If a fight erupted in this room, it would be a massacre.

Katsa stepped forward, her eyes and ears finely tuned to the archers. Randa’s archers were good, but they were not Graced. Katsa spared a moment to drily pity the guards at her back, if this encounter came down to arrow dodging.

And then, when she’d progressed about halfway to the throne, her uncle called out. “Stop there. I’ve no wish for your closer company, Katsa.” Her name sounded like steam hissing down the carpet when Randa spoke it. “You return to court today with no woman. No dowry. My underlord and my captain injured by your hand. What do you have to say for yourself?”

When a battalion of soldiers didn’t trouble her, why should one voice rile her so? She forced herself to hold his contemptuous eyes. “I didn’t agree with your order, Lord King.”

“Can I possibly have heard you correctly? You didn’t agree with my order?”

“No, Lord King.”

Randa sat back, his smile twisted tighter now. “Charming,” he said. “Charming, truly. Tell me, Katsa. What, precisely, possessed you with the notion that you are in a position to consider the king’s orders? To think about them? To form opinions regarding them? Have I ever asked you to share your thoughts on anything?”

“No, Lord King.”

“Have I ever encouraged you to bestow upon us your sage advice?”

“No, Lord King.”

“Do you imagine it is your wit, your stunning intellect, that warrants your position in this court?”

And here was where Randa was clever. This was how he’d kept her a caged animal for so long. He knew the words to make her feel stupid and brutish and turn her into a dog.

Well, and if she must be a dog, at least she would no longer be in this man’s cage. She would be her own, she would possess her own viciousness, and she would do what she liked with it. Even now, she felt her arms and legs beginning to thrill with readiness. She narrowed her eyes at the king. She could not keep the challenge out of her voice.

“And what exactly is the purpose of all these men, Uncle?”

Randa smiled blandly. “These men will attack if you make the slightest move. And at the end of this interview they’ll accompany you to my dungeons.”

“And do you imagine I’ll go willingly to your dungeons?”

“I don’t care if you go willingly or not.”

“That’s because you think these men could force me to go against my will.”

“Katsa. Of course we all have the highest regard for your skill. But even you have no chance against two hundred guards and my best archers. The end of this conversation will see you either in my dungeons, or dead.”

Katsa saw and heard everything in the room. The king and his archers; the arrows notched and aimed; the guards ready with their swords; her arms in red sleeves, her feet beneath red skirts. The room was still, completely still, excepting the breath of the men around her, and the tingling she felt inside her. She held her hands at her sides, away from her body, so that everyone could see them. She breathed around a thing that she recognized now as hatred. She hated this king. Her body was alive with it.