Kushiel's Dart

almost black.
    We all stared at it, saying nothing. Gonzago de Escabares eyes were round with perplexity; I don't think he knew what it was. I did. Joscelin did. I had been wearing it that last day, the day Delaunay was killed. The day Melisande had betrayed us.
    "What in the seventh hell is this supposed to mean?" Joscelin demanded, throwing it down on the couch beside me. He gave a bewildered laugh, running his hands through his hair. "Your cloak ? Do you have the faintest idea?" He looked at me, then looked again. "Phedre?" I did know.
    Someone had aided Melisande, had helped her escape from Troyes-le-Mont. Whoever it was, they had never been found. Ysandre's suspicion, in the end, had fallen most heavily on Quincel de Morhban and the two Shahrizai kin, Marmion and Persia. If they were exonerated, it was only because there was no proof and it was too ludicrously obvious, all of them too canny to stage such a blatant ploy. But there was another reason, I knew. I spent that night atop the battlements, and never heard a sound. The guard at the postern gate was killed by a knife to the heart. He'd seen his killer; it was someone he trusted, face-to-face. And the guardsmen of Troyes-le-Mont didn't trust anyone who hadn't fought at their side. Certainly he would have challenged any one of the Kusheline nobles, approaching him in the dark of night.
    Someone he trusted. Someone we all trusted.
    And now Melisande was in La Serenissima, close enough to the family of the Doge to learn in a day that their soothsayer had received a visitor. Prince Benedicte's eldest daughter, Marie-Celeste, was wed to the Doge's son ... a near-incestuous knot of the deadly Stregazza, who had poisoned Isabel L'Envers de la Courcel.
    Ysandre's nearest kin who were of the Blood.
    Oh, I knew. My hands closed on a fold of the sangoire cloak, feeling the rich velvet beneath my fingertips. I could smell, faintly, Melisande's scent. Why had she kept it? I couldn't answer it, my mind shying away from the question. But what she meant it for now, I knew well enough.
    A challenge, an opening gambit.
    I touched my throat, bare of her diamond.
    Somewhere in that deadly coil of La Serenissima, a plot was hatching. It was a long way, a very long way, from Ysandre's throne in the City of Elua. But intrigue has a long reach, when thrones are at stake. Someone, at Ysandre's right hand, concealed poison at their heart.
    And I could find them out.
    That was what the cloak meant, of course. Melisande knew full well how I had served Delaunay, Alcuin and I. He'd let her know as much. Like her, he was a master, and could not bear to be entirely without an audience . . . one solitary witness, who could appreciate his artistry, the tremendous scope and complexity of his undertaking. Whoremaster of Spies, his detractors called him, when the halcyon days of Ysandre's wedding and D'Angeline victory had passed.
    Witness and opponent, Melisande had chosen me as her equal.
    I was an anguissette and a sometime Servant of Naamah, that much, the world knew; trained to observe, to remember, to analyze. Not many knew that. Even those who did put little stock in it. I had been at the wrong place at the right time, nothing more. I nearly believed it myself, and sometimes, I think, it was true.
    Others would find it easy to believe.
    Who would the gatekeeper have trusted?
    I could count them on my fingers. Caspar Trevalion, Percy de Somer-ville, Barquiel L'Envers; a half a dozen others. No more.
    I could find out, as I had found out that Childric d'Essoms served L'Envers, as I had found out that Solaine Belfours was Lyonette de Trev-alion's puppet. People will speak before an anguissette , careless as with no other, not even the pillow-talk of the Night Court. I stroked the velvet pile of the sangoire cloak. Delaunay had sent all the way to Firezia to find dye-makers who could recreate it. We'd lost the art, in Terre d'Ange. That didn't happen often. Such a beautiful color , Melisande had said, once. It suits you .
    It would be easy, so easy, to begin again; I was born to it, I thought, blinking away the red wash that hazed my vision. Joscelin began every morning with the smooth execution of the Cassiline forms drilled into him since he was ten, that deadly, private dance he now performed in the gardens of Montreve, while members of the household watched with covert admiration.
    And I, I channeled my gifts and their awful yearnings into my studies, which I was loathe to abandon. No