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area.
    “No.” She frowned. “The Queen would have heard by now. Tsingani, mayhap. I’ve read accounts of D’Angeline children being stolen by Tsingani. Elua knows, there are enough of them that travel the passes between here and Aragonia. Tinkers and horse-traders, they say, but who knows what they might hide in those wagons?”
    “ No .” The sharpness of my own voice surprised me. I sighed, apologizing. “My lady Jehane, forgive me. But it is not Tsingani.”
    “As you say, Comtesse.” Jehane looked at me with composed interest. “Near-sister, I should say. I must confess, you’re not what I expected.”
    “Oh?” I raised my brows.
    “No.” A corner of her mouth curved in the familiar hint of a smile. “I expected a keen wit and a strong will. Joscelin wouldn’t have fallen for less. And I know what you are. Still, I didn’t expect you to ride out of the backlands of Siovale looking like one of the more delicate blossoms in the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers.”
    I flushed. Jehane laughed.
    “Jehane!” Her father, already closeted with Luc and Joscelin, laying his plans for the search, turned to give her a look of reproach. “Be courteous.”
    She merely smiled, rose and stooped to kiss his cheek before turning back to me. “They’ll be at it for hours. Shall I show you to your quarters? You look as though you wouldn’t mind a rest before dinner. With your permission, Mother,” she added.
    “By all means.” The Lady Ges, abstracted, gestured with one hand, counting on the other. “I’ll be busy till nightfall trying to figure out how the larder’s to provision this undertaking.”
    I followed Jehane through the rambling corridors of Verreuil to the rooms in which Joscelin and I had stayed before when we visited, clean and airy, with massive timbers supporting the ceiling and a window that looked out onto the mountains. It held, touchingly, some few items of Joscelin’s childhood-a Caerdicci primer with a cracked binding, a book of verse by the warrior-poet Martin Leger, a child’s miniature hunting-horn. Jehane lingered, picking up the horn and examining it.
    “I gave this to him,” she murmured. “For his ninth birthday. I had to beg the money from Luc to do it. I knew he’d only have a year to use it, before he was sent to the Cassilines. Does he speak of his time there?”
    I sat down on the bed. “Not often.”
    “I missed him the most, I think.” Jehane set down the horn. “Mahieu was too young, and Luc ... Luc never said it, but I think he was glad it wasn’t him. You know Father was furious that Joscelin broke his vows for you? It nearly killed him, when he learned Joscelin had been convicted in absentia for the murder of your lord Delaunay. He didn’t believe it, but it nearly killed him all the same.”
    Joscelin and I had been enslaved in Skaldia when that had happened, betrayed by Melisande Shahrizai, though no one could have known it. It had been the logical conclusion, I suppose, when Anafiel Delaunay and his apprentice Alcuin were found slain in their home, while Delaunay’s anguissette and her Cassiline guard had vanished. I remember how it grieved Joscelin, on the eve of battle, to think his father might have believed it. “I guessed as much,” I said. “But he never said it to my face. He was always courteous.”
    “Courteous.” She pulled a wry look. “Yes. Father is that. Well, he had the sense to realize that fate will out in the end, after Troyes-le-Mont. Mother was glad, though. She always mourned losing her middle son to the Cassilines.” Jehane cocked her head at me. “You do love him, don’t you?”
    “Yes.” I nodded. “More than I can say.”
    “Good.” She dusted her hands, then wiped them on her skirt. “Keep him safe, will you?” She gave a self-conscious laugh. “It sounds foolish, I know. He with a sword at his back and daggers at his belt, knowing more ways to use them than I can count, and you ... well. But he was my younger brother, once, and he’s given his heart into your hands.”
    “I understand, my lady.”
    Jehane left, then, and I lay down on the bed. She was right, I was weary; more weary than I had known. Of a surety, travel takes its toll, but this was a weariness of the soul more than the body. The crofter’s revelation had dealt me a blow. In all my careful efforts to unravel the mystery of Imriel’s disappearance, it had never occurred to me that it could prove out to be a senseless crime. It was the