Chapter 191

Bash

The captain of the Council’s guard woke me at a quarter to six by hammering on my bedroom door with his fist, which no one had done in that house since my father died.

I knew before I opened it. I don’t know how. Something in the sound of it. Something in the silence of the house behind it, which was the wrong kind of silence.

He was standing in the corridor in his shirt, gray-faced, with his hair on end and his hands shaking. Behind him, at the end of the corridor, two of my own men were half carrying a third between them, and the third man’s head was lolling on his chest.

“She’s gone,” the captain said.

***

They were still asleep when I got there. The two in the chairs outside the west wing room, one slumped against the wall with his mouth open, the other on the floor where he had slid out of his chair in the night, curled on his side like a dog by a fire. Somebody had put a coat over him. A tin mug lay on its side by his boot, in a