“My sister presumably trapped me in our childhood prison,” he said, “alone, for months. Recently, they started feeding me more, and giving me my favorite candy.”

“Your favorite candy!”

“Samklavi,” he said.

“Samklavi!” said Lovisa, who heard herself repeating things stupidly but couldn’t help it. A few weeks ago, she’d watched her furious mother hand her father a wallet of samklavi. “I think my mother sent you the samklavi, via my father!”

“Well,” Katu said, with a noise like a snort. “Despite that act of magnanimity, I can’t say I’m moved by ties of sibling loyalty just now.”

“My mother is dead,” said Lovisa.

Katu went still, all the light fading from his eyes. He tucked his chin to his chest, put his hands into the pockets of Lovisa’s coat. Then, to his own patent amazement, he extracted his ruby ring. “What on earth?” he cried.

Suddenly Nev shouted at Lovisa to return to the sheet rope to haul Hava up. “I’ll be a minute, Katu,” she said. But once Hava was back on solid ground, she had to help with Giddon. By the time Lovisa returned to Katu, he’d curled himself into a shivering ball. When she touched his shoulder, he recoiled.

“Quick,” she cried, alarmed at the transformation. “He’s ill!”

Davvi, Liv the cook, and Ella the maid came running, Davvi lifting Katu into his arms like a child, carrying him toward the house. Behind them, Nev and Roni the housekeeper supported Hava between them, headed in the same direction. Giddon and the queen followed, so Lovisa tagged along too, alone, cold. Liv and Ella were in quite a state about Katu. They kept exclaiming their wonderment, unable to believe what had happened to him. When a guard came stumbling out of the barn, clearly dizzy and concussed, Liv turned on him, shrieking vitriol, accusing him of having known, of having perpetuated an outrage against the Cavenda family. Tears were practically flying from her face. Lovisa watched her with a kind of fascination, wondering what would happen if she started screaming and crying, flinging tears around at the outrage of it all. Would it make her feel different? More certain of what was true?

She’d thrown an egg and killed Linta Massera and two guards. That was true. She didn’t want to think about it.

Giddon went into the barn, came out with horse tackle, and began binding the hands and feet of the guards, whose bodies, in various states of consciousness, seemed scattered across the grounds and house. Everyone else gathered in the sitting room, where Nev began to give orders about how to tend to Katu and Hava. Nev, an animal doctor, probably knew what she was doing. Maybe a human was like a tiny, upright, small-nosed, hairless horse?