She shrugged. “We’ll hold,” she said.

Aneas pursed his lips and nodded. “Have you given thought to escape?” he asked. “The man who claims to be Kevin Orley has promised us all some spectacular tortures and humiliations.”

“The Orleys were never worth a tinker’s curse,” she said, snapping her fingers. “And if I leave this rock, it will fall. You know that.”

He frowned. “We have a bolt hole,” he reminded her.

“I won’t be captured,” she said. “But I’m not going anywhere. Hold the walls, my last son. I’ll hold the sorcerer.”

And when Aneas was gone back to his men, she all but flew up the steps to her solar. She gazed into the ball—

Waved her hand, moving the scene this way and that, her whole intent concentrated on the crystal artifact.

“Mary Magdelene,” Ghause swore. “He’s dead!”

For too long—time she could not spare—she watched the catastrophe play out in the south. She had no idea how the tournament had played out, but the King—her brother—was dead, his corpse wrapped in linen. She was bonded with her brother in a very special way, and she found him easily, even in death. She watched the corpse, and the Galles and the Albans gather around it like the flies.

The new archbishop was giving a speech. Over her brother’s corpse.

She bit her lip.

“Henri and you, in one day?” she asked the crystal. “Goodbye, brother.”

Then she moved her hand and sent the scene spinning northward. After an agonized minute of scrolling she faced her fears. She unlaced the side of her kirtle with hurried fingers, and pulled both it and her shift over her head.

Naked, she summoned her power, and cast.

Thorn was in the midst of a complex summoning to support the siege—the parsing of two energies to augment a trebuchet. Covered by a nasty, rainy spring night, Ser Hartmut was moving his machines forward.

But an alarm went off, and he dropped all the summoned power, so suddenly a trebuchet arm suddenly whipped back, killing two sailors.

Thorn cared not, and in the twinkling of an insect’s multifaceted eye, he was gone.

Instantly, Ghause had Gabriel in the stone. The summoning did her bidding. It was dangerous, given Thorn’s proximity, but she had to know.

He was alive. Wounded—and tired.

There was his little nun. Such a useless lover, that boy—he still hadn’t straddled the little twig, although she pined for it and Ghause had tried to put a geas on her.

And the nun and a tall blonde woman were supporting…

The so-called Queen.

Ghause spat.

“I didn’t want to have to do this,” she said to God and anyone else listening. “But—an eye for an eye.”

In the fastness of her palace, she looked at the great working she’d designed and built for months.