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By Root 1244 0

in the women’s hall, alone except for little Casso. She was sitting at a table, sideways to allow for her pregnancy, while the child knelt on a chair padded with cushions. They had between them a big wooden bowl of Bardek glass beads, which Bellyra was showing him how to sort by their color and size while he laughed, staring at the pretties. In the afternoon sun their blond heads, bent toward each other, gleamed as if they’d been gilded. Cerrmor was so immensely rich, Lilli found herself thinking, that they could use a bowl of treasures as a child’s toy! Real glass beads, heaped up as casually as if they were pebbles from the seashore!

At that point Bellyra looked up, smiling in welcome.

“Your Highness.” Lilli made a quick bob of a curtsy. “I’ve come to tell you somewhat. I know the way into Dun Deverry.”

Bellyra stared, her full lips slightly parted.

“There’s a bolthole, I mean,” Lilli went on. “It leads from a ruined dun outside the city right into the inner ward.”

“Oh ye gods,” Bellyra whispered. “Some of our men could open the gates.”

“Just so, Your Highness.”

Bellyra grinned, then wiped the expression away.

“It must have cost you horribly,” the princess said. “Telling me this.”

“It did.” Lilli turned away. All at once it seemed hard to breathe, yet she couldn’t say why. “I couldn’t just blurt it out. I had to think about it for a long time.”

“No doubt, what with your kin—But truly, Lilli, Maryn means it when he says he’ll pardon anyone who asks. Really he will.”

“I believe it, Your Highness. It’s just that most of them won’t ask. They’d be dishonored if they begged.”

For a long moment the two women stared at each other, while the sun streamed into the bowl of beads and touched them with fire, and a laughing Casyl ran his hands through them. Bellyra looked away first.

“Lilli? Find some pages, will you? We need to talk to the captain of the fortguard about getting you up to the siege.”

“Me? I—”

“Well, they’ll need to know everything you do, where the tunnel leads, and what lies inside the dun between it and the gates.”

Lilli nodded, gasping a little for breath. Bellyra got up and walked over, holding out one hand.

“Come sit down. You’re pale as death.”

“Am I?” Lilli sank onto a chair. “Please, tell me somewhat. He really is the true-born king, isn’t he? Maryn I mean. Oh ye gods, if he’s not, then what have I done?”

“But he is. I know it in the very marrow of my heart and soul.” Suddenly Bellyra knelt, as if she were the commoner and Lilli the princess, and caught her hands. “Help us, Lilli! Please? I’ll send Maryn a letter with my seal upon it, begging him to spare your kin for your sake. But tell him what you know, all of it.”

“Your Highness, do get up! Oh, don’t kneel like that! Of course I will. The Boars aren’t my clan anymore, anyway. They’d never take me back, would they? All I have is Peddyc and Anasyn and the Rams, and they’re the prince’s men now.”

“That’s true.” Bellyra did rise, dusting off her skirts with both hands. “My heart aches for you, though. But Maryn will spare your mother. I can’t imagine him harming a woman, I just can’t.”

“No more can I. But will he force her into a temple?”

“Not if you beg him not to. He’s going to owe you a lot, isn’t he?” Bellyra smiled, then glanced at Casso. “Oh, you little beast! Get those out of your mouth!”

At the sound of the princess’s raised voice, Arda came rushing in from the adjoining chamber. Lilli left them to fuss over Casyl and wandered across the room to look out the window. Between the towers of Dun Cerrmor she could just see a distant stripe of ocean, blazing with sunset. To her dweomer-sight the water seemed to burn, and in that fire it seemed she heard men screaming in rage.

“Look—the moon’s past full again,” Maryn said. “She looked like just that when we invested the dun. So far they don’t seem to be surrendering. I wonder why they’re so slow about it?”

Nevyn allowed himself a brief smile at the prince’s jest. They were standing outside the royal pavilion, a large white affair with a peaked roof hung with the banner of the Red Wyvern.