There. A point of light flickered across the river. Someone had seen their signal. Now came the moment—would a boat come? Or would the king of Pargun’s ambitious brother prevent it? He and the king, Elis and the Knight-Commander, went with the others to the landing stage. A boat was coming, rigged with a small sail.

“I can’t see …” the king said.

Elis shivered; Kieri turned to her. “The cold?”

“No,” she said, sounding sulky. “I’m afraid—afraid I’ll do it wrong and ruin everything.”

“We don’t know what right is, so we don’t know what wrong is,” Kieri said. “You know the plan; you know the desired outcome. You know the people there and here both. Just think what you really want from this, and feel your way to it.”

“Feel?” the king said, not quite scornfully.

“It is a situation for which none of us has a good set of rules,” Kieri said. “Like a battle on unknown terrain, with new troops. She is your daughter; she is a fledgling Knight of Falk: she will do her best, and I suspect her best is very good.”

“You honor me too much, Sir King,” she said. She no longer sounded sulky.

“If this works,” Kieri said, “no honor will be too much, for you or your father.” He caught the king’s eye. “And no, it is not southern flattery. Think what rests on it.”

“I am thinking,” the king said, “that it is time we moved to where the torches light our faces.”

Flames whipped past them in the gathering dark. Kieri had found a tiara that a jeweler twisted into a half-crown for the Pargunese king. He himself wore his own. A risk, his Council had said. And he had said, “If I fall, you will have worse to worry about than a lost crown. Our only chance is for the Pargunese—enough Pargunese—to see two kings together, in council, saying the same things.”

He hoped it would work.

The boat came nearer, driven by wind and steered across the river’s current by a steersman standing erect on the high stern and plying his oar. The boat was half full: Kieri saw a boy or young man in rich garb, hard-faced Pargunese soldiers who must be his guard, and three other men, also richly dressed.

“That’s Iolin,” Elis said.

The boy made it up the steps of the landing stage first, light-footed and blown by anger as much as wind. “You!” he said to Elis, who had stepped forward to greet him. “I thought you wanted to raise horses, not go whoring among foreign soldiers! Do you even know what you have cost us?” He slapped her full in the face. Elis staggered and might have fallen if the Knight-Commander’s shoulder had not braced her.

Someone just onto the landing stage from the boat yelled and ran toward them, but the king had already grabbed the boy about the body and, bellowing with rage, threw him off the landing stage into the river. The boy yelped, then came a splash and … nothing. Elis shrieked; the other men in the boat all yelled and came running at them; the Pargunese guards drew their swords.