“Eat more, then,” Chert said, “—but slowly. Why should you be hiding? What has happened to the world up there? We hear stories, and even if they are only half true or less, they are still astonishing and terrifying—the fairy folk defeating our army, the princess and her brother dead or run away…”

“Briony has not run away,” said Chaven, scowling. “I would stake my life on that. In fact, I already have.”

Chert shook his head, lost. “What are you talking about?”

“It is a long tale, and as full of madness as anything you have heard about fairy armies…”

Opal stood abruptly as a noise came from behind them. Flint, pale and bleary-eyed, stood in the doorway. “What are you doing out of bed?” she demanded.

The boy looked at her, his face chillingly dull. With all the things that had been strange or even frightening about him before, Chert could not help thinking, this lifeless, disinterested look was worse by far. “Thirsty.”

“I’ll bring you in water, child. You are not ready to be out of bed yet, so soon after the fever has passed.” She gave Chert and Chaven a significant glance. “Keep your voices down,” she told them.

Chert had barely begun to describe the bizarre events of Winter’s Eve when Opal returned from getting Flint back into bed, so he started again. His tale, which would have been an incredible one coming from the mouth of someone recently returned from exotic foreign lands, let alone the familiar precincts of Southmarch, would have been impossible to believe had it not been Chaven himself speaking, a man Chert knew to be not just honest, but rigorously careful about what he knew and did not know, about what could be proved or only surmised. “Built on bedrock,” as Chert’s father had always said of someone trustworthy, “not on sand, sliding this way and that with every shrug of the Elders.”

“So do you think that this Tolly villain had something to do with the southern witch, Selia?” Chert asked. “With the death of poor Prince Kendrick and the attack on the princess?” From his one brief meeting with her, Chert had a proprietorial fondness for Briony Eddon, and already loathed Hendon Tolly and his entire family with an unquenchable hatred.

“I can’t say, but the snatches of conversation I heard from him and his guards made them sound just as surprised as me. But their treachery to the royal family cannot be questioned, nor their desire to murder me, a witness of what really happened.”

“They truly would have killed you?” asked Opal.

“Definitely, had I remained to be killed,” Chaven said with a pained smile. “As I hid from them in the Tower of Spring, I heard Hendon Tolly telling his minions that I was by no means to survive my capture—that he would reward the man who finished me.”

“Elders!” breathed Opal. “The castle’s in the hands of bandits and murderers!”

“For the moment, certainly. Without Princess Briony or her brother, I see no way to change things.” All the talking had tired the physician; he seemed barely able to keep his head up.