I felt cold all over, despite the warmth of Dain's arms around me. "Someone set them up," I whispered. "Ciradyl told me once that you had her loyalty until the day she died. She shouldn't have been able to do it."

"She did?" Dain said, sounding shocked.

I nodded, my head still resting against the bare skin of his strong chest. A flicker of memory: desperation in a man's eyes as he gave me a way to break his instructions, telling me that the most important thing was making Dain happy. Had they been screaming in the backs of their minds, too? Had they woken up with no memory of what had happened to them?

If he'd somehow survived – if the iron hadn't been enough – surely the expectation would have been that he would kill them with the same hot rage that had driven him to nearly start a war over an arrow in my leg. Dain hated sexual assault of all kinds, and drugging someone to make her put a murder weapon inside herself and seduce her soulmate to his brutal betrayal and death for sure counted. That it had been done to me? Surely the person who'd commanded them would have anticipated never being found, because they expected Dain's sword to silence any hope of finding them.

He'd said, "tell me what to do." Dain wasn't the same man anymore, was he? He wanted them dead, yes, and he hadn't yet leashed himself. But he'd handed me the leash, and I knew down to my bones that he would respect it if I told him not to harm them.

"We need to talk to them," I said, looking at the thing that had been given to me again, where it lay ugly on the floor. "Look at their schedules and their stories, and figure out who hurt them."

"And that's what you want me to do?" he asked.

I nodded, then kissed him on the sternum and placed my hand on top of the kiss and his heart, looking up into his eyes. "Yes, that's what I want you to do," I said quietly. "Someone powerful wants you dead. Someone who got enemies into the palace gardens to start a war, and who was stymied when you stopped that war from happening. Someone who can get something like that made, and do this." I hesitated, then added, "Maybe someone who already started a different war to see you dead, and failed then, too."

"You're talking about my mother," he said, his voice as soft as mine.

"I don't know, but maybe," I said. "She said some spooky things to me when we were alone after open court, about me being your weakness. Would the Court magic keep her from doing something like this?"