She had to admit it was well done. There had been hardly any noise at all, nothing like as loud as the occasional call of all’s well from the watchmen in the town’s streets, or the challenge-and-response from the completely useless guards patrolling the outer perimeter of the palace. Being that quiet while you were hanging upside down from a silk rope and sawing through steel bars with a diamond-dusted flexible saw was not easy.

A flicker of light crossed her closed lids, some lantern reflecting upward. The bed was extremely comfortable and the day had been long, but she had no difficulty staying in a half trance, breathing deeply and completely relaxed but in a stable state halfway between waking and sleep. She’d learned the trick of that not long after the Change, when she and Kat had to keep watch and watch. An instructor of Sandra’s, a Korean so silent she’d never even learned his name, had taught her how to do it consciously at will later as one part of a training program designed to strengthen the strong and destroy the weak.

It was nearly as restful as real sleep, and had the advantage that your senses were if anything more acute than in the normal waking world.

A squeak. That would be the diamond cutter on the windowpane, now that the bars were out of the way. Her new-minted knights had been precisely right so far on the way the enemy would come. It was a compliment to her training of them.

In the darkness she grinned like a wolf.

Lady Sandra’s school has left a legacy that will travel down the generations.

The sheets and pillows smelled of clean linen and lavender, and felt crisp and smooth under her fingers as she slowly pulled the coverings off. She was in working clothes, dark trews and shirt and jerkin, sock-shoes of glove-soft leather with doubled soles that gripped like fingers. Light mesh lined the jerkin, but for this sort of work you relied on speed.

It’s actually more pleasant than being a general, she thought. Straightforward, in a sneaky sort of way. But to acknowledge the absolute truth, I’m sick of both. I have been for years.

She opened her eyes, keeping them down; she was facing away from the windows. Starlight and a little moonlight were perfectly adequate if you didn’t try to close-focus on anything. They painted the room in shades of pale gray and sliver and blue. One leg moved out, and she caught her left heel on the edge of the mattress and bent the knee.

Of course, this could go wrong. You’re never quite certain with knives, but we need them alive. You know, when I was in my twenties, I used to positively enjoy this sort of thing. Now I just worry about leaving Delia a widow . . . damn, she could be widowed twice in this war.