Sanglant smiled. “I so swear, Hathui. You will have satisfaction.”

“Your Majesty,” she said, head bowed, and kissed the royal seal ring on his right hand, the one he had taken off his father’s body.

He stood in unusual stillness for a long time, unwilling to break into her grief, but at last she shook her head and rose.

“There is wine,” he said. “Captain Fulk will see you get anything you wish. We’ll keep a close watch, but I expect Hugh is gone. And that you are safe from him for the time being. Still, we must be cautious.”

“Your Majesty,” she said. She nodded at Liath, and left the tent.

He remained still for a shockingly long time, and she watched him, curious and also not at all recovered from the unexpected memory of the weaving that had risen like a tide to engulf her. It had troubled her. It had roiled the waters.

“What is it?” she asked him finally.

“Did you touch him? In the library?” His voice was hoarse, but then, he always sounded like that.

‘Are you jealous of him, Sanglant?”

“Of course I’m jealous of him! I know he—” He faltered, grimacing. “I know he … possessed your body.”

“He took what he wanted. I didn’t go to him willingly.”

“I know! I know! It just … gripes me to think of him touching you. That isn’t all of it. He has all the skills you treasure. He can read and write and puzzle over the mysteries of the heavens, just as you do.” He waved toward the walls, the ceiling, the lantern. “He knows sorcery. He’s more like you than I am.”

“That’s true,” she agreed, smiling as he got to looking more agitated. “It’s a terrible thing to imagine that a man as evil as Hugh can be compared to me in so many ways.”

“That’s not what I meant!” he answered, laughing but still worrying at it. “He’s just so damned beautiful.”

“That’s true,” she agreed.

“How can the outer seeming so ill match the inner heart?”

“I don’t know. Yet in the end even his beauty has failed him. His own half siblings ought to trust and embrace him, but they hate and distrust him instead. He betrayed those who did trust him. He is a fugitive, a man without kinfolk or retinue to aid him. Perhaps God have set him before us as a lesson.”

“What sort of lesson? I am not well versed in these clerical riddles.”

He was amused, and no doubt a little relieved, but in her own heart laughter had fled. ” ‘Chaos in the world is the result of disorder in the human soul.’ I didn’t say it,” she added. “I’m just quoting. I read it in a book.”

“Which doesn’t make it any less true. Did you touch him?”

She thought of Waltharia, a nice enough woman, someone she had liked perfectly well. Someone who had shown her a moment’s surprising, and genuine, compassion.