He had to content himself with seeing his sister as little as he could. A couple of times, he’d also had to keep Merkela from marching into the east wing and wringing Krasta’s neck. The Algarvians had taken Merkela’s first husband hostage and blazed him; she hated collaborators even more than redheads.

“We don’t know everything,” Skarnu said, not for the first time.

“We know enough,” Merkela answered with peasant directness. “All right, so she slept with Valnu, too. But she let the redhead futter her for as long as he was here. She has to pay the price.”

“No one ever said she didn’t. No one ever said she won’t.” While Skarnu was out in the provinces, he’d got used to thinking of himself as being without a sister after he’d learned that Krasta was keeping company with her Algarvian colonel. Finding things weren’t quite so simple jolted him, too. He sighed and added, “We’re not quite sure what the price should be, that’s all.”

“I’m sure.” But Merkela grimaced and turned away. She didn’t sound sure, not even to herself. Doing her best to recover the fierceness she’d had when fighting Algarve seemed futile, she brushed blond hair back from her face and said, “She deserves worse than this. This is nothing.”

“We can’t be too hard on her, not when we don’t know for certain whose baby it is,” Skarnu said. They’d had that argument before, too.

Before they could get deeply into it again, someone knocked on the door to their bedchamber. Skarnu went to open it with more than a little relief. The butler, Valmiru, bowed to him. “Your Excellency, a gentleman from the palace to see you and your, ah, companion.” He wasn’t used to having Merkela in the mansion, not anywhere close to it, and treated her as he might have treated any other dangerous wild animal.