“There’s three things ye can do in any situation, girl,” her father had told her once. “Ye can decide to do a thing, ye can decide not to do a thing... or ye can decide not to decide.” That last, her da had never quite come out and said (he hadn’t needed to) was the choice of weaklings and fools. She had promised herself she would never elect it herself... and yet she had allowed herself to drift into this ugly situation. Now all the choices seemed bad and honorless, all the roads either filled with rocks or hub-deep in mud.

In her room at Mayor’s House (she had not shared a chamber with Hart for ten years, or a bed, even briefly, for five), Olive sat in a nightdress of undecorated white cotton, also looking out at the waning moon. After closing herself into this safe and private place, she had wept... but not for long. Now she was dry-eyed, and felt as hollow as a dead tree.

And what was the worst? That Hart didn’t understand how humiliated she was, and not just for herself. He was too busy strutting and preening (also too busy trying to look down the front of sai Delgado’s dress at every opportunity) to know that people—his own Chancellor among them—were laughing at him behind his back. That might stop when the girl had returned to her aunt’s with a big belly, but that wouldn’t be for months yet. The witch had seen to that. It would be even longer if the girl kindled slowly. And what was the silliest, most humilating thing of all? That she, John Haverty’s daughter Olive, still loved her husband. Hart was an overweening, vainglorious, prancing loon of a man, but she still loved him.

There was something else, something quite apart from the matter of Hart’s turning into George o’ Goats in his late middle age: she thought there was an intrigue of some sort going on, something dangerous and quite likely dishonorable. Hart knew a little about it, but she guessed he knew only what Kimba Rimer and that hideous limping man wanted him to know.

There was a time, and not so long ago, when Hart wouldn’t have allowed himself to be fobbed off in such fashion by the likes of Rimer, a time when he would have taken one look at Eldred Jonas and his friends and sent them west ere they had so much as a single hot dinner in them. But that was before Hart had become besotted with sai Delgado’s gray eyes, high bosom, and flat belly.

Olive turned down the lamp, blew out the flame, and crept off to bed, where she would lie wakeful until dawn.