“Come along,” she said, “but say nothing.” She carried only the empty buckets, tongs, and shovel, so he was sweating and his legs shaking by the time they climbed the steps that led up to the old palace, once the imperial winter residence of Emperor Taillefer.

They passed by the broad porch of the famous octagonal chapel where lay the emperor’s tomb. A pair of bored guards stood on watch, chatting as they chafed hands and stamped feet to keep warm.

“Yes, the lad would have been whipped to death, I’m thinking, and all for a loaf of bread, but the lord cleric intervened and got him sent to the church as a servant instead. Hoo! That was a stroke of fortune.”

“Or God’s work done through man’s hands.”

“Truth rises with the phoenix! Here, now, did you hear about—”

“Come!” whispered his guide, seeing how Ivar had slowed to listen. He hurried after her.

The central palace, built all of wood, was an echoing hall and terrifically cold within, but they passed through to a separate wing where the lady and her personal retainers made their home. Like Count Harl, but unlike her brother the regnant, Sabella had planted herself in one place and traveled only brief circuits of the countryside when the mood took her or a pocket of discontent needed quelling.

Beyond the smaller audience chamber lay a series of rooms that housed her attendants and clerics. They passed through the tiny room set aside for her schola, dark and empty now. The sloped writing desks were veiled by shadows, and chests and cabinets sealed tight against vermin. Beyond that lay a handsome chapel, lit at this hour by a dozen lamps molded into the shape of guivres. Quietly, they set down the buckets next to a trio of braziers. A woman knelt on cold stone although there were carpets aplenty to cushion her knees. Her wheat-colored hair was braided back from her face and covered with a mesh of gold wire threaded with pearls, held in place with a golden coronet. Because her back was to them, Ivar could not see her face, but he did not need to see her face. He had stared at her back, at her profile, at her pale, drawn features through that hole in the fence in Qyedlinhame often enough that he would know her anywhere and instantly. It wasn’t only her rich burgundy underrobe and fur-lined overtunic that betrayed her as a woman of highest station. It wasn’t only the heavy golden torque shackling her slender neck that announced her royal status.

He recognized as well that particular way she had of clasping her hands, perfected in those days when it had hurt her to press her palms together because of the weeping sores, her stigmata, the mark of her holiness and the sign of the Lady’s favor. The ones she had inflicted herself, by digging at her skin with a nail, so Hathumod claimed.

If Tallia had been lying about the sores, then was it possible she had lied about the heresy as well? What if the phoenix was a lie?