“Let her through!” he called in a Hillman accent. “Here’s a woman come to serve the Queen. Let her through, with God’s good grace.”

And the commons moved aside like the parting of the Dark Sea, and Blanche slipped past them to the barrier around the Queen’s seat—ducked under it and came to the Queen.

She bobbed a deep curtsey. “Your grace?” she asked.

The Queen turned her head. Her eyes focused.

She smiled. “Blanche,” she said.

Blanche hadn’t been sure until then that the Queen even knew her name. She curtsied again. “Your grace, I’ve brought you soap, water and some food.”

“She hasn’t eaten in four days,” one of the King’s men muttered.

The Queen put a hand to her throat. “I might try… to eat,” she said huskily. “The sun—has been so kind—”

The guardsmen muttered among themselves. She looked so… crazy, Blanche thought.

She looked even worse as she began to eat, seizing a loaf of bread and ripping pieces from it. Blanche had eight thick slices of bacon from a guardsman’s fire and a slice of very questionable pie that had cost her a copper and a kiss. The kiss had been greasy, too.

The Queen tore through it with wolfish intensity, glancing up from time to time—like a dog, Blanche thought. Or something that feared a predator.

Blanche had a soldier’s canteen over her shoulder—a heavy object of fired clay. She’d stolen it, in the first outright theft of her life. She handed it to the Queen, who drank off the entire contents without seeming to breathe.

She looked at Blanche and her eyes narrowed a fraction. “You should run,” she said. “You’ve been seen.”

Blanche curtsied. “Your grace, I am here for you. You should know that—”

“Run,” said the Queen. “I will not have your blood on my head. Now.”

Blanche ducked under the barrier, abandoning the basket and the canteen. The Queen’s intensity communicated itself to her.

But the press was still thick—and there was shouting. Men were moving, and suddenly she had a lane, and like a flash—

She was caught. There were four of them, big men in the archbishop’s purple livery. They knocked her down.

One said something, and the other three laughed, showing a mouth full of blackened stumps of teeth.

She expected help from the crowd, and when the men in purple reached for her, she screamed, but the peasants were cowed by the armour and the spears. Black Teeth slammed the top of his head into her forehead, so that the world spun. He laughed and pushed her again.

Her wimple came off, her glorious yellow-gold hair blowing in the wind.

There were fifty of them, the purple spearmen. They’d killed a man, and the crowd fled them, leaving them alone like an island of stone in a rising tide. A woman was screaming, and another man was trying to hold his guts in with his hands.

Her head hurt so much she wanted to throw up.