Boleso would have been expected to reappear at court in another half year, duly chastened, or at least duly pretending to be. But Fara had broken her journey here from her earl-ordainer husband's holdings to her father's sickbed, and so her-Ingrey presumed, pretty-lady-in-waiting had fallen under the bored prince's eye. One could take one's pick of tales from the princess's retinue, arriving barely before the bad news at the king's hall in Easthome, whether the cursed girl had yielded her virtue in terror to the prince's importunate lusts, or in calculation to her own vaulting ambition.
If it had been calculation, it had gone badly awry. Ingrey sighed. “Take me to the prince's bedchamber.”
The late prince's room lay high in the central keep. The corridor outside was short and dim. Ingrey pictured Boleso's retainers huddled at the far end in the wavering candlelight, waiting for the screams to stop, then had to unset his teeth. The room's solid door featured a wooden bar on the inside, as well as an iron lock.
The windows to the right of the armor stand were narrow, with thick wavery circles of glass set in their leads. Ingrey pulled the casements inward, swung wide the shutters, and gazed out upon the green-forested folds of countryside falling away from the crag. In the watery light, wisps of mist rose from the ravines like the ghosts of streams. At the bottom of the valley, a small farming village hacked out of the woods pushed back the tide of trees: source, no doubt, of food, servants, firewood for the castle, all crude and simple.
The fall from the sill to the stones below was lethal, the jump to the walls beyond quite impossible even for anyone slim enough to wriggle out the opening. In the dark and the rain. No escape by that route, except to death. A half turn from the window, the armor stand