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Rachel.”
    “She’s a jewel, all right. Whenever I have doubts about my job, I remember that I’m doing all I can to keep her and her family safe. That’s all the encouragement I need.”
    We stopped in Mahaleela for the night. The town was pretty much the same as I remembered it—one long central road with an inexplicable right angle in the middle of it. The Serpent’s Toe Tavern and Inn was the best accommodation in town, and the desk clerk certainly fawned enough over Anders when the boy flashed his money bag. We sent our horses to the stable, dropped our saddle bags in the room and went downstairs to eat.
    Perched on the main road like it was, the Serpent’s Toe catered to a more varied clientele than the regular taverns. Single adult travelers and wealthy families both stopped there, and it dealt with this dichotomy by dichotomizing itself. The main room, where you could get dinner and warm yourself by the fire, was designed to be acceptable to prudish parents: the barmaids wore necklines to their chins, the ale served with dinner was frighteningly watered down, and there were even wet nurses available if the parents didn’t bring their own. Off to oneside was the true tavern where you could ogle the girls’ cleavage and arrange for an evening’s companionship while you drank yourself idiotic on the real stuff. It was an interesting approach to attracting customers, but judging from the crowd in the dining room, it worked.
    One family, a Mishicot livestock trader with two wives and a half-dozen kids, occupied a corner table. The kids, as Mishicotian children tended to be, were regimented little mechanicals who lifted their spoons in unison under the watchful eye of their mothers. This kind of iron-fisted parenting was necessary when you might have twenty kids in a household. The younger of the wives, a shapely blonde with dark circles under her eyes, nursed a fussy infant and stared blankly into space. Each time the baby made a particularly loud noise, the other wife, dark-haired and portly, would shoot the blonde a disapproving look. Through all this the head of the household ate ravenously, ignoring everything around him. He was tall and handsome, and scanned the other women in the room with the same rapacious gaze so many Mishicotian merchants possessed. In Mishicot a man measured success by wives and children, and he was clearly on his way up the ladder.
    Our waitress, far too young for me but just about right for Anders, brought us drinks and bread. The menu was scrawled in chalk on a board on one wall. As we studied the fare, I caught the voices of two tradesmen at the table behind me.
    “. . . worst domestic scandal we’ve ever had.”
    “It’s not a scandal, it’s just the inevitable result of dealing with women.”
    “You’re too cynical.
My
wife isn’t so bad. Certainly not a child-killer.”
    “Well, you know the government’s not telling us everything.
I
hear that she’s a moon priestess; I bet it was all part of some spell.”
    “To do
what?
She married the king of Arentia, she’s the most powerful woman in the country now. What more did she need?” His voice dropped. “I bet there’s another man involved, and the king found out it wasn’t his child. This is just his way of saving face.”
    “I just know that I don’t believe they’re being straight with us.”
    “This king isn’t like that. He doesn’t hide in his castle behind guards and soldiers, he’s never had a scandal, and he’s never been caught in a public lie.”
    “Maybe he’s just better at hiding it than his father was.”
    That tied in with the message Anders had given me, and I began to understand its urgency. After we ate, I excused myself and went into the tavern for a nightcap. I couldn’t imagine sleeping in Arentia while sober.
    The tavern was half the size of the dining hall, lit with a few oil lamps and the smoldering fireplace. But the nearest waitress wore a blouse so low-cut the brown circles