I fall to the grass too, breathing hard. But something sharp sticks me in the chest. It’s a golden brooch, the one Mush Face was wearing. It must have fallen in the fight. I pull it out of my skin. A pair of golden wings. It’s Baron Seymaur’s badge. It must be her only token of her family. I recall I saw the wings that awful night in the castle’s banner room beside Katryna’s badge of a girl coming out of a rose.

No, the golden wings weren’t in the banner room. But I feel as if I saw the two badges together. A girl coming from a flower and golden wings. Where was it?

Then it comes to me. I saw them in Corliss’s tapestry. In the tree, there was a girl coming out of a flower with golden wings. The two badges, joined into one.

The whole picture comes into my mind, the Queen touching her belly with one hand and touching the tree with the other. The joined badges are the fruit of the tree. The fruit of the Queen’s tree.

All at once wards slide into place, and the lock opens.

I stagger to standing. Across the grass, Mush Face has raised herself up to hands and knees. ‘I haven’t told you the list of foods,’ I call to her.

Mush Face raises her head. Her jaw hangs at a sickening angle.

‘When you die a traitor’s death,’ I say, ‘I’ll eat pig hearts for each of the women you murdered.’ Mush Face pushes herself to kneeling. ‘There’s no punishment for being born a bastard,’ I tell her. Her head swings towards me, her eyes confused. ‘But if you succeed in killing the Queen,’ I go on, ‘I’ll eat swan heart on your coffin. For killing your own mother.’

She looks at me, not believing. But I’m right. The belly knows. Mush Face read the stranger word, Chavah, on the tapestry and believed it was the only message, as folk who know their letters would. But common folk see meaning in pictures, like beggar’s marks.

The tapestry says that Queen Bethany’s bastard is the child of Baron Seymaur and Katryna. At least, the child thought to be Baron Seymaur and Katryna’s. Mush Face is the Queen’s bastard.

‘That’s a lie,’ Mush Face cries through her broken jaw.

The Eucharistian countess in the dungeon served Katryna as a lady-in-waiting. She spoke about a cuckoo bird, and I thought at the time she was talking nonsense, but she wasn’t. She must have known, or at least suspected, the truth.

Bethany wanted to kill her bastard. She asked Corliss, Tilly, and the Painted Pig to do it. They swore they would. But then they deceived her. They helped Bethany, but not in the way she asked.