“All right, all right.” Marcus looked up at Raesinia, as though considering her in a new light, and she felt herself blush slightly.

“What?” she said. “Am I failing to live up to your expectations for a queen again?”

“In a way,” Marcus said. “I was just thinking that maybe this is what I ought to have expected a queen to be like.”

Raesinia snorted, but her cheeks reddened further. She turned away to hide them. I don’t need his approval. “I’m glad you’ve learned something—”

There was a knock on the trapdoor, and she fell silent. Marcus, sitting beside it, said, “Yes?”

“Raes?” Cora said. “There’s someone down here asking to talk to you.”

“One of the refugees?” Raesinia said. “Or someone from the Leatherbacks?”

“Neither.” Cora lowered her voice. “I think it’s your friend Rose.”

Rose . . . Raesinia shot to her feet after a moment’s thought, cursing herself for not getting it faster. Sothe had used that name when Cora met her, during the fall of the Vendre. She’s here! She rushed to the trapdoor and pulled it up. Cora was already backing down the ladder, too slowly for Raesinia’s taste—she nearly jumped, twenty-five-foot drop be damned. I’ve fallen a lot farther.

But there were people watching, so she followed Cora down, carefully. The church didn’t have a true second floor, just a balcony that ran along one wall, where seats had once been positioned for distinguished guests to watch the service. Mrs. Felda had used it for storage before the crisis; now the food stocks had mostly been eaten, and bedding laid out on the creaking wooden floor so that refugees could sleep in shifts. This area had been allocated to later arrivals, which meant they were almost all Vordanai—mothers with young children, for the most part, along with quite a few old men and women who’d been forced from their homes by the seedies and left with nowhere to go. Men of fighting age found looking shiftless were liable to be dragged into service in the Patriot Guard, while unaccompanied young women disappeared to even worse fates.

Raesinia picked her way through the makeshift beds, full of exhausted people sleeping in spite of the early hour, and down the rickety switchback stair that led to the main floor. The church smelled mostly of the huge pots of soup Mrs. Felda and her assistants churned out, but with a strong undertone of unwashed bodies and overflowing privies. Filthy children ran about, chasing one another with sticks.

Sothe looked like any other refugee, wrapped in gray, fraying homespun, the dirt of several nights on the road obvious on her face. A thick bandage wrapped her side, and she walked with a limp, favoring one ankle. Raesinia pushed her way through the crowd and wrapped her arms around her maidservant, carefully avoiding her wounded side.

“Thank God,” she said. “I was so worried about you.”