Aye, she thought ruefully. That was the question. ‘It was you who brought us together.’

‘Only once.’ His jaw worked again. ‘It was a mistake, I admit it. Either I helped a traitor. Or else I have compromised you—’

‘Your conscience need not trouble you, either way. I am responsible for my own choices.’

‘Have they. . . hurt you?’

She lifted her head. A greasy lock of blonde hair fell across her eye. ‘There are no marks on me, Majesty. So I suppose they have not.’

‘If they but laid a finger on you, without my authority—’

‘No one has touched me.’

He nodded, apparently satisfied. But if he was satisfied with that, he was a fool. ‘I had wanted to help you.’

‘Had?’

‘Now I find I cannot trust you. . . I realize how little I know of you. . . I would release you but—’

‘The evidence.’

He nodded. ‘It demands an explanation. And you give none. Why were you with the lampros? You were heard arguing. What about?’

Lilla closed her eyes. More questions. Did they not know by now that she had no answers to their questions? ‘I must rest now,’ she said softly. ‘I am tired.’

‘Your pride will destroy you, Queen Lilla. I can end this. Only tell me the truth.’

‘What is truth?’ she murmured.

A stranger answer. She wasn’t even sure why she gave it. He looked at her with a curious expression. ‘So be it,’ he said abruptly, and left her hanging there in the cold and the dark. . .

Each day wore hard on Gerutha’s heart. She found no comfort from Yana, who seemed to take Queen Lilla’s imprisonment as mere respite from her duties. Gerutha’s attempts to see Lilla herself were met with a stone wall. She knew nothing – nothing but the gossip of the marketplace and kitchens and back passages of the palace. That her mistress was a murderess, that the evidence against her was damning and conclusive. It was only the emperor’s misplaced favour that kept her alive, the gossips said – and even he could not protect her for ever. Gerutha dreaded to think what state Lilla was in.

The only one to offer Gerutha any solace was Domnicus. ‘The Almighty knows her heart,’ he told her. ‘If she is innocent, God’s hand of mercy will protect her. Only believe. . .’

Aye, only believe, and pray. It seemed cold comfort. As if the innocent did not meet the fate of the wicked every single day in every land across the world of men.

She found keeping busy a far more effective balm for her troubled heart. And so she accompanied Domnicus whenever she could in his forays into the city to bring relief to the poor.

It took them a while to wend their way through the maze of back streets that made up the coppersmiths’ quarter, avoiding grey puddles and fetid gutters, listening to the street-hawkers’ cries and tinkers’ songs as they went about their work.