“There’s a fly in the room somewhere,” the Marshal-General said.

“It’s not a fly,” Dorrin said. She brought the ax down full force on the floor. The old wood, hardened by time, rang but did not yield. The bloodstain darkened perceptibly. Again … again … and the wood cracked. Blood spurted up through the crack, the smell of it strong in the room, followed by the stench of decay. Dorrin ignored it, striking again and again, working the head of the ax into the gap and tugging pieces of board free. She had no time to think of the others, not with wave after wave of malice pounding at her. The first board yielded finally with a shriek, and then another and another. The red mist she had seen before formed in the air, but this time others were also praying, and it dissipated more quickly.

Under the floor a space the size of a small body had been framed in and covered with a blood-soaked cloth. She pulled that back and saw for a few moments a child’s mummified body resting on a bed of shattered bone. Then it collapsed, the skin and flesh vanishing away like the blood-mist, leaving clean bone behind. Every prayer she knew ran through her mind; she felt her eyes burning, the hot tears on her face.

“Gird’s grace,” the Marshal-General said softly. She was kneeling beside Dorrin now and put out a hand to touch the small skull, stroking it. “Gird’s grace on this child and—I presume—the others whose bones lie here. Poor little ones. And their families—they must have thought them run away or fallen into the river.”

Dorrin blinked her tears away and wished she could erase that momentary glimpse of the body—the obvious marks of pain on those small limbs. “Marshal Tamis is right,” she said. “This house should be destroyed. We burned the old keep, back in Verrakai domain, for the same reason; it was saturated in evil, centuries of it.”

“I think not,” the Marshal-General said. “This evil is gone—I feel it is gone.”

“And I,” Oktar said. “Look—the bloodstains are gone from even the broken boards.”

At that moment something rustled in the cavity, and the bone fragments under the skeleton stirred. “A mouse,” Marshal Tamis said.

“No mouse would—” Dorrin began, and then a battered, dusty spoon with a loop-shaped handle rose through the bone fragments to the surface.

“Holy Gird,” the Marshals said together. Then the Marshal-General said, “A spoon? What does a spoon mean?”

“It’s not a spoon,” Dorrin said. Despite the horror of the whole room, she knew she had to pick it up.

Yes, the crown said in her head. It belongs with us. With you.

She reached out; the Marshal-General grabbed her wrist. “Be careful! It might still be—”

“It’s magical but not evil,” Dorrin said. “I think it will change in my hand—watch—” She plucked the spoon out—heavy silver, it felt like—and her hand and arm tingled as they had before. The spoon squirmed, re-forming into a ring, a sapphire surrounded by diamonds.