Kushiel's Chosen

very night you came. This is what you spared me."
    Wisely, he said nothing more, but only took my arm and drew me away.
    Once the palace of the Little Court was safely held, a pair of Royal Couriers was dispatched to be carried by swift gondolini to the mainland, where another, smaller portion of the Queen's retinue was encamped and the horses pastured.
    Still, the search of Benedicte's palace continued, supervised by Amaury Trente. Even after the Dogal Guardsmen were dismissed with thanks, the search continued until at last Lord Trente reported to Ysandre, now ensconced in Prince Benedicte's throne room.
    I had returned from my sojourn to view Melisande' s dungeon and waited attendance on the Queen, along with Joscelin and a handful of other D'Angeline nobles. I saw the taut futility etched in Lord Trente' s face as he made his report, shaking his head.
    "I am sorry, your majesty," he said. "But the babe is not here."

SEVENTY-SEVEN
    Sometime in the middle of the night, word arrived from the Dogal Palace that Prince Benedicte de la Courcel had died of his injuries.
    Ysandre heard out the news with no more than a nod, and what she thought of it, I never knew. It was a mark of her character that she bore out these dreadful betrayals without succumbing to the desire for vengeance. Over furious protest, she had made arrangements for the body of David de Rocaille to be returned home by ship and buried on his family estate.
    "He sought my life in exchange for his sister's death," she said implacably. "Let it end here." And insofar as I know, it did, save for those events already in motion.
    Ysandre's search for Benedicte and Melisande's son was another such mark of character, although there are those who claimed-and always will be-that she sought the child's life. It was not so. At a little over two years wed, Ysandre and Drustan had not yet conceived. With Prince Benedicte dead and his daughters by his Serenissiman wife disgraced, the lines of succession were clear. Barquiel L'Envers, however much she trusted him, whatever his ambition, had not a drop of Courcel blood in his veins; and House Courcel held the throne of Terre d'Ange.
    Until the Queen conceived, the infant Imriel de la Courcel was her heir.
    I do not think Ysandre intended him to inherit-she was young, and had every hope of yet bearing children of her own-but she had spoken truly in the Temple of Asherat-of-the-Sea. Rather than allow another blood-feud to fester, she would take the child into her household and see him raised with honor and respect, thwarting whatever hopes Melisande Shahrizai harbored of her son eventually cleaving House Courcel in twain.
    It might even have worked.
    The babe's nursemaid gave her testimony in stammering D'Angeline, over and over. All she knew was that she'd been given orders to see him made ready to be taken to the ceremony of investiture, fed and rested ere dawn and swaddled in cloth-of-silver. One of the Princess' attendants, a man she knew by sight, but not name, had come for the babe, and she'd given him into his custody. Neither man nor child were seen again.
    We had a clear description of the infant from numerous sources: a babe of some six months' age, with fair skin, a dense crop of black hair and eyes the hue of blue twilight. By all accounts, Imriel de la Courcel was a beautiful babe-unmistakably, his mother's son.
    And just as unmistakably, he was missing.
    The following day bore strange, familiar echoes of the aftermath of the battle of Troyes-le-Mont as the denizens of the Little Court were brought before Ysandre for hard questioning. A few were detained, but most appeared genuinely ignorant of Melisande's identity and Benedicte's betrayal. None of them had knowledge of the missing heir. Last time, I had faced questioning too; this time, I stood beside Ysandre's throne, watching and listening for the telltales of a lie. In the matter of the child, I saw none. Melisande's contingency plan was cloaked in secrecy.
    Ti-Philippe returned quietly in the small hours of the morning, reporting with weary relief that all the Yeshuites had gotten out safely; I was glad to hear it, and Joscelin all the more so. One day, a party of Serenissiman Yeshuites would indeed depart for the far northern lands, where the sun never sets in summertime but shines day and night upon the snowy vistas, and they would be led by a young man named Micah ben Ximon, who fought with crossed daggers that shone like a star in his hands-but that is