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flushing to red with the pressure on his throat—Janus released him, a little shaken. Savne was a poor imitation of Maledicte, and one made pathetic by being so deliberate, but even that false face made him ache with loss.
    “Where is Psyke?” Janus said. “I know you're Lovesy's man. She escorted my wife where?”
    “Just to her quarters, just that.”
    “Be more precise,” Janus snapped. “If you must ape Mal, recall his words were never less than precise.”
    “Lady Last has been returned to her own quarters,” Savne said, rubbing his throat with shaking fingers.
    Janus swung away from him, making for the stairs to the old wing, and Savne called after him, “'Tis a pity her door is well guarded. Rue holds her in near as much regard as the king did.”
    “Fool,” Janus said under his breath. Savne lacked even the meanest intelligence to fuel his spite. Psyke and Aris? Yes, the court whispered and gossiped over their closeness, but Janus knew better. Arisfeared intimacy with women, feared another child born mindless. Psyke had been Aris's spy now declared herself Janus's enemy and that was a matter of far more import than whether or not shed cuckolded him.
    The chill of the old wing flowed down to meet him as he closed on the uncarpeted stairwell. He made short work of the stairs, and the palace servants that saw him made haste to clear his way.
    Two blue-clad kingsguards, a young man and an older one, watched him approach with expressions veering toward dismay and panic. The guard was soft these days; the most seasoned had followed their maimed Captain Jasper into the ranks of the city Particulars, where they tried to discipline an increasingly troubled populace. The remaining guards were the lazy ones who wouldn't leave a familiar life for confrontations on the streets, the greenest of recruits, and the few paranoid loyalists who thought a threat to Aris would come from within the palace walls and not without. Janus doubted they enjoyed being proved right.
    The young guard, showing more bravery than sense, made the mistake of stepping forward, hand raised to slow Janus. It was a moment's work to step into the man's reach; the recruit's hand went to his blade, but he was too slow or too uncertain to draw it. Janus pinned the guard's sword arm behind his back before the lad could finish dithering. Using the boy as a shield, Janus pushed the other guard back and slammed the door open to his wife's chambers, an incongruous clutter of pastel and gilt furnishings adrift in a granite cave.
    An opened interior door granted him sight of his goal: Psyke sat at her dressing table like a statue. If she had been overwrought and frantic when he had last seen her, now she had plunged into despairing stillness. The only liveliness about her was her voice, issuing a series of commands to her maid. “No, Dahlia. I don't need to change my gown. I don't need an infusion of Laudable, and I don't need you.”
    Dahlia fumbled the pearlescent bottle, dropped it, staggered forward trying to catch it, and squeaked when Janus made his entrance, the guard struggling in his grip.
    Psyke's stillness only grew deeper, an animal freezing before a predator's gaze.
    “Get out, girl,” Janus said. Dahlia, after a last look at her mistress, darted for the door, leaving the bottle rocking on the carpet. Janus shoved the young guard after her, and bolted the door whose latch, like all those in the old wing, would withstand armies.
    Assured of their privacy, Janus paced the room, trying to outwait that furious pounding in his chest. Right now, he wanted her dead, wanted that delicate neck between his hands—it wouldn't take much effort. She was thin boned and slight, untrained in even the slightest defense, as helpless as a rabbit before a hound.
    Psyke sat motionless, though her hands twisted in her lap, knotting and unknotting over the bloody patches Aris's death had left, and her eyes sought escape as fervently as any prisoner faced with the