“Fascinating.” Katsa poured gravy onto her meat.

“The Monsean queen is grieving terribly for Grandfather Tealiff,” Giddon said. “A Monsean merchant spoke of it.”

“I’d heard she wasn’t eating,” Katsa said. It seemed to her a foolish way to grieve.

“There’s more,” Giddon said. “She’s closed herself and her daughter into her rooms. She permits no one but her handmaiden to enter, not even King Leck.”

That seemed not only foolish but peculiar. “Is she allowing her daughter to eat?”

“The handmaiden brings them meals,” Giddon said. “But they won’t leave the rooms. Apparently the king is being very patient about it.”

“It will pass,” Oll said. “There’s no saying what grief will do to a person. It will pass when her father is found.”

The Council would keep the old man hidden, for his own safety, until they learned the reason for his kidnapping. But perhaps a message could be sent to the Monsean queen, to ease her strange grief? Katsa determined to consider it. She would bring it up with Giddon and Oll, when they could talk safely.

“She’s Lienid,” Giddon said. “They’re known to be odd people.”

“It seems very odd to me,” Katsa said. She’d never felt grief, or if she had, she didn’t remember. Her mother, Randa’s sister, had died of a fever before Katsa’s eyes had settled, the same fever that had taken Raffin’s mother, Randa’s queen. Her father, a northern Middluns borderlord, had been killed in a raid across the border. It had been a Westeran raid on a Nanderan village. It hadn’t been his responsibility, but he’d taken up the defense of his neighbors, and gotten himself killed in the process. She hadn’t even been of speaking age. She didn’t remember him.

If her uncle died, she didn’t think she would grieve. She glanced at Giddon. She wouldn’t like to lose him, but she didn’t think she would grieve his loss, either. Oll was different. She would grieve for Oll. And her ladyservant, Helda. And Raffin. Raffin’s loss would hurt more than a finger sliced off, or an arm broken, or a knife in her side.

But she wouldn’t close herself in her rooms. She would go out and find the one who had done it, and then she’d make that person feel pain as no one had ever felt pain before.

Giddon was speaking to her, and she wasn’t listening. She shook herself. “What did you say?”

“I said, lady dreamer, that I believe the sky is clearing. We’ll be able to set out at dawn, if you like.”

They would reach court before nightfall. Katsa finished her meal quickly and ran to her room to pack her bags.

Chapter Six

THE SUN was well on its way across the sky when their horses clattered onto the marble floor of Randa’s inner courtyard. Around them on all sides, the white castle walls rose and stood brightly against the green marble of the floor. Balconied passageways lined the walls above, so that the people of the court could look down into the courtyard as they moved from one section of the castle to another and admire Randa’s great garden of crawling vines and pink flowering trees. A statue of Randa stood in the center of the garden, a fountain of water flowing from one outstretched hand and a torch in the other. It was an attractive garden, if one did not dwell on the statue, and an attractive courtyard—but not a peaceful or private one, with the entire court roaming the passageways above.