“Your disdain for her is proof of your stupidity,” said Anonoei, “if more proof were needed. All your plotting, and it never dawns on you that she has outmaneuvered you at every step.”

“My aunt the Sparrowtwit? She got pregnant by Prayard, that’s all. It complicated things but it didn’t change anything important.”

“She blocked all your father’s spies from access to Prayard—which means that the spies that secretly served you are also blocked.”

“She did nothing,” said Frostinch. He washed his backside—something his father used servants for, but Frostinch trusted no one enough to allow them to stand in that position. “You’re wasting my time.”

“No, you’re wasting mine. I told my friend you were too arrogant and stupid to save. He won’t listen to a woman, I said.”

“I won’t listen to a fool,” said Frostinch.

“You don’t even know your aunt,” said Anonoei. “She left for Iceway before you were fifteen.”

“I sat with her while she told me stories, and watched how she couldn’t even get sparrows to obey her, no matter how much she fed them.”

“And it never occurred to you that the disobedience of the sparrows was proof that she was not a birdmage at all?”

“Why would anyone claim to have such a pathetic power if…”

His voice trailed off. It was a pleasure to see him realize that he had indeed been stupid. He dried his buttocks. “You claim that she had so much foresight that she thought a child was worth deceiving?”

“The heir to the Jarl of Gray? A boy who had already shown himself to be an ambitious little monster? No offense intended, of course.”

Frostinch smiled. Anonoei had understood him well—“ambitious little monster” was no insult to him. “So she was deceiving me then in order to blind my eyes today.”

“And until this moment, it worked, didn’t it? You thought she was a tool you could use, and that when that tool was taken from you, it was Prayard’s doing, not her own.”

“You have no evidence of anything like that.”

“Fool,” said Anonoei. “I’m here, am I not? After spying on your every conversation for days. And you think I wasn’t able to spy on her before? That I do not know exactly what I’m speaking of? That I don’t know how she arranged to deceive your agent Luvix when he tried to murder her?”

In that instant Frostinch’s pose of languid unconcern evaporated. “What do you know of that?”

“I know that your aunt has the power to create a clant so vivid that when he stabbed the clant, it bled. He believed he had succeeded.”

“No one can make a clant that…” Then he concentrated on refastening his breeches. “You saw this?”

“My friend saw it. After he stole the poison Luvix had intended to use and gave it to Bexoi.”