When I came out, Justine was sitting on her bed, looking scared. A tall, muscular white woman was guarding the door. She looked to be in her late thirties, and I could see she’d lived through some serious injuries. One particularly nasty scar ran from her jaw up into her hairline, pulling her left eye a little askew. She was almost as tough-looking as Williams. Maybe she did the same kind of work. No wonder Justine looked scared.

When she spoke, though, she sounded calm and rational — not exactly friendly, but certainly not psychotic.

“I’m Gwen. You’re Elizabeth?”

“Yeah. Hi.”

She nodded civilly. “The staff brought both of you some breakfast and some clothes that should fit. Lord Cordus will visit you soon, so you’d both better eat and get dressed.”

She gestured at the untouched breakfast tray on Justine’s lap. A similar one was waiting on my bed.

“Cordus?” Justine said in a strange tone.

Gwen and I both turned to look at her. She’d visibly relaxed, and the expression on her face was sort of vacant.

“You know Lord Cordus?” I asked.

She frowned. “I don’t know.” Her eyes roved around, as though searching for some lost thing. “No,” she decided, “but he sounds trustworthy.”

She started tucking into her breakfast.

“Mmm, this is good.”

I looked back at Gwen. “Did you tell her anything about Lord Cordus?”

She shook her head, looking a little perplexed.

Well, whatever. Cordus could work it out.

As it turned out, he couldn’t. Justine seemed perfectly relaxed in his presence, even happy to see him, yet maintained that she’d never laid eyes on him. She claimed to have no memory of running away or of turning into a deer. The very idea clearly struck her as ludicrous. Such things were simply impossible, and even if they weren’t, she was a normal woman — they were impossible for her.

And yet, when Cordus mentioned returning to Dorf, she blanched and said she couldn’t.

But she couldn’t come up with a reason why not.

“I just can’t,” she said, shaking her head and trembling.

The three of us were perched in the suite’s sitting area. Cordus had shown up about half an hour after I came out of the bathroom. Gwen had opened the door for him, then left. He’d questioned Justine extensively, while politely declining to answer any of her questions or to let her call Ben.

“Would you feel safer,” Cordus said slowly, “if I were to tell you that the green man is dead?”

Justine again visibly relaxed but at the same time said, “Who’s the green man?” A second later she said, “I still can’t go home.”

Then she accused me again of having kidnapped her and flirtatiously asked Cordus to have me arrested.