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down. ‘But I knew something
like
this would happen soon.’ She looked over at the small counter and pointed. ‘Aline, dear, get me a cup of whatever’s in that jug over there, would you?’
    Aline nodded and filled an old battered metal cup with something that looked like it might have once been beer.
    ‘Trin’s weak,’ the Tailor said, and took a swig from the cup. ‘For all the vicious brilliance she inherited from Patriana, she’s still an eighteen-year-old girl, and more, one who everyone thought was just Valiana’s handmaiden, up until a few weeks ago.’
    ‘She has an army four times the size of the Duke of Pulnam’s,’ Kest pointed out.
    ‘Aye, she has an army: an army of men twice her age who have no reason to be loyal other than tradition and parentage. When Patriana ruled Hervor she did so with skill and cunning. Her army had won every battle they fought in the last twenty years and the duchy prospered accordingly. But Patriana’s dead now and we should all thank the Gods for that.’
    ‘And now they have Trin,’ I said, following the Tailor’s line of reasoning. ‘Young. Untested . . .’
    ‘No,’ the Tailor said, her voice on the edge of glee, ‘tested indeed! Nearly a month she’s been trying to force the Duke of Pulnam to bow before her, and what has she to show for it? Nothing but the dead bodies of her soldiers!’
    If Trin’s armies of Hervor ever met the wretched and under-trained forces of Erris, Duke of Pulnam, on the battlefield, I doubted Pulnam would last a day. But the Tailor’s Greatcoats had been launching buzzing attacks on her forces that had kept them busy trying to swat us: an army that had not known defeat in two decades was now being delayed from destroying its enemy by a mere hundred Greatcoats.
    ‘She had to attack us,’ I agreed. ‘But if the villagers had betrayed us to her, then why not send her whole army?’
    ‘They’re still too far away,’ Kest said, looking as if he were counting odds in his head. ‘Trying to move that many men so quickly would make them vulnerable to attack from Pulnam’s forces.’
    I imagined Trin, parading her beauty and arrogance before the military generals of Hervor. She could be a masterful actor when she wanted, as capable of simulating innocent and seductive need as she was of committing casual and merciless violence. She’d fooled all of us, playing the shy young girl even as she murdered Lord Tremondi and manipulated everyone around her.
Trin loves games
, I thought.
There must be a way to use that when the time is right.
    ‘She needs to show her Knights that she’s as clever as her mother was,’ the Tailor said. ‘She needs them to believe she can lead them to ever-more-brilliant victories. It can’t just be sending ten thousand men to crush one hundred. To make an impression, she needed to do us great harm using just a few of her own men: a victory won with little cost to her. Murdering you, in some ingenious and theatrical manner, Falcio, was one of the more likely scenarios.’
    ‘Did you have some plan for protecting me?’
    She jabbed a finger at Kest. ‘I figured he’d deal with that.’
    ‘You realise I’m here too, don’t you?’ Brasti said.
    The Tailor ignored him. ‘But the biggest prize would be to take Aline. Imagine Trin, dragging King Paelis’ heir through the muck and mud as her generals watched, telling the story of her cunning victory to the cheers of her soldiers before she turned the girl over to them.’
    Gods, the things they would have done to her before finally slitting her throat.
They’ll do those same things to whomever the Tailor has given them
, I realised with a start. ‘The girl – the one you have masquerading as Aline—’
    ‘The one I sent knows how to protect herself,’ the Tailor said, cutting me off. ‘I’ll tell you no more than that. She’ll leave us a trail and we’ll send out the Greatcoats in an hour.’
    ‘Why not right now?’
    ‘In between here and