Relief briefly flickered over his face, followed by confusion. Constance lifted her hand from his face, unable to bear the sense of him slipping away. The lines around the Duke’s eyes grew deeper, his stoop more pronounced as he hunched over in the chair. He closed his fingers around the scored wooden arms, his knuckles whitening.

The sea had swept him back into its depths, and he was drowned.

“Who are you?” he snapped, catching sight of her as if for the first time. “What are you doing here, sneaking around? Fetch the Justice! Out! Out!” he shouted, his voice raw and ugly.

She stood up. “I’m just leaving, my lord,” she said, the words catching in her throat.

NINE

The Huntsman

Lena woke, groggy and heavy-headed, when the sun was shining through the window of her little room. For a moment she was disoriented. She didn’t recognize the wooden bed, the soft sheet beneath the mounds of woolen blankets. And where was Hunter, usually curled up on her feet?

Someone was knocking on the door of her room—and she could smell something delicious. “It’s me, Lena,” Emris announced, “and breakfast.”

The previous day returned to her in a whirl of impossibility. At the same time, she realized quite suddenly that she was starving. “Coming!” she called, and scrambled out of bed. She quickly dressed in the clothes from the chest of drawers, leaving her ruined habit on the floor by the bath and resting the butterfly carefully in a new pocket. The clothes were exactly like the ones Emris wore—gray tunic, trews, and cloak. She pulled on her old boots after knocking the worst of the dried mud and leaves out the window.

After a huge greasy breakfast of bacon, eggs, and fluffy white bread, eaten from a tray in an armchair beside the map room fire, the huntsman led her on a twisted path through the interior of the old terraced houses. The entire street had been knocked through into a ramshackle mansion: flights of stairs, a tangled warren of corridors in various states of grandeur and disrepair, heavy doors, and carved arches. Emris nodded at gray-clad passersby, occasionally murmuring a greeting or flashing a smile. Lena was hardly spared a glance in spite of her birthmark; next to Emris’s scars, she supposed, it was nothing unusual.

By the time they had finished climbing the final staircase, arriving at a plain wooden door engraved with the words “FIRST HUNTSMAN,” Lena was a little breathless. “I’ll never find my way back to my room,” she managed.

“That’s sort of the point,” Emris said, allowing her a moment’s rest. “Extra protection against any intruders. Ready?” Without waiting for an answer, he knocked three times on the door.