His reply shamed Estie. She was too quick to judge. The assassin’s treatment of Jaspid did not necessarily falsify what the same woman had done for Estie herself. Lylin had claimed that her loyalties did not conflict. That might be true: Estie had no way of knowing. But the devotee still had decisions to make. What she did might reveal more than what she said.

“Very well.” Queen Estie faced Lylin again. “I will tell you what I can.

“But I must ask you,” she insisted immediately, “to accept that King Bifalt and I have taken every precaution we can imagine to protect Amika and preserve Belleger’s people. If you fault what we have done, I can do nothing now to improve our efforts.”

The devotee nodded. “Of course, Majesty. I have no cause to doubt you. I can believe that whatever you and Belleger’s King have done is good.”

Good? thought Estie. She did not care if it was good. She wanted it to be enough.

At that moment, the carriage tilted back on its springs as it began to ascend the bridge. Queen Estie leaned a little harder against the padded back of her seat.

“Then I can say that we have had only one encounter on our journey. It was worse than troubling. It was—”

She wanted to say, It was horrific. But the word stuck in her throat. She had to swallow fresh sorrow and ire before she continued.

“Now Magister Facile is dead. Murdered.”

She could still hear the crushing sound as the old woman’s chest was shattered. She could smell the blood gushing from the Magister’s mouth.

And the cruelest detail was that the old sorceress had never heard Magister Avail’s message. She had died not knowing that the man she had once loved had survived his poisoning: the only man in the library who had been able to hear her for twenty years.

Lylin’s only reactions were a lift of her eyebrows, a tightening of the muscles around her mouth. She said nothing. Nevertheless her posture as she listened implied vehemence.

Forcing herself, Estie told her tale.

“While we were still far from the desert, we saw signs that made us think of spies. Commander Crayn found three men. One was a priest of the Great God Rile, Father Knout. The other two had the look of servants.”

In a few words, she described what she knew of Archpriest Makh’s disappearance. To appease her doubts about Lylin, she did not mention Elgart. Instead, she remarked, “Without the head of their Church, the remaining priests seemed leaderless. Lost in some essential way. The priest we found said the same.