Sparhawk sat up quickly, his eyes hardening. ‘I think you’d better explain a few things, Kurik,’ he said. ‘Ehlana’s the Queen. Why does her kingdom need a Prince Regent?’

‘Where have you been, Sparhawk? On the moon? Ehlana fell ill a month ago.’

‘Not dead?’ Sparhawk demanded with a sudden sinking in his stomach and a wrench of unbearable loss at the memory of the pale, beautiful girl-child with the grave, serious grey eyes whom he had watched throughout her childhood and whom, in a peculiar way, he had come to love, though she had been but eight years old when King Aldreas had sent him into his exile in Rendor.

‘No,’ Kurik replied, ‘not dead, though she might as well be.’ He picked up the large, rough towel. ‘Come out of the tub,’ he ordered. ‘I’ll tell you about it while you eat.’

Sparhawk nodded and stood up. Kurik roughly towelled him off and then draped the soft robe about him. The table in the other room was laid with a platter of steaming slices of meat swimming in gravy, a half-loaf of rough, dark peasant bread, a wedge of cheese, and a pitcher of chilled milk. ‘Eat,’ Kurik said.

‘What’s been going on here?’ Sparhawk demanded as he seated himself at the table and started to eat. He was surprised to find that he was suddenly ravenous. ‘Start at the beginning.’

‘All right,’ Kurik agreed, drawing his dagger and starting to carve thick slices of bread from the loaf. ‘You knew that the Pandions were confined to the motherhouse at Demos after you left, didn’t you?’

Sparhawk nodded. ‘I heard about it. King Aldreas was never really very fond of us.’

‘That was your father’s fault, Sparhawk. Aldreas was very fond of his sister, and then your father forced him to marry someone else. That sort of soured his attitude towards the Pandion Order.’

‘Kurik,’ Sparhawk said, ‘it’s not proper to talk about the king that way.’

Kurik shrugged. ‘He’s dead now, so it doesn’t hurt him, and the way he felt about his sister was common knowledge anyway The palace pages used to take money from anyone who wanted to watch Arissa walk mother-naked through the upper halls to her brother’s bedchamber. Aldreas was a weak king, Sparhawk. He was totally under the control of Arissa and the Primate Annias. With the Pandions confined at Demos, Annias and his underlings had things pretty much the way they wanted them. You were lucky not to have been here during those years.’

‘Perhaps,’ Sparhawk murmured. ‘What did Aldreas die from?’

‘They say that it was the falling-sickness. My guess would be that the whores Annias used to slip into the palace for him after his wife died finally wore him out.’

‘Kurik, you gossip worse than an old woman.’

‘I know,’ Kurik admitted blandly ‘It’s a vice I have.’

‘And then Ehlana was crowned Queen?’