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fabric of my shirt rasp over my wounded flesh. It was a familiar feeling. I’d known it well, once. This was different. I had chosen it.
    “It is well done, my lord priest,” I said.
    He nodded a final time. “Go, then.”
    Hugues leapt to his feet when I entered the foyer. “Are you . . . how are you?”
    I ran my tongue over my teeth, thinking. I could taste blood where I’d bitten the inside of my cheek, and the lingering taste of incense. Nothing else. I hurt, but no worse than I’d hurt after a rough training session with Barbarus squadron. The weals would fade. And I wasn’t scared inside. “I’m fine,” I said, surprised to discover it was true. I smiled at Hugues. “Come on, let’s go.”

T HREE
    S OME DAYS AFTER MY visit to Kushiel’s temple, the Queen threw a fête to celebrate my return to the City of Elua.
    It was a small affair as such matters went. Given free rein, she would have thrown a larger one—and I daresay Phèdre would gladly have aided her—but I had left the City under a lingering cloud of suspicion and recrimination, and as glad as I was to be among my loved ones, my return was tainted by what had gone before. I preferred a smaller engagement.
    Duc Barquiel L’Envers would not be in attendance, which was good. My unwelcome nemesis was the Queen’s uncle on her mother’s side. The plot he had conceived against me had been simple and effective. A mysterious messenger, a whispered password, a note indicating a clandestine meeting. That was all it had taken to convince far, far too many peers that Melisande Shahrizai’s son plotted treason, including some I counted as friends. Some of them had apologized after the Queen publicly proclaimed my innocence.
    Others had not.
    Bertran de Trevalion was one of those, and despite my wishes, he would be attending. I’d greeted him civilly upon my return. I was glad to know he’d been ignorant of his mother’s intrigues, and I’d made my uneasy truce with her. Still, I’d rather not have to be polite to them at the dinner table just yet. Being targeted for murder had that effect.
    “I’d truly prefer it if House Trevalion wasn’t in attendance,” I said to Phèdre.
    “I know, love.” There was a slight furrow between her brows. “Believe me, so would I, and Joscelin, too. But there are blood-ties between House Trevalion and Courcel, and other ties, as well. You know how Ysandre can be about such such things. This is the price of the choice you made, and unless you wish to change your mind, you’ll have to bear it.”
    I shook my head. “I made a promise.”
    I’d made my choice, in part, because of the Queen. Ysandre de la Courcel, the product of a contentious marriage and inheritor of a throne plagued by treachery, had a fierce determination to heal old wounds and unite the members of her family in harmony. It had not, however, extended to holding her uncle accountable for his actions in the public milieu. It still galled me, and all the more after learning that Bernadette de Trevalion had tried to have me killed because of it. Somehow, I blamed him more than I did her.
    “At least Maslin de Lombelon won’t be there,” Phèdre commented.
    “He’s still in disgrace?” I asked. She nodded. “Why did he do it, anyway?”
    Maslin de Lombelon was a minor lordling because I’d made him one. I’d given him an estate, Lombelon; the smallest of my holdings. I’d done it because I knew he loved it, and I thought we understood each other, at least a little bit. His father had been a traitor, too. I’d been wrong. He’d left Lombelon to enlist in the Queen’s Guard, where he glared daggers at me at every opportunity and later disgraced himself by administering a beating to one Raul L’Envers y Aragon, who was also distant kin to the Queen.
    Betimes, returning to the City made my head ache.
    “Raul challenged him,” Phèdre said dryly. “Maslin carried it too far.”
    The first time I’d seen Maslin, he’d been attacking