ZELLA provided an excellent early breakfast in a sunny dining room the next morning and at Klia’s order she and her party ate in private. Mika sat beside Thero, unusually quiet and wide-eyed. Perhaps Thero had explained the previous night’s events, thought Seregil.

“So, I assume you’ve told Alec what you and Thero found last night?” asked Klia as soon as the servants had left their platters and departed.

“It’s a nasty magic, apparently,” Alec replied. “From what Seregil says, it sounds like we need a healer or a priest. Drysians don’t deal in curses or ghosts.”

“Until I speak with Doctor Kordira, I won’t be able to do anything more with him,” Thero explained. “Assuming we trust her to help us.”

“I don’t trust anyone here yet,” said Seregil. “But I think our next concern should be the other soldier they’ve got locked up here.”

They finished the meal quickly and Alec went to find Zella. “Her Highness wishes to speak to the corporal now,” he told her.

“Of course. Naya, go fetch one of the boys to lead them down.”

The maid returned with a young man.

Mika gave Thero a nervous look. “May I stay with you, Master?”

“I think that’s best,” Thero replied.

The servant led them to the back of the house and down a wide set of dank stone stairs to a heavy door with a thick grille at eye level. Seregil wrinkled his nose at the smell, one he was all too familiar with, and caught Alec doing the same. They’d met in a place very like this one.

At the servant’s knock they heard the clink of keys, the scrape of the lock. A burly warder in a leather jerkin swung the door open, revealing a long stone corridor with a sharp bend at the far end.

“Shall I wait for you?” asked the servant.

“No, I’ll find my way back,” Klia replied.

The warder, a taciturn fellow apparently little moved by the presence of royalty, led them down the torchlit corridor and around the corner through another locked door and into a large square room lined on three sides with barred cells. Though windowless, they were not the worst Seregil had ever seen. They were clean and didn’t stink. Only one of them was occupied. Mika stayed close to Thero as he looked around.

Corporal Karis, a tall, wan-faced young man hardly out of boyhood, sat on a pallet against the back wall, hands and feet in manacles chained to the wall. He was barefoot but still in uniform otherwise, wearing a dirty black tabard stitched in white showing two rampant catamounts supporting a sword.

“On your feet, Corporal,” Micum ordered sharply, playing sergeant-at-arms. “This is Princess Klia and you are to answer whatever she asks you.”

Karis scrambled awkwardly to his feet, chains rattling, and saluted Klia fist to heart.

“Warder, open this cell and unchain this man at once,” Klia ordered.