He nodded to the old jester, ready to begin again. Most of the courtiers, although not all, politely lowered their voices once more.

“At last Surazem came to birthing bed,” Tinwright declaimed, half-singing in the Syannese style now expected at court entertainments,

“As the Four Winds hovered to cool her brow,
Her sister, her semblance, stood at her head
Dark Onyena, bound by a sacred vow
Like oxen traced unwilling to the plow.
On high Sarissa her own infant son
Lay coldly dead ’neath the pine’s snowy bough
Because Sveros cruelly had decreed that none
Should midwife one twin but the other one…”

For long moments Tinwright could almost forget what was really happening—that almost no one was listening to the words he declaimed, that the rumble of talk and drunken laughter made it hard for even those few who wanted to hear, and that in any case there were darker, grimmer matters to think about than even the fall of gods—and could revel in the fact that for this moment, at least, he was presenting his verse before the entire royal court of Southmarch. His own verse!

“But now as Perin’s infant head appeared
Surazem’s dark twin saw her time, and thieved
From out her sister’s belly, blood-besmeared,
That essence which the world has so long grieved
For Onyena with it three more conceived,
Repaying cruelly the death of her own,
A fated tapestry which first she weaved
As her sister in childbirth’s pain did groan
And thus were the seeds of the gods’ war sown…”

One of the few people paying attention was the man who had commissioned the poem, Hendon Tolly himself, who frightened Tinwright in ways he had never even imagined possible. Another was the young woman Elan M’Cory, the object of Tinwright’s own painful affection, to whom he had promised to bring poison tonight.

A strange audience, at best, he admitted to himself.

One of those most obviously not paying attention was Hendon’s brother, the new Duke of Summerfield. Caradon Tolly was more like the dead brother Gailon than like Hendon, jut-jawed and big across the shoulders. His square face reflected little of what went on behind it—Tinwright thought he seemed more statue than man—but he was known to be heavy-handed and ruthless, though perhaps lacking his younger sibling’s flair for cruelty. Just now Duke Caradon was staring openly at the Southmarch nobles gathered in the banquet hall, as if making a list of who would serve the Tollys well and who would not. The objects of his gaze looked almost uniformly discomforted.

Looking at this cold, powerful man, Matt Tinwright felt sick at his stomach. What am I thinking, meddling in the Tollys’ affairs? I am far out of my depth—they could kill me in an instant! Remembering how certain he had been only a few days ago that he would be executed, he almost lost his place in the poem. He had to swallow down this sudden fright and force himself back into his words, spreading his arms as he declaimed,