Wouldn’t you know it, but the giant cage for whipped thieves and cheating prostitutes, or the Rat’s Nest, sat directly across the short hallway of solitary cells for “special concerns.” I sat at the front as they escorted in a malevolent-looking fellow, barely able to move from all the chains. But no amount of dragging iron did any good. Not long after, he escaped.

—

“Nice breeze tonight,” Werlyle said, sounding uncharacteristically sober and approaching from my rear. There was a comfortable wind out. Cool, its currents slipped through the black trees and caressed the balcony.

“Some dinner, aye? Don’t know why she insisted on rabbit. Venison was excellent.” Werlyle went on. “Those flimsy buzzards that circle her have to be from Pelliul.” He sucked on his lip. “Where’d you say you were from again, Snier?”

“I’m from here,” I said into my wine glass.

The party long over, I was waiting for the last slaves to retire from the brute chores a butler was thankfully spared—I was more a figurehead, after all, and had my own list of errands.

Werlyle and I talked when the deviations from my reconnaissance and his bottle both aligned. We’d developed a modest friendship, one could say. Mostly to share our disdain for Morlia, I would join him in his chambers for a game of dice or a few shots of a potent beverage.

“What a place,” he said, leaning over the balcony as if he’d arrived that day. The outer bailey’s wall faded into the floor of the black eastern forest. Squinting one’s eyes under a waxing moon like tonight’s, you could make out gardens turned wild thickets, neglected statues, and of course the stakes saved for the Lady’s wrath.

Girdling the mansion was a wall separating the inner and outer baileys. Equipped with archer towers and weather-beaten merlons, the crenels from above looked to be once defendable, but now were crumbling with the breeze. In the inner bailey, or as Morlia referred to it if she remembered her nomenclature, the lower bailey, were the wells and a stable in front of the grazing ground. No horses lived in the stable anymore, just droves of rodents and the owl feasting on them.

Also in the “lower bailey” was the family graveyard. Staring at me from outside my chamber windows, the graveyard now lay somber below me as the night air weaved in and out of its vaulted obelisks. Werlyle was looking at them as well.

“A Rogaire male has sat in this house since it was built. You know, Snier, that this house is the farthest east in all the Morgeltine?”

“No, I didn’t. How interesting.”

“Many a marauder and beast used to live in those woods yonder.” Tossing a nod toward the black. “Still some lurk in its bosom; it was the first Rogaires to settle in Nilghorde that were tasked with their confrontin’.”