“It didn’t seem relevant,” Raesinia said, with a note in her voice that said she’d known exactly what she was doing.

“Not relevant? That the top suspect in your attempted assassination knows you have a tendency to wander around incognito and will recognize your former identity? You might as well paint a target on yourself!”

“Only if he knows I’m here!”

Marcus scowled. “That won’t take long, if you keep visiting old friends.”

“Cora’s the only old friend I have left,” Raesinia said, a bit of pain in her voice. She took hold of Marcus’ hand and pushed it aside irritably. “Anyway, are you supposed to be manhandling your monarch?”

Marcus looked down at his hand as though it had caught fire, and swallowed hard. “Sorry.”

Raesinia waved his apology away. “I hardly think Mrs. Felda or the people here will tell the Patriot Guard we’ve been by. And we need Cora’s help.”

“If there’s anything else I ought to know,” Marcus grated, “please bring it to my attention.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Raesinia walked back to Cora. “Sorry. Yes, it’s about the bombing. I wasn’t nearly killed, though. I wasn’t even there. But some other people were.”

“You’re trying to figure out who did it?” Cora said.

Raesinia nodded.

“What we’d really like to know,” Marcus said, “is who bought the flash powder from Halverson, and what happened to it after that.”

“If they’re in on the plot, they’re not likely to have kept records,” Raesinia said.

“They’ll have to write something down,” Cora said. “Powder production is tightly monitored by the army. You couldn’t just take hundreds of pounds away from a mill without fudging the books somewhere. The mill’s capacity is a constant. The raw materials are recorded. From there it’d just be a matter of math to figure it out.”

Raesinia and Marcus looked at each other.

A genius, eh? “If we could get you those records,” he said slowly, “you could tell us where the powder went?”

“Probably,” Cora said.

“Then we might be able to track down where they assembled the bomb,” Marcus said. “That would be a start.”

“Where would the records be kept?” Raesinia said.

“At the Exchange Central Office. There’s a military post there to handle war supplies.”

A grin spread across Raesinia’s face. Marcus looked from her to Cora, and stifled a groan.

Chapter Six

WINTER

The game known as “handball” had ancient origins, though nobody was quite certain how ancient. It went back at least as far as the reign of Farus the Conqueror, who was supposed to have won the allegiance of one recalcitrant noble by his prodigious feats on the field. According to Cyte, there was some evidence it was much older, being descended from the ceremonial contests of the Mithradacii Children of the Sun thousands of years before the birth of Karis.