“What’s wrong with her?” the guard asked next, for Bitterblue was now leaning both hands on the wall and resting her face sideways, gently, against the rock. She’d cleverly chosen the wall beyond the gate, which turned the guard’s back to Lovisa. Her expression was familiar to Giddon, for she was plainly trying not to vomit, and as she blinked up at the guard, her pupils were as big as saucers.

“Oh,” the guard said knowingly. “You should be careful with our teas, miss. Some of them are quite addicting.”

“Might I rest inside your gates?” said Bitterblue. “Until I’m feeling better?”

“I’m afraid we don’t have those kinds of facilities,” the guard said.

“Not even for the Queen of Monsea?”

“I’m sure it seems cruel to someone of your magnificence,” he said with a sympathetic grin.

“It’s all right,” Bitterblue said, pushing herself away from the wall. “Sincerely yours, Queen Glitterboo,” she added thickly, as if she were signing a letter, then tried to sweep away, stumbled, and crashed to the ground.

In the ensuing hubbub, Giddon couldn’t tell whether her collapse was real or not, which made his performance as a worried royal retainer even more convincing than it otherwise would have been. He shoved the guard aside and insisted on picking her up himself, relieved that the thing he wanted to do was the thing someone in his position would believably do.

“You can’t leave us out here,” Giddon said, in Keepish.

“I’m sorry—” began the guard.

“I’m bringing her in,” Giddon said, taking full advantage of his height, his breadth, the combined volume of him and Bitterblue as he walked straight into the guard and pushed him back through the gate. “Get some water!” he shouted over the protests of the guard. “And a doctor! She has a heart condition!”

“A heart condition?” cried the guard in renewed alarm as Giddon bullied him along a path that wound through leafless trees. “What kind of heart condition? Would an animal doctor be sufficient?”

“Does she look like a poodle?” shouted Giddon, briefly proud of his Keepish. He could see the gray, weathered wood of the house through the trees ahead, then the place where the trees stopped, with nothing but air and light beyond. A rushing noise he’d mistaken for wind resolved itself into the sweep and pound of water against rock, reminding him that this house stood on a cliff. Behind him he heard nothing, but he knew Lovisa had had every opportunity to enter the property and begin to make her own way through the trees.