Jino smiled and brushed his fingers through his beard. "Perhaps you will, but that is for my master King Enander to decide, Princess Briony. He will see you later today." The juxtaposition of titles was no accident: Jino was reminding her that she stood below the Syannese king in precedence, and would have even in her own country-but she was not, most definitely not, in her own country.

Lord Jino rose with a smooth grace most women would have envied. "Come. I will take you to the players now."

Father gone, Kendrick gone, Barrick… She fought to keep the tears that suddenly trembled on her lower lid from running over. Shaso, and now Dawet. All gone, most of them dead-maybe all of them… She tried to steady herself before the Syannese official noticed. And now I must say goodbye to Makewell's Men as well. It was a strange feeling, this loneliness. Always before she had felt it as something temporary, as something that must be endured until her situation improved. For the first time she was beginning to sense that it might not be temporary at all, that she might have to learn live this way, tall and straight as a statue, hard as stone, but hollow inside. All, all hollow…

Jino led her across the residence and then through one of Broadhall Palace's great gardens and into a quiet hallway built along the inside of the palace's great wall. Such a vast dwelling-the palace alone as large as all of Southmarch, castle and city. And she knew not a soul here, had no one to trust…

Allies. I need allies in this strange land.

The Southmarch players were sitting on a bench in a windowless chamber under the eyes of several guards. Most of them already looked frightened; the sight of Briony, confirmed now as their ruler and dressed in expensive clothes Jino had provided for her, did not make them any less so. Estir Makewell, whose last words to Briony had been angry and unpleasant, even blanched and hunched her shoulders as though she expected to be struck. Of all the players on the bench, only young Feival did not look cowed. He eyed her up and down.