“She had Lokdal down below,” Kim said bluntly. Almost, she wanted to hurt him with it. “She used it on herself.”

He did react, and she was sorry for the thought behind her words. A hand came up to cover his mouth, a curious gesture in such a man. “No,” he breathed. “Oh, Ysanne, no!” She could hear the loss.

“You understand what she has done?” she asked. There was a catch in her voice; she controlled it. There was so much pain.

“I know what the dagger does, yes. I didn’t know she had it here. She must have come to love you very much.”

“Not just me. All of us.” She hesitated. “She dreamt me twenty-five years ago. Before I was born.” Did that make it easier? Did anything?

His eyes widened. “That I never knew.”

“How could you?” He seemed to regard gaps in his awareness as deeply felt affronts. But there was something else that had to be said. “There is more,” Kim said. His name is not to be spoken, she thought, then: “Your father died this afternoon, Aileron.”

There was a silence.

“Old news,” the elder Prince of Brennin said. “Listen.”

And after a moment she heard them: all the bells in Paras Derval tolling. The death bells for the passing of a King.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

His mouth twitched, then he looked out the window. You cold bastard, she thought. Old news. He deserved more than that, surely; surely he did. She was about to say as much when Aileron turned back to her, and she saw the river of tears pouring and pouring down his face.

Dear God, she thought shakily, enduring a paroxysm of self-condemnation. He may be hard to read, but how can you be that far off? It would have been funny, a Kim Ford classic, except that people were going to be relying on her now for so much. It was no good, no good at all. She was an impulsive, undisciplined, halfway-decent intern from Toronto. What the hell was she going to do?

Nothing, at any rate, for the moment. She held herself very still on the bed, and after a minute Aileron lifted his tanned, bearded face and spoke.

“After my mother died, he was never the same. He… dwindled. Will you believe that he was once a very great man?”

This she could help him with. “I saw by the lake. I know he was, Aileron.”

“I watched him until I could hardly bear it,” he said, under control now. “Then factions formed in the palace that wanted him to step aside for me. I killed two men who spoke of it in my presence, but my father grew suspicious and frightened. I could not talk to him anymore.”

“And Diarmuid?”

The question seemed to genuinely surprise him. “My brother? He was drunk most of the time, and taking ladies to South Keep the rest. Playing March Warden down there.”