“Yes. Black scales with golden seams running between each plate.”

“Golden, you say? Are you certain it wasn’t a trick of the light coming through the palace windows?”

“No, I’m certain of the color. The light didn’t reach it.”

“How tall was it? How broad?”

“Half again as tall as you, Your Highness. And much broader of shoulder.”

“You are doing so wonderfully. What happened next?”

The calm façade that had washed over her as she described the monster finally broke, tears pooling in her eyes and then spilling down her cheeks. With quivering lips, she said, “The guards shoved the woman into the alcove behind them and drew their swords, but—” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, they were red and wet. “—but they might as well have been unarmed as much good it did them. Flames shot from the monster’s hands—it had claws, did I say that yet?—and then the two guards were burning. The sounds they made—full of agony, like they were being tortured—I’ll never be able to unhear them.”

“And the woman? What did she do?”

“She said something in a foreign tongue, Razim noth recorum? Something like that? I don’t know what it meant, but the monster didn’t like it at all. Flames erupted from its mouth and took her too. Why did it kill them, Your Highness? What was that thing?”

“Thank you,” Tomas said. “You have had a terrible ordeal. Please, take the rest of the day off. Rest your body and mind. I will inform Lady Arlsborough personally. I trust you will not speak of what you saw to anyone?”

“I never want to speak of it again. Or think of it, for that matter, Your Highness.”

“Good. Now go. You need not concern yourself with monsters or murders anymore. Actually, wait, I have just one more question.” The woman looked at him expectantly. “How did the monster escape?”

“Just as it arrived, on those creepy wings. All awkward and off-kilter. It’s a wonder it made it past the walls.”

“Indeed. Thank you. You may go.”

“We cannot have vigilante justice running rampant throughout the kingdom,” Tomas argued, moving his Knightsguard halfway across the board to an attack position. “Defend,” he said.

His father eyed the positioning of his own pieces, though there weren’t many of them left. “And we can’t have criminals escaping justice on legal technicalities. I know you were never going to let me get away with executing her.” The king made his own move, a lackluster attempt to position his cavalry between Tomas’s Knightsguard and his fortress.