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and a little abstracted, but he was whiter than Ted had ever seen anyone. He shivered, turned for the door, and fell over. His head would have cracked against the stone floor, but it hit King William’s knee.
    “Two!” said Conrad. He and Matthew both knelt over Randolph, and nearly bumped heads. Conrad looked over his shoulder at Ted. “Thy father’s dead,” he said. “This one lives.”
    “I’ll get Fence,” said Ted, and went running.
    “None must leave!” Andrew called after him, but he ran on. He could not stay in that room.
    He was supposed to run all up and down Fence’s steps before he found him in the rose garden, but it no longer mattered what anybody was supposed to do. He went straight down past the startled guard and out into the damp gray evening. He blundered past the rain-heavy roses, scattering petals on the wind as his robe slapped them, and came, in the center of the garden where the fountain was, upon Fence and Claudia.
    They looked at him, Fence with sharp concern and Claudia with irritation. She was out: out of the spell of Shan’s Ring, and thence easily out of the tower where Jerome had imprisoned her. Ted had no time for her. He stood catching his breath and looking at Fence.
    “Edward?”
    “The King,” said Ted, lurched to his knees, and threw up.
    Fence held his head, with cold but extremely steady hands.
    “Thou cream-faced loon!” exclaimed Claudia. “Where gotst thou that goose-look?”
    “Hold your tongue,” said Fence, absently.
    Ted’s stomach finished with him. Maybe they had all been poisoned by Andrew, and that was why Randolph fell over.
    Fence picked him up off his knees and steered him to the fountain. “Wash thy face,” he said.
    Ted put his head into the water obediently. It was cold, and when he had stood up and blinked the drops from his eyes, he could see clearly for the first time since they had lit the candles in the Council Chamber.
    He shook back his wet hair and turned to Fence. Claudia stood just beyond the short figure of the wizard. Her dress was brighter than all the roses, and the pallid sky behind her dark head made it regal. She looked like a queen contemplating the fate of nations.
    “You did it,” Ted said to her.
    “What’s the matter?” said Fence.
    “King William is dead,” said Ted.
    Fence, not a fidgeter at the worst of times, became absolutely still. “How?” he said.
    “Poison in the wine,” said Ted. “At least, Andrew said—” he stopped.
    “Who hath done this?”
    “Randolph, by her will.” Ted pointed at Claudia.
    “In that chaos, how might you know?”
    “It wasn’t chaos, Fence. The King mistook the feast.”
    Fence remained still. “For which other?”
    “Randolph’s serving-feast.”
    “So there is no doubt?”
    Ted was silent. He had remembered that it was not in his own interest to accuse Randolph now.
    “Did others drink?”
    “Everyone.”
    “Were others stricken?”
    “I don’t think so. Randolph fainted, or something; and I’m sick, but nobody else just—just died like that.”
    “In the cup, then, not in the bottle.”
    “I guess,” said Ted, miserably.
    “Who had a chance at the cup?”
    “Search close for one that strikes,” said Claudia, in her deep voice with its insinuating touch of huskiness. She sounded amused. “All may yet be very well.”
    “Keep the words of Shan from thy mouth,” said Fence, with astonishing severity, and he put his arm through Ted’s. “Go we to Randolph, then,” he said.

CHAPTER 4
    T HEY went back to the Council Chamber in silence. Ted stole an occasional glance at Fence. For all that he was walking briskly, that same stillness hung about him, as if he had suspended all his mental processes and half his bodily ones. Ted kept wanting to make sure he was breathing. But it was comforting to have something so steady so close. Ted felt as if he had just stepped off one of the nastier carnival rides, the kind you could never let Laurie go on because she