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stepped over his body and turned toward Alisande. She saw her hostess and screamed again, running toward her, hands hooked into claws. "You have slain him! Your vile people have slain him!"
    "Traitors! Poltroons!" Drustan roared, only one step behind her. "Have you no guards, have you no Watch? How could you let your scum slay a true prince?"
    "Your Majesties, I am most deeply sorry," Alisande said, face pale. "I share your grief."
    "Be sure that you shall!" Drustan bellowed. "Be sure that you shall share it at spear's point!" Every Merovencian soldier in the hallway slanted his pike or halberd to guard position. The Bretanglians saw and readied their own weapons.
    "Nothing can console you for such a loss," Matt said quickly, "but I shall find the murderer and haul him before you for your vengeance!"
    "We have the murderer," one of the Bretanglian soldiers snapped. "It's the pimp who—" Petronille spun to face him, eyes wide and wild.
    "—who fought him trying to ravish the maiden," the soldier ad-libbed quickly. "We have both him and one of his doxies in custody, Majesty!"
    "I shall see him drawn and quartered!" Drustan thundered, glaring at Alisande.
    "That is the punishment for treachery or the slaying of a prince," she agreed, wooden-faced.
    "The surgeons must save him first," the Bretanglian soldier said in his heavy accent "Your son gave the man quite a drubbing, Majesty, and slit his weasand for him."
    Something about the way the man said it set Mart's built-in lie detector shrilling.
    "Call out all your surgeons!" Petronille commanded. "We must preserve the louse for royal vengeance!"
    "Indeed we must," Alisande returned. "Death in combat is far too gentle an ending for a prince-killer."
    "Did he act alone?" Matt asked.
    He said it softly, but the whole hallway fell silent. Then Petronille asked in a strangled tone, "What do Page 21
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    you mean?"
    "Only that," Matt told her. "Princes are trained in fighting; alley urchins only learn it by winning often enough to stay alive. I don't think a street fighter could have killed a skilled swordsman without help."
    "The prince had no sword," the Bretanglian soldier said instantly, "only a dagger. He was disguised as a peasant."
    Again Matt's alarm rang, but this time because he was guessing right. He ignored the question of why the prince had dressed down for his evening's recreation and said, "With or without a sword, he should have been more than the equal of a gutter rat. Who came at his back?" The hall was silent, the Bretanglian soldiers staring at one another. Finally Drustan smelled a running rodent, too. He turned on his guardsmen, demanding, "Well?"
    "There was the man who went out the window," one of; them said hesitantly.
    "And you did not pursue him? Fool!" Drustan backhanded the man across the chops so hard that he fell back into his mates. "No one will find him now! The trail is cold!"
    "Cold or hot, I'll find him," Matt assured the king. "If you don't have one murderer to chop up, you'll have the other."
    "Then you shall accompany him!" Drustan jabbed a finger at Sir Orizhan. "You, disgraced knight who failed in your charge!" He kicked the fallen sergeant. "Wake this one and send him, too." The assignment spoke of a lack of trust, but under the circumstances, Matt could understand it. He stepped around the king to the Bretanglian guardsmen. "Tell me about this man who went out the window."
    They eyed him warily, and one said, "How could you catch him when the trail is more than an hour cold?"
    "I'm the Lord Wizard, remember?"
    "Tell him!" Drustan shouted.
    They told.

CHAPTER 3
    If anyone happened to be awake and noticing Matt through their windows that midnight, they must have shuddered and pulled the drapes shut, muttering a quick charm. Dressed in a dark brown leather jerkin and black hose, Matt looked pretty grim. Sir Orizhan wore similar clothing, and Sergeant Brock's indigo