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his bed.”
    A thousand, a thousand-thousand times I have wished those words unsaid. They were the words that ended my life. My lady went red, and then white, so pale I thought she would faint. And then she whispered, in a voice as cold as a drowned man, “Go hence, Felicity. Sleep in your own bed tonight. Or in his. I’ve no need of you just now.”
    ‘Just now’ she said, but her voice said ‘anymore.’
    I left her bed and crossed the cold room, to enter my little chamber and clamber into my freezing bed. As I huddled there, sleepless, the rest of the night, I heard no weeping from her room. Only a terrible quiet.
    I rose in the morning and went to tend her, but found her already up and dressed. Her face was white, her eyes set deep in dark circles. She did not stir from her room that day, nor say more than a dozen words to me. I brought her meals and took them away uneaten. I was pathetically grateful that she did not send me away entirely. My efforts to speak to her went unanswered, and she looked past me, but not at me. The pain of my lie cut me deep for the sorrow it had caused her. Yet I will not deny there was a satisfaction that although she might cut off all contact with Lostler over his supposed infidelity, her love for me, her humble and homely serving maid, was great enough that she did not rebuke me nor send me away. Every time I felt the urge to confess to her, I stifled it, thinking, ‘She will get over her pain, and if I tell her, I will be the one she abandons. I have saved her from going to him, saved her from anyone discovering the truth.’ Thinking this helped me to bear the pain of her exiling me from her thoughts.
    Only to my mother did I admit my transgression, and she gave me no cause to doubt my impulse. Instead, she praised me warmly and whispered to me that I was far more clever than she had ever given me credit for. She also spoke urgently of all I had yet to do, saying that the moment the Queen-in-Waiting began to feel the surges of birth I must come to her and tell her. This I agreed to easily. She urged me, also, to mutter against Lostler to the other servants, saying that he had treated me badly in abandoning me once he knew I carried a babe, but this I did not have the courage to do. One lie surely was enough, and even then I suspected that the consequences of it might be deeper than I knew.
    And so I continued to serve Caution faithfully, even if she kept me at a cool distance. I pretended that I thought it the result of her pregnancy, and was ever more solicitous of her comforts.
    In the days that followed, Caution grew more silent and more wan. She spoke little and was without spirit. She ceased all efforts to defy her chaperone Lady Hope, but was as docile as a cow as she sat with her sewing untouched in her lap. She would not walk in the gardens, or descend to the Great Hall for music. Word of her bleak spirits spread through the court. At her command, many a visitor I turned away from her door. Finally, the king himself, his face lined with his grief, came to her. Him I could not turn away; instead, he sent me from her room, but I crouched on the floor by the door to my chamber and listened.
    He did not comfort her with gentle words of forgiveness and encouragement. Instead, he spoke gravely, telling her that he knew she now realized how foolish she had been and what a grave error she had committed. He admitted to her that had she been his son, folk would have shrugged off her breach of conduct. But she was not and neither one of them could change that. Then he told her, bluntly, that many of his nobles had come to him asking that he set her and her unborn child aside as heir, and instead put the crown of King-in-Waiting on the raven locks of his young nephew Canny Farseer.
    I peered through the crack to see her lift her head at those words. “And would you do that, Father?”
    He was silent for a long time. Then he asked her, “What would your will be in this, Caution?”
    She