“Thank all the gods my wife is not such a frail flower,” Caradon said with his lip curled. “Little Elan has always been the doleful one of that family.”

Hendon Tolly beckoned Tinwright forward. He produced a bag that clinked and put it in Tinwright’s hands.

“Thank you, Lord Tolly.” He tucked it away quickly, without testing the weight—to receive anything other than a blow from this man was a gift in itself. “You are too kind. I am glad my words…”

“Yes, yes. It amused me, and there is little that does so these days. Did you see old Brone squirming when you spoke the part about ‘Ever must the blood of tyrants water That free and sovereign soil of our fair honor’? It was very funny.”

“I…I didn’t notice, my lord.”

Tolly shrugged. “Still, it is like spearing fish in a soup bowl. I miss the Syannese court. They are sharp as daggers, there. A good jest is appreciated. Not like here, or in my family’s house, which is like dining with the local deacon in some Helmingsea village.”

“Enough, Hendon,” said Caradon sharply. “Send this warbling phebe away—we have men’s talk to talk and your childish festivities have wasted enough of my time.”

Tinwright thought the look Hendon gave his brother the duke was one of the strangest he had ever seen, a combination of amusement and deadly loathing. “By all means, elder brother. You may withdraw, poet.”

Tinwright, sickened, could tell that Hendon planned to murder his brother someday. He had also seen in that same moment that Caradon himself knew it very well, and that the duke probably planned the same for his younger brother. The two of them scarcely bothered to conceal their feelings, even in front of a stranger. How could one family breed such hatred? No wonder Elan wanted to escape them into death.

“Of course,” Tinwright said as he quickly backed away. “Going now. Thank you, my lords.”

He at least had the small satisfaction of seeing that Erlon Meaher, another court poet who thought much of himself, had been watching his conversation with the two Tollys. Meaher’s face was twisted in an unhidden grimace of envy and dislike.

“Get yourself some wine, Tinwright,” Hendon Tolly called after him. “I’m sure reciting poetry is almost as thirsty work as killing—if not quite as enjoyable.”

It was the hardest hour of waiting he had ever experienced. He knocked on her door while the bells were still chiming the end of evening prayers.

Elan M’Cory opened it herself, shrouded in a heavy black robe. She had sent away her servants to protect him, Tinwright realized, and he was surprised again by the intensity of feeling she aroused in him.

It was a touch of lover’s madness, surely—the very thing he had written about so many times. He had always felt secretly superior to the sort of lovesick people found in poems, almost contemptuous, but in these last days, as he had come to realize that he could not sleep, eat, drink, stand, sit, or talk without thinking about Elan M’Cory, matters had begun to seem very different. For one thing, although he had alluded in many a poem to the “happy pain” or even the “sweet agony” of love, he had not understood that the agony could be worse than any other sort of agony—worse than any actual pain of the limbs or organs, worse even than the way his head felt after a night out with Hewney and Teodoros, which he had previously thought could not be outdone for misery. And there was no way to separate a wounded heart from the body it tormented—no way except death.