"Provisions!" Ilsabet whispered. "They attack us, and we send them home with supplies?"

"Enough for their trip. They're taking a conciliatory message from Baron Peto and your brother to their villages."

"I doubt I'd be much help," she said, but followed Greta anyway to a corner where the cook was loading cheese and dried meat into a sack. A second sack of the morning's bread was already full, waiting to be tied shut.

Ilsabet reached into her pocket and pulled out a white linen kerchief she'd carried to the dungeons to poison the rats' food. She'd just begun to unfold it above the bread sack when one of the servants came for it.

She moved quickly out of his way, thinking she'd be pressing her luck if she tried to kill them again. She threw the kerchief into the lit stove, pausing to watch it flare. "I'm going to sit with my sister a while. You know what she thinks of rats," she said to Greta, then left the servants to their work.

When Marishka had been a toddler, a river rat managed to sneak into her room. It waited until her wet nurse went to sleep, then slipped into her cradle, pressing its furry body close to her bare chest, licking the milk from her tiny pursed lips.

Sometime in the middle of the night, the nurse awakened and came to check on her. Seeing the rat, she let out a terrible scream. It startled Marishka and the rat, which bit her on the lip.

She was now left with a tiny scar near the corner of her mouth. Each time she looked at it, she recalled exactly how the woman had shrieked, how the animal's teeth had felt as they sank into her flesh, how the servant had beat at her bedcoverings then killed the beast with a fire iron.

When she had heard about the rats swarming through the dungeons, Marishka had summoned two of her maids. Hours had passed, and there had been no sign of the animals aboveground, so she dismissed them, took a fireplace poker, and sat in the center of her bed, determined to remain on guard all night if need be.