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Stablemaster daily brought the Spotted Stud, saddled and bridled, to the courtyard, she did not go down to him, nor so much as wave her dismissal from a window. So every day he waited, an hour or sometimes two, and then he and the horses would return to the stables. Sometimes I peeped from the window to see him standing there patiently, holding the reins of our mounts and looking straight ahead.
    To me alone Caution spoke of her sorrows. She felt the loss of her mother keenly, even though they had not been close since she was a little girl. Her mother had always been the one to temper her father’s anger and when he would have disciplined her more strictly, her mother had always intervened. King Virile’s dark eyes were full of hurt when he looked at his daughter now, and the two of them seemed to avoid one another instead of being drawn together by their grief. So Caution felt her father was lost to her as well. Since her pregnancy had become known, Virile had asked his wife’s younger sister to keep watch over his daughter and to regulate her conduct.
    Lady Hope was as feisty as a yapping dog, and fully a match for my mistress’s resourcefulness. That stern chaperone was never more than a few steps away from her charge, severely restricting her activities to those she considered appropriate. She might sew, or walk with her ladies in a garden, or listen to music. There was no hope of her going out to ride, even if she had felt well enough to do so. In the evenings, the key was turned in the lock to our suite of rooms, and two guards stationed outside it lest so much as a slip of paper be slipped beneath the door.
    And so she pined for her lover as well as suffering the early trials of her pregnancy. I wondered if she had managed to convey to Lostler that she carried his child. She had not been out of my sight since my ill-fated attempt with the herbs, and sending him a secret note would have been useless, him being unlettered in any language. He would surely hear, though, of her disgrace. I hoped he would be wise enough not to try to contact her, for if he betrayed her secret, it would not go well for any of us.
    Why no one else made the obvious connection, why her father did not dismiss the man or order him flogged, I did not understand. Perhaps a princess dallying with her stablemaster was too shameful a thing for him to imagine possible. Perhaps those who might suspect did not openly accuse Lostler for fear of deepening the Queen-in-Waiting’s disgrace and earning the king’s disfavor. Perhaps the king deluded himself that the child was nobly bred, if not legitimate, and that the father might yet step forward to claim his get. Or perhaps the death of his wife and his daughter’s disgrace had so unmanned him that he had no heart left to solve such a sordid mystery. Daily it stabbed me that I had not been firmer with her, that I had let her fall into this disgrace.
    And in another way I failed her. I was my mother’s child, but seemed to lack both her nerve and her fecundity. I had dithered and delayed, hoping in vain that Caution would be done with the stablemaster before his seed took root in her. And then I told myself that my herbs would shake the child from her. Although I was the first to know she carried a child, still it was hard for me to choose a man to aid me in my plan likewise to conceive.
    At last, in desperation, I settled on a man I thought I could seduce. Copper Songsmith was a young apprentice to the court. He was not as handsome then as he would grow to be, for he was wild-haired and gangly and had not yet seen a score of years, although even then he possessed a voice that made women swoon. I was not skilled in the ways of seduction and he was not a man expecting to be seduced. So we were both awkward at our task, and I at least was pretending to an ardency I did not truly feel. He was not a skilled lover and I did not care. Our matings were hurried and brief. When even after this my courses still