“What if they wake?” Giddon had said.

Prince Raffin had been offended. “You doubt my medicine. They won’t wake.”

“It would be faster to kill them,” Giddon had said, his brown eyes insistent. Heads in the dark room had nodded.

“I can do it in the time allotted,” Katsa had said, and when Giddon had started to protest, she’d held up her hand. “Enough. I won’t kill them. If you want them killed, you can send someone else.”

Oll had smiled and clapped the young lord on the back. “Just think, Lord Giddon, it’ll make it more fun for us. The perfect robbery, past all of Murgon’s guards, and nobody hurt? It’s a good game.”

The room had erupted with laughter, but Katsa hadn’t even cracked a smile. She wouldn’t kill, not if she didn’t have to. A killing couldn’t be undone, and she’d killed enough. Mostly for her uncle. King Randa thought her useful. When border ruffians were stirring up trouble, why send an army if you could send a single representative? It was much more economical. But she’d killed for the Council, too, when it couldn’t be avoided. This time it could be avoided.

At the far end of the orchard she came upon a guard who was old, as old, perhaps, as the Lienid. He stood in a grove of yearling trees, leaning on his sword, his back round and bent. She snuck up behind him and paused. A tremor shook the hands that rested on the hilt of his blade.

She didn’t think much of a king who didn’t retire his guards in comfort when they’d gotten too old to hold a sword steady.

But if she left him, he would find the others she’d felled and raise the alarm. She struck him once, hard, on the back of the head, and he slumped and let out a puff of air. She caught him and lowered him to the ground, as gently as she could, and then dropped a pill into his mouth. She took a moment to run her fingers along the lump forming on his skull. She hoped his head was strong.

She had killed once by accident, a memory she held close to her consciousness. It was how her Grace had announced its nature, a decade ago. She’d been a child, barely eight years old. A man who was some sort of distant cousin had visited the court. She hadn’t liked him—his heavy perfume, the way he leered at the girls who served him, the way his leer followed them around the room, the way he touched them when he thought no one was watching. When he’d started to pay Katsa some attention, she had grown wary. “Such a pretty little one,” he’d said. “Graceling eyes can be so very unattractive. But you, lucky girl, look better for it. What is your Grace, my sweetness? Storytelling? Mind reading? I know. You’re a dancer.”

Katsa hadn’t known what her Grace was. Some Graces took longer than others to surface. But even if she had known, she wouldn’t have cared to discuss it with this cousin. She’d scowled at the man and turned away. But then his hand had slid toward her leg, and her hand had flown out and smashed him in the face. So hard and so fast that she’d pushed the bones of his nose into his brain.