Across the room, in the door to his bedchamber, stood a grinning stranger wearing a palace tabard; he held a short bow in one hand and an arrow in his teeth. Spitting the arrow into his hand, he said, “I do like it when they’re naked and helpless.”

Kieri hurled the soap at the man’s face; the man put up his hand instinctively, dropping the arrow. As Kieri surged out of the tub and grabbed the ewer Joriam had set down, he saw the man fumble at the tabard, as if he expected to find an arrow there, and then dive for the one on the floor. Before he could reach it, Kieri was on him, smashing the heavy ewer in his face, a foot and then a knee in the man’s belly, hitting him again with the ewer, and again … the anger he thought he’d worked off in the salle roared through him like the winter wind, even when the man lay still, blood running from his nose and ears. Kieri raised the ewer again … and stopped. He could hear his own harsh breathing and nothing else. The taig—he must think of the taig. The man was dead. He might not be the only assassin—and his people needed their king, not a wild man.

He looked for the fallen arrow, found it, and stood up carefully, watching where he stepped in case of any other hazard. As his pulse slowed, he felt chilled … Joriam, poor old Joriam … and who else? How had the assassin made it this far? How had he known where to go? Was it safe to call out?

His hands were blood-splashed; he dipped them in the still-warm bathwater, plucked a warmed towel off the rack by the fire and dried his hands, rubbed himself with it. Then he went back to the assassin, picked up the bow, put the arrow on the string, and walked into his bedchamber. He heard a cry from the corridor just as he saw the bodies of Aulin and Sarol and heard someone running toward him.

He had just presence of mind to drop the bow and grab his sword from the rack when two white-faced Squires, Edrin and Lieth, appeared. “Sir King!”

“An assassin,” Kieri said. “I killed him, but not before he killed those Squires and Joriam, I’m sorry to say.”

“He—you—you’re alive!”

“As you see,” Kieri said. They had both seen more than anyone here but Joriam; after a bath the old scars always showed clearly. “I need to dress,” he said, laying his sword on the bed. Joriam, bless him, had set out clothes for the evening in the bathing room, but he was not going back in there, not immediately. “The bodies are in the bathing room,” he said. “Joriam took an arrow in the throat. The Seneschal should be told, to honor our dead.”

The bedroom felt cold after the bathing room; he went to his closet and began dressing, as the Squires called for more help.