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floor that it was as though the space had been designed with a toddling child in mind.
    Now that I was here, however, one obvious question that I’d somehow hitherto ignored made itself inescapable: what was I actually looking for? Did princes keep gold and jewels loose in their chambers? Would Panchetto have even possessed coin when he hardly left the palace, never wanted for anything money could buy? Having spent so little time with royalty, I found it impossible to say – but I had my doubts.
    I’d made it this far, though, and I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving empty handed. I pushed through a silken hanging, into a room dominated by a bed fit for a small household, curtained with fine cloth of interlacing crimson and blue. Bed aside, there wasn’t a single piece of furniture in there, so I pressed on, through another hanging into a slightly smaller room, where a bath as large as a good-sized cottage was sunk into the floor.
    I was about to turn back when something caught my eye: a box set with polished bronze and lapis lazuli perched on one edge of the oceanic bath. On impulse, I scurried over, drew back the lid – and almost keeled over in my delight. It wasn’t the oils and perfumes within that had set my head spinning, expensive though they no doubt were. No, it was the bottles that contained them: the flasks of cut crystal, with their jewel-encrusted stoppers of gold and silver. Melted down, the gold alone would keep me comfortable for a year.
    I unslung my pack, loosed the straps and began to fill it. I went carefully at first, but soon realised it was wasted effort. Like everything else, the flasks had been designed with the clumsy Panchetto in mind; I could probably have flung them at the wall without them breaking. Instead, I crammed them in by the handful, heedless of how they clinked and rattled.
    Too late did it occur to me that breaking my prizes was the least of my worries.
    No, it was the noise I was making I should have been paying attention to. It was a mistake unworthy of a seasoned thief – and all the more so because it took a hand clamping my shoulder to make me realise it.
    “Whoever you are,” a leaden voice declaimed, “you sure as hells aren’t Prince Panchetto.”

CHAPTER THREE

    My mistake had been assuming there would only be one guard watching Panchetto’s chambers.
    Or else it had been not keeping an eye out; or perhaps breaking into the palace in the first place; or maybe just ever returning to Altapasaeda. The more I thought about it, the harder it became to think of some point that I could definitively say wasn’t a mistake to work forward from.
    In the meantime, the vice-like grip on my shoulder was doing unpleasant things to the circulation in my arm. I could already feel my fingers starting to go numb. “If you can just give me a minute to explain...”
    He released my shoulder abruptly. Whatever relief I felt vanished the instant I realised it was only to clasp my wrist and wrap my arm efficiently – not to mention, excruciatingly – behind my back.
    “Aaaowww,” I wailed, “there’s no need to–
    Another twist, very slight and utterly agonising, was enough to make me shut up.
    “You can tell it downstairs,” he said. My guard, whose face I still hadn’t seen, had perfectly mastered the forced boredom of the professional law enforcer. We might have been discussing the weather on a particularly dull day for all the interest in his voice.
    Still, his professionalism couldn’t be faulted. He had me on my feet in a moment, and moving straight after, all achieved with only the subtlest manipulation of my pinned arm. I was helpless as a newborn kitten in a snake pit. My choices extended to doing precisely what he wanted or having my shoulder dislodged from its socket.
    He led me at a steady march, taking a different route to the one I’d arrived by. I could hardly see where we were going for the tears stinging my eyes, but the passages looked more or less like