The guard she was approaching had his station in the shadow of a huge, spreading oak, whose dried leaves, spread underfoot, made the approach tantalizingly challenging. She padded across them, stepping so slowly and carefully she hardly seemed to move at all. The guard was a silhouette against the tree, leaning on the trunk and staring out toward the river. Sothe was so absorbed in keeping her progress silent that it took her a few moments to catch the absolute stillness of the shadowed shape, or the scent of fresh blood on the wind.

She stiffened, then ran the last few steps, leaves scattering and crunching underfoot. The guard, a thin, rangy man, had been pinned by the shirt to the trunk of the tree, his throat slit as neatly as a pig at a butcher shop. Sothe looked him over briefly, then turned up the slope toward the house.

None of the Directory’s agents had dared do anything so overt, at least not yet. But there were other powers interested in the welfare of the Vordanai queen who might not be so circumspect. Borel, Murnsk, and Hamvelt certainly had their own agents, and the Hamveltai Kommerzint in particular was—though overestimated, in Sothe’s professional opinion—still worthy of respect.

He killed the guard. It was the move of someone who didn’t plan to stay undetected for long. Bodies had a way of causing alarms, by their presence or their absence. So either he’s testing the defenses or he’s here to break in and doesn’t much care about getting out again.

She covered the distance to the house at a jog, crunching across the gravel path that separated it from the grounds and heading for the closest door. The illusion had to be maintained at all costs, even in an emergency—if the queen had been here, the first thing Sothe would have done on discovering a dead guard would be to make sure she was safe. So that was the first order of business, followed by a quiet alert, and an effort to mousetrap whoever had the temerity—

There were two guards beside the door, day and night. Both were now dead, sprawled in the gravel. Knife wounds, fast and precise. One guard had fumbled a pistol out of his belt, and it lay nearby.

That, Sothe thought, makes no sense. There were far easier ways to gain access to the house itself. Clover-by-Ost was too large to be very secure, and a little climbing would have given the intruder a way in without the chanciness of a fight. So he’s either a lunatic, or . . .