Ulkra turned his head away. “We had our orders to guard the prince's repose. My lord.”

“Who heard the cries? Yourself, and…?”

“Two of the prince's guards, who had been told to wait his pleasure.”

“Three strong men, sworn to the prince's protection. Who stood-where?”

Ulkra's face might have been carved from rock. “In the corridor. Near his door.”

“Who stood in the corridor not ten feet from his murder, and did nothing.”

“We dared not. My lord. For he did not call. And anyway, the screams…stopped. We assumed, um, that the girl had yielded herself. She went in willingly enough.”

Willingly? Or despairingly? “She was no servant wench. She was a retainer of Prince Boleso's own lady sister, a dowered maiden of her household. Entrusted to her service by kin Badgerbank, no less.”

“Princess Fara herself yielded her up to her brother, my lord, when he begged the girl of her.”

Pressured, was how Ingrey had heard the gossip. “Which made her a retainer of this house. Did it not?”

Ulkra flinched. “Even a menial deserves better protection of his masters.”

The ugly incident with the murdered manservant was the reason Prince Boleso had suffered his internal exile to this remote crag. His known love of hunting made it a dubious punishment, but it had got the Temple out of the royal sealmaster's thinning hair. Too little payment for a crime, too much for an accident; Ingrey, who had observed the shambles next morning for Lord Hetwar before it had all been cleaned away, had judged it neither.

“Any lord would not then go on to skin and butcher his kill, Ulkra. There was more than drink behind that wild act. It was madness, and we all knew it.” And when the king and his retainers had let their judgment be swayed, after that night's fury, by an appeal to loyalty-not to the prince's own soul's need, but to the appearance, the