Shaso, though, watched with a calculating eye as the young man went out again. “Do you think your nephew might have some spare garments he could lend us?” Shaso asked suddenly.

“Garments?” Dan-Mozan raised an eyebrow.

“Rough ones, not fine cloth. Suitable for some hard labor.”

“I do not understand.”

“He looks as though clothing of his might fit the princess. We can roll up the cuffs and sleeves.” He turned to Briony. “We will put that anger of yours to some good work this afternoon.”

“But surely you will come,” Puzzle said. “I asked for you, Matty—I told them you were a poet, a very gifted poet.”

Ordinarily, the chance to perform at table for the masters of Southmarch would have been the first and last thing solicited in Matt Tinwright’s nightly prayers (if he had been the sort of person to pray) but for some reason, he was not so certain he wanted to be known by the Tollys and their friends at court, both old and new. The past tennight things had seemed to change, as though the dark clouds that these days always clung to the city across the bay had drifted over the castle as well.

Perhaps I am too sensitive, he told himself. My poet’s nature. The Tollys have done nothing but good in an ill time, surely. Still, he had begun to hear tales from the kitchen workers and some of the other servitors with whom he shared quarters in the back of the residence that made him uneasy—tales of people disappearing and others being badly beaten or even executed for minor mistakes. One of the kitchen potboys had seen a young page’s fingers cut off at the table by Tolly’s lieutenant Berkan Hood for spilling a cup of wine, and Tinwright knew it was true because he had seen the poor lad being tended in a bed with a bandage over his bloody stumps.

“I…I am not certain I am ready to perform for them myself,” he told Puzzle. “But I will help you. A new song, perhaps?”

“Aye, truly? Something I could dedicate to Lord Tolly…?” As Puzzle paused to consider this and its possible results, Tinwright noticed movement on the wall of the Inner Keep where it passed around Wolfstooth Spire, a short arrow’s flight from the residence garden where he and Puzzle had met to share some cooking wine that Puzzle had filched from the lesser buttery. For a moment he thought it was a phantom, a transparent thing of dark mists, but then he realized that the woman walking atop the wall was wearing veils and a net shawl over her black dress and he knew at once who it was.

“We will talk later, yes?” he said to Puzzle, giving the jester a clap on the back that almost knocked the old man over. “There is something I need to do.”

Tinwright ran across the garden, dodging wandering sheep and goats as though in some village festival game. He knew Puzzle must be staring at his sudden retreat as though he were mad, but if this was madness it was the sweetest kind, the sort that a man could catch and never wish to lose.