In the eight months she has lived in Aymar castle, even before the siege, she has rarely wandered. Her room is her sanctuary. She knows almost nobody in the castle household, let alone the refugees or the king’s contingent. There’s nobody she can go to, except perhaps for Ser Voyne and Ser Leodegardis, to ask what is happening.

But when she reaches the gatehouse, the shadows wrap around her, and she goes unseen as she listens in.

Three guards in armor sit around a pitted table, all perched on wobbling stools.

“Georgie didn’t do it,” the redhead is saying, throwing down worn cards on the table. “And I didn’t do it. And I don’t know that anybody could’ve done it without somebody noticing, that winch can’t be moved on its own—”

“But they’re here,” says the one with the coiled dark hair. “Somebody must’ve. If a door’s not open, no one’s getting in. And if they can get in, then we’re all fucked, because Etrebia could just march right up here and—”

“We’d skewer ’em before they got close,” says the angry one, and their fury seems to bleed through the rock and into Phosyne’s cheek, and she is panting, and—

She realizes, suddenly, that even if the shadows abandoned her, they would not see her; she is pressed against the stone wall on the outside of the gatehouse.

She doesn’t know how she can see them, hear them, and suddenly she can’t anymore. But that is for tomorrow, or the next day, after she deals with the more obvious terror:

Nobody opened the gates.

Nobody opened the gates, and yet there are four strangers within Aymar’s walls, gentle and kind and beautiful, and they are allowed to move about under their own power. They are guests. This makes no sense. Phosyne has been kept up in her tower, and Ser Leodegardis knows her. He saw her walk into this castle under her own power. The gates were open, then.

But they are closed now, and surrounded by a heavy earthen wall manned by enemy soldiers, and how, how could anybody make it all the way along the path that leads from the plain beyond up to the gates of Aymar without anybody on either side noticing?

They are not natural. They are not people in costume, or people at all. Phosyne knows that with a galling certainty that makes her head spin, the same certainty that tells her what the guards inside the room look and feel like. She pushes herself up off the ground (When did she kneel? When did she fall?) and nearly vomits, but keeps whatever bile is left to her down. She staggers back toward the upper bailey, the safety of her tower, the comfort of the wicked creatures that reside in her workspace.