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about Prince Rajnir’s Dag Erkric, who had to be seventy! An old dag, making up spells for warfare? It had to be rumor. How could a dag make war? Even the greatest of them could not bespell a sword to fight on its own or an arrow to loose itself from a bow.
    What she definitely did not want was to catch the attention of the Yaga Krona, the dags who served as Eyes of the Crown. If they caught you spreading gossip during the Frasadeng, you could find yourself in the Hall of Judgment being fitted with an iron torc and given three years’ menial service for contributing toward Rainorec. The powerful can talk, they can even raise crowds, but you can’t, her mother had once said. And even the powerful sometimes fall . She’d made the gesture toward the north that everyone understood, no matter where you actually stood, to mean Sinnaborc and its infamous bloody tower roof.
    Despite their furtive glances and lowered voices, the women’s rapid exchange echoed off the stone walls with the peculiar sibilant clarity of sound in icy air, audible to anyone following ten paces behind. As Vra Seigmad was.
    “So the senior wives will demand an accounting at the Frasadeng?”
    “I’m certain that’s what’s going to happen. Why else wear black?”
    “What I don’t understand is why Hatchet-Face is throwing over her marriage. Stalna Hyarl Durasnir was not in command of the invasion. Stalna Talkar of the Hilda was.” She twiddled two fingers, indicating “army.”
    “Doesn’t anyone tell you anything out there in your faraway tunnel?”
    “No one wants an iron torc and three years of scraping ice-mud from the streets for their pains.”
    “They only call ‘treason’ and ‘Rainorec’ on one another, those in power,” came the scoffing answer in a lowered tone. “Here’s what I was told. Stalna Hyarl Durasnir negotiated the defeat with the Marlovan king himself. The first defeat ever in our history.”
    The young wife snorted. “They can’t send him to the far shore as outcast. Not a Durasnir . My mother used to say that Durasnirs don’t use the Waste Spell because they shit gold.”
    “What I heard was Dag Erkric forced him into it.”
    “Then we’ll never hear the truth. Who can gainsay a dag? All the talk about how he’ll turn your brain into stone—”
    “Shh! If you want to wake up iron-thralled tomorrow, just say his name when you walk into a spiderweb.”
    The young wife lowered her voice slightly. “But if Hatchet-Face parts with him, will she go back to her people? Who are they, anyway? I never heard that she was part of any of the Great Houses.”
    “She isn’t. She was a scribe from a collateral family connected to Lefsan House. They own nothing.”
    “Lefsan? A Durasnir allied with a Lefsan? I don’t believe it. They haven’t put forward a king candidate at Breseng for a hundred years!”
    “And you can count their captains granted helm wings on one hand. Even so. She and Durasnir met when he was a mere third son, born in a Breseng year.”
    “Oh!” Ordinarily this ancient history about old people would have been boring, but the fleet coming home, the rumors and whispers, even the Frasadeng made everything deliciously immediate.
    The young wife wasted a heartbeat or two on the notion of the famed Fulla Durasnir being born a mere third son, conceived only because a Breseng year had come, from which the Houses would choose the next king candidates—though everyone knew how that law had been twisted by paid adoptions and other connivings as the great Houses struggled for supremacy.
    Both women had grown up hearing about these struggles, but neither would have questioned the system that had governed their lives: every thirty years there would be a thirty-year-old king, young and strong, as the old king retired at sixty. Boys born that Breseng year were nurtured for fifteen years, at which time the future heir would be selected; the heir would then leave his family to live with the king and train