By not challenging him, not confronting him, Iome had agreed to it. The horror of it had all been creeping up on her since noon yesterday. Now she found herself defenseless. She hadn’t slept for two nights. She’d felt dizzy for hours, had feared she would topple from her horse.

Now it seemed as if a great invisible beast, lurking beneath her consciousness, suddenly sprang and seized her.

Iome had meant to say some word of comfort to Gaborn, but suddenly found icy tears coursing down her cold cheeks. She tried to wipe them, began shuddering quietly.

Gaborn had prepared his father’s body well. The King’s hair was combed, his face was pale in death. The glamour he’d worn had died with him, so that the man she saw was not the King Orden who had seemed so regal, so powerful, during life.

He looked like some aging statesman, with a broad face, skin somewhat weather-beaten. He smiled enigmatically. He was dressed in his armor, and lay on a plank. His richly embroidered cape of shimmering samite covered him like a robe.

In his hands, he clasped the bud of a single blue rose, perhaps taken from the Duke’s garden.

Gaborn turned to look up at Iome, saw the expression on her face, then stood slowly, as if the effort pained him. He walked to her, grabbed her shoulders as she slid from her horse, and held her close.

She thought he would kiss her, tell her not to weep.

Instead his voice sounded hollow and dead as he whispered fiercely, “Grieve for us. Grieve.”

Borenson thundered into Longmot in a red fury. From the moment he had crested a ridge five miles back and seen the ruined towers, the crowd milling on the downs outside the castle, he’d known the news would be bad. Among the crowd, many colors flew, but none for Raj Ahten.

He wished Raj Ahten were dead, wanted to strike against him with a rage so burning that Borenson had never felt its like.

So he was still in a frustrated rage when he galloped down the north road into Longmot and met the ragged commoners milling about by the thousands. He looked among the crowd for the colors of Orden, saw them nowhere.

He rode up to a pair of teens who scrambled among the snow outside the castle, robbing the corpse of one of Raj Ahten’s soldiers. One young man was perhaps fourteen, another eighteen. At first he thought the vermin were stealing money pouches or rings, and he’d have belittled them for doing so. Then he recognized that one lad was wrestling the armor from the corpse, while the other helped lift the dead weight.

Good. They sought armor and weapons that they could never otherwise purchase.

“Where is King Orden?” Borenson asked, trying to keep the emotion from his voice.