But her attire was very austere for one so young: stark white on white, unadorned but for the pattern of the fabric itself, almost as though she had known, before entering the room, of the dreadful news the young king brought. After the servants had been dismissed, she listened calmly as Kelson told of her husband’s treachery, her expression hardly changing. When he had finished, she turned away and stared out the window for a long time: a slim shadow of white and gold in the brilliant moonlight.

“Shall I call one of your maidservants, my lady?” Kelson asked in a low voice, concerned that she might faint or become hysterical, as he had heard that noble ladies sometimes were wont to do.

Richenda bowed her head and shook it slowly, pulling the lace kerchief from her long, red-golden hair and letting it fall to the floor. A gold ring set with a heavy seal—her husband’s betrothal ring—winked on her left hand as she ran her hands along the stone window-ledge, and Kelson thought he saw something wet mark the stone sill for just an instant.

But the hands quickly covered the teardrop, if such it had been. Nor did the slim fingers tremble as she gazed down at them, unseeing. Richenda of Marley was a daughter of the nobility, bred to dignity and stoic acceptance of her lot in the general order of things. She reminded Kelson a little of his mother.

“I am truly sorry, my lady,” Kelson finally said, wishing there was something else he could say to ease her pain. “If—if it will make your sorrow any easier to bear, be assured that I will not hold your husband’s treachery against you or your son. You shall have my personal protection for as long as—”

There was a curt, staccato knock at the door, followed immediately by Morgan’s low-voiced, “Kelson?”

Kelson turned expectantly at the sound of his name and moved toward the door, not noticing the effect the voice had had on the woman at the window. As Morgan entered, Richenda’s face went pale and the fingers of one hand clenched on the sill of the moonlit window. Morgan made a perfunctory bow in her direction but did not really see her, so absorbed was he in delivering his message to the king. As he and Kelson met, the woman watched in amazement, as though unable to believe what her eyes and ears perceived.

“Forgive the interruption, my prince,” Morgan murmured, lowering his head to point out the signature as Kelson tilted the page toward the light. “I knew you would wish to see this at once. Duke Jared is captured but alive, at last report. General Gloddruth and a few others managed to escape. The council has been apprised.”

“Gloddruth!” Kelson breathed, moving toward the rack of candles and reading eagerly. “And Burchard, too! My lady, you will pardon me, this is important news.”

At his words, Morgan glanced up as though just remembering that there was a third person in the room, then met the woman’s wide blue eyes and nearly recoiled. For just an instant, his memory flashed back to the previous spring, to the road by Saint Torin’s, to a mired coach bound for Dhassa and a lady with hair the color of flame in sunlight; again, to a woman and child seen leaving vespers at the bishop’s chapel only last week. It was the same woman, the one he had almost asked Duncan about; the woman whose face had been graven on his memory since that first brief encounter on the Dhassa road.