The maid bobbed another curtsey before fleeing the chamber. Imogen waited until the door closed before pulling a travel sack from under her bed. In it she’d stuffed a water flask, a few days’ worth of pilfered oat cakes and a dress discarded by the palace’s head laundress. To these, she added a heavy cloak and a small purse containing four skells of silver, enough to buy a horse and ride to the Castagheri border. The sack went back under the bed. Thank the gods her maids were lazy and didn’t bother to dust under there. All she could do now was wait.

The days before Solstice crawled on feeble legs. The entire city prepared to celebrate, and for once Hayden didn’t insist Imogen join him in the upcoming celebrations. Death’s handmaiden among a drunken crowd of celebrants presented too much of a risk. Imogen occupied herself with studying the map she had tucked away in a book of poems. She had memorized every detail but studied it a final time before tossing it in the fireplace’s grate where the flames greedily devoured the parchment.

She thought of Niamh once more. She might have discounted Dradus’s revelations as lies, but Hayden verified most of them.

Stricken by her lover’s change of affections from his mistress to his new wife, Niamh had gone mad. The need for vengeance had overridden any sense of reason or compassion, and she’d leveled a dark power against King Varn’s wife, never knowing until too late that her bane had stricken the unborn child Selene carried.

Death ran like blood through Imogen’s tiny hands, striking down any she touched, including Selene, Varn, the midwife and nursemaids. By the time Niamh discovered the devastation her curse had wrought, Varn’s sister had stepped in and instructed the newborn be taken out of the castle and drowned in the nearest well. The maid assigned to the hideous task never saw the blow that struck her down or the fleet shadow that gently lifted the sleeping infant from her cradle and vanished with her into the night.

Imogen refused to cry in front of Dradus, but she sobbed alone in her room until the tears ran dry. That night she dreamed of Cededa and his wraith wife Gruah. Gruah held out a nebulous hand, wispy fingers curling around Imogen’s. In the dream, she spoke and her voice chimed like tiny bells in a summer garden. “Yours is a great heart, Imogen. Can you forgive?”