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It was Ruthgul.

She turned her head away sharply, starting to really shake. The Purple Dragon swordcaptain started forward with a frown, one arm rising to reach out to her, and Arclath spun her away again, turning her in his arms until he could see her paling face.

One good look at her, and his grip on her arms tightened. “Lady,” he said firmly, “you’re coming home with me.”

“N-no,” she replied with equal firmness, twisting free of him to back quickly away and raising her voice for the Purple Dragons to hear. “I’m not. I am going to my bed, Lord, and alone. Right now.”

The faces of Dralkin and several other nearby Dragons hardened—and they stepped forward every bit as swiftly and deftly as Arclath, to bar the young Lord Delcastle’s way to Amarune.

He eyed their stern faces, brawn, and hands ready on sword hilts for a moment, then shrugged, smiled, and gave the dancer an airy wave. “Until your next shift, then!”

“Until then,” she replied heavily—and hastened away.

Only to recoil in bewildered fear as she passed Ruthgul’s body, looked down at it despite herself … and saw that it was magically changing into the likeness of someone else.

A man she didn’t know at all.

Shaking her head—what, by all the gods, was going on? Had Ruthgul been someone else all those years, or was that someone who’d been impersonating him and had paid the price?—she ducked into a side alley and trotted hastily along it to reach the door to her abode on a side of the building the Lord Delcastle couldn’t see.

Arclath regarded the stone-faced Dragons, who were forming a wall of burly uniformed flesh to prevent him following the dancer or getting a better look at the dead man—whose change he’d half-glimpsed, and confirmed from some of their reactions—with a broadening smile. Giving them a theatrical sigh, he observed, “Women! I’ll never understand them!”

“Whereas they,” Dralkin told him warningly, “understand you all too well, Lord. As, now, do we.”

“Bravely challenged, good Swordcaptain,” Arclath replied airily, turning with a wave of farewell to stroll off back the way he’d come, “yet you don’t, you know. No one understands me! Save perhaps one person, a little.”

“That would be me,” a sharp voice said suddenly at his elbow.

It was a voice he knew, and it belonged to a wizard of war by the name of Glathra.

“I’ve listened in to a lot of what you’ve said and done this night,” she added briskly, “so spare me all the fanciful tales and instead yield me a few plain answers.”

“Not without something decent to drink,” he said, giving her a courtly bow. “So beautiful an interrogator deserves no less.”

“I believe we have water in the palace that doesn’t have too many squirming things floating in it,” she replied dryly, as war wizards and Purple Dragons appeared from all sides to close in around them. “Come.”

“Your command is my wish, Lady,” the Lord Delcastle told her lightly—almost mockingly—as he offered her his arm. She ignored it, but when she turned, pointed toward the distant royal palace, and started walking, he fell in beside her.

Amid the suddenly tight ring of their watchful Purple Dragon escort.

Amarune was half-expecting to find Talane waiting in her rooms, but there was no sign of her. Or anyone.

Not even under the bed.

Her heaps of soiled clothing lay just as she’d left them, the untidy little mountain range of her laziness. By the state of them, the undisturbed dust, and the way her other minor untidynesses reigned unaltered, it didn’t look as if any intruder had so much as thought of entering Amarune’s rooms.

When she finally dared to believe that and relax, weariness broke over her like a harbor storm, leaving her reeling.

She staggered across the room, suddenly very tired—yet still scared, a rising fear that got worse as her thoughts started racing through all the possibilities of Ruthgul’s murder, the drunken wizard of war who’d known who she was—did they all know? Why hadn’t they done anything to her, then?—and Talane …

Amarune was shaking so hard, she was almost a shuddering by the time she clawed at a certain