:When my gut decides to go along with my head, I suppose,: he replied glumly. :And my gut is going to be screaming, “but he’s only a child!” for a little while longer at least.:

He might have said something more, but at just that moment, a bell rang out, cutting across the winter night.

And for one, horrible moment, he thought it was the Death Bell, and his thoughts fastened on Harrow—

But no, it wasn’t. It was the Great Bell at the Palace—not the Collegium Bell, that sounded the candlemarks and the meals, but the huge, deep-toned Bell that sounded only for major occasions. So what—

A moment later, his question was answered.

:It’s time! It’s Selenay!: said Kantor, and given the gravid condition of the Queen, that was all Kantor needed to say.

Selenay had gone into labor. By dawn, Valdemar would have an Heir-Presumptive.

And from that moment on, the Queen would be standing between Prince Karathanelan and his ambitions.

Alberich shivered. It had begun.

21

21

“I’m sorry, Weaponsmaster,” Mical sighed. He pushed the papers away from him, and reluctantly, Alberich took them and folded them up, tightly. “All I get from them is—” he screwed up his face, “—the writer was in a hurry, really annoyed with something, and wanted to get this over with. I think he was that actor fellow—the one we all thought was so—interesting.” He paused again, then smiled wanly. “And about the only thing that I can tell you besides that is that he thought the person he was writing to was very, very thick.”

Alberich sighed. It had been a long shot, of course. He’d hoped that somehow the secret instructions from Norris to the Prince would have some link to the unknown patron. But—no luck, it seemed. Whoever the patron was, Norris had not been thinking of him when he’d been writing the Prince’s “scripts.”

“My thanks, regardless, Mical,” he said. He saw Mical glancing with longing at the door, and he found a bit of sympathy for the boy. It was the first fine day in—well, since autumn. And Mical, no longer under punishment duty, was probably afire to be out in it. “Go along—”

He hadn’t so much as gotten the words out when Mical was out the door like a shot.

“Frustrating,” said Myste redundantly. “We’ve got one end of the path—Norris to Karath. We have the other, Devlin to Norris. But we still don’t have the so-called ‘patron’ who links it all into a neat circle.”