Time must have passed, but she lost track of it. Why it was so hard to concentrate she could not say. Her mind felt sluggish but also touched with a panic that might spread if she were not careful. It was not just thinking of Grae, not just the disbelief that she might have read him so wrongly, not just the gasping knowledge that he had held steel and fenced with Aaden, not even realizing how very close she had come to folly.

In addition to all this, emotions she had not allowed within herself for years rushed in. Memories of her father, of Igguldan, of Hanish: the men who had betrayed her, each in his own way. Was Grae another of these? Was she still the fool she had been at sixteen? More, images of her mother during her illness, the memory of crying and crying and crying on her bedspread as the woman—she who was dying—tried to comfort her. More, there came a bone-deep longing, which she almost never acknowledged, to sit and speak with Aliver, right now, as adults, both of them living.

And then she was striding through the doorway behind Delivegu. She walked into the room and circled around to the front of the chair. The guards followed her with their eyes, and she watched as the prisoner’s square profile came into view and then changed as it filled out. She pulled in her attention, blocked out the noise, and concentrated all her being on the exchange she was about to have. It felt necessary to focus her eyes on a single point, while the rest of the world blurred. The man’s eyes were brown, spaced wide. Rolling toward her, they looked heavy, as if just moving them would be a monumental task, as if they were stone. She could almost hear the grinding rumble as they shifted.

She said, “Lower your eyes.” The man stared at her a moment longer and then obeyed. “How could you think the monarch of one kingdom would betray the monarch of another … for peasants? Don’t you see how foolish that is? How impossible? And they told me you were bright. Devious. Cunning. Instead, you’re none of these things.”

Had she really gotten all that out without a hitch or quaver of emotion? She had. The man’s steady attention confirmed it. He stared at her feet but said nothing.

“You may speak freely to me,” Corinn said, trusting her voice a little more now. “I am not easy to offend. Nor do you frighten me. If your language is coarse, so be it. I have some rough about me as well.”

One corner of the man’s mouth crooked upward. It looked like a tic, a jerk of his cheek muscles, but the expression held. A lopsided smile.

“Well, speak. That’s what you like to do, isn’t it? Make up speeches. Exhort. Rant to the masses! Try it on an audience of one.”