This was Delia’s room, and she could have told that at a glance even if she hadn’t woken up here often enough before; pale pastel colors, controlled and elegant froufrou around the canopy of the four-poster, a spectacular tapestry on one wall showing a mountain scene that looked as if it were taken from a Maxfield Parrish poster and probably had been. Some books, a dressing table that looked as if you needed a seven-year apprenticeship and an examination before a panel of guildmasters to handle all the stuff, an embroidery frame, a fretwork door leading to a clothes closet nearly as large as the bedroom.

There was a gentle scent of sachets and bouquets of roses and rhododendrons, and—

“Oh, God, coffee,” she said.

About one ship a year came in from the Big Island of Hawaii to Astoria or Newport, with coffee as part of its cargo. There were definite perks to being a baron and Grand Constable.

Lioncel brought it from a wheeled tray; it already had the cream and two spoons of sugar she liked. She drank, yawned, swallowed the paper of bitter powdered willow bark extract he handed her, drank more of the coffee and thought as her brain lurched back into motion. Barony d’Ath’s town house was smaller and several blocks away.

Right, memory working now. I got in well after dark last night and there was still blood drying in places all over my armor. I was punch-drunk, thirty hours in the saddle and skirmishes and no sleep.

Lord Rigobert de Stafford, Baron Forest Grove and Marchwarden of the South, had been waiting at Union station. He’d slapped her on the back, told her that everything was in hand and bundled her exhausted form into his pedicab and sent her to his town house and his wife: her lover, Delia. Who had poured several glasses of something sweet down her throat and gotten her into this room, nightshirt and bed, and then darkness had walked up and clubbed her unconscious when she was halfway to the pillow.

Yes, the bathroom was the door to the left. She glanced back at the bed, shaking her head minutely in surprise. Getting the seven-month pregnant Delia out of bed usually involved her bouncing and squirming around. They had made a game of it for all of her pregnancies. Today Delia had managed to get herself up and out of the room without waking her.

If I was that dead asleep, I really did need Rigobert to take over last night, she thought as she ran the water into the basin, washing her hands. Well, that is one of the things a second-in-command is for.