucy had never been feebleminded, but brave and clever and devoted, feigning a ruined mind in order to keep the child she loved safe. She had taught him to hide what he could do. When she was told that she was no longer needed in the nursery, she knew better, and she did what was necessary to make sure she was close by to watch him, to be his friend when he dared not let anyone close enough to discover his terrible secret.

Ten years ago on the twenty-ninth day of the Month of Winds… two months to the day after Karon’s burning… the day the silent, gentle Maddy had helped me give birth to my son.

From my breast burst a cry of lamentation that would have unmanned the Guardians of the Keep, making them snap the chains that bound them to their sacred duty. I ran like a madwoman through the corridors of Comigor, knowing as well as I knew the sun would set that Gerick would not be found in any corner of the world I knew.