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gallows.
    “Tell me,” he said, and the deep growl of his voice made her jump. “What wrong have I ever done you that you would tell such a lie?” It was hard to come at her obliquely when all he wanted to do was demand the truth: Had she truly seen Maledicte? But that question couldn't be asked, not without betraying the deadly secret he had kept for near a year: that Maledicte lived.
    “Lies?” she said. “I told none.” Her voice wavered, thin and reedy, uncertain. She turned her back to him, but in the age-mottled mirror before her, her eyes were resolute.
    Janus let out his breath. “You should have held your tongue until you knew where I had been. If you hate me so much that you would see me hanged for treason, it's best to know my whereabouts before you make your accusations.”
    He approached her, felt stiff with controlling his rage, more a toy soldier than a man. Her eyes followed each step with rising worry; her hands fled her skirts, shifted to fiddle with the jumble of artifacts on her dressing table. A tarnished silver-backed brush, bristles nearly worn away; a child's locket; a scatter of stained ribbons. Not the usual clutter, Janus knew, but something closer to a shrine, the grisly mementos of her murdered family.
    She shook her head, breaking the connection between their glass-caught gazes. Head lowered, voice small, she said, “Your whereabouts are irrelevant when you have a killer on a leash.”
    He reached out to shake the smugness from her mouth, the prim hatred from her eyes; and she jumped away, spinning, standing, nearly falling over her seat. She pressed her back to the wall, and her expression veered toward panic. He seized her shoulders, gratified that she shuddered beneath his hands.
    “Your lie injured your cause as well,” he said. “The entire court whispers that the witch Mirabile left you mad when she slaughtered your family. Do you think this lie did anything to counter it?”
    “Careful,” Psyke said, a weird wild light in her eyes. “Be cautious which weapons you marshal against me. If no one believes my words tonight, neither do they trust yours. There is no madness in me—”
    “Appearances are everything in this court. Abandon your grief; wallowing in the past will only cause you misery in the present.”
    He reached for her again and she quailed; he caught her hands, dragged them down to her skirts. “Feel that?”
    The cloth, stiff with blood, resisted their touch, crinkled against the weight of their joined hands. “Tell me, my sweet, how mad must one be before one refuses to change out of a blood-soaked gown. To accuse one's husband of regicide on no evidence at all?”
    Her gaze shied from his, fell to the clotted stains, dark even against the dull navy of her dress. Her hands in his trembled and grew cold. “How mad,” he whispered, “to not even notice that you reek of Aris's death?”
    “A death you caused,” she whispered, even as her weight folded inward, her legs giving out. Janus tightened his grip, dragged her to face him.
    Her eyes were the blind blue of summer skies.
    “Aris is dead. My king dead,” she whispered. Her hands fluttered, tightened on his sleeves, so lost that she clutched him as an anchor.
    He shook her off. “Aris
is
dead. Most inconveniently so.” His temper swelled at the memory of Ivor's smile, and settled only when he thought Rue, at least, would be making the man's evening near as uncomfortableas Janus's promised to be. “Aris was a fool to hold his rendezvous with no one but yourself to guard him. Not even his hounds! The man
wanted
to be killed and, by the gods, someone obliged.”
    She slapped him. It wasn't much, a feeble blow, but the quickness of it, the angry glitter in her eyes, made him flinch. His enemy indeed.
    “He was your king and your kin,” she said, and the fury in her voice was the fury of generations bound by tradition and unthinking loyalty.
    “And such kinship,” Janus said. “To allow my