21

His eyes found Ryska beside him, with her gaze fixed on the table, she'd trusted him and she was still waiting with resigned patience of someone who had already learned not to expect much from the world, and had readied herself, once again, for disappointment.

Erynae's voice rose in his memory once more. The truth ought to be spoken, even when some voice insists, you're of no-good use.

He gathered himself, breath by breath, and forced the words loose at last. "She was seated where she said. I saw her there myself, the whole of that afternoon and evening, until the results were called. "She had a blade cut on her arm," he added, "still bleeding through the sleeve and she did not move from that spot for a long while."

"I remember the cut," said Bram. "Nobody goes and murders four men with an arm bleeding through its sleeve and then sits quietly in a courtyard waiting for a list to be read," he shook his head. "It doesn't make sense as a thing to do."

"I noticed her injury, a cut on her arm," said Faelen. "I went to fetch her food, and she was still at same spot when I returned. She stayed with me after that, through the rest of the wait, until the results were posted, and until Valere spotted us and joined. She never left my sight beyond the time it took me to bring back that food."

"Prince Valere," Karnaet weighed the name, knowing he had to be careful with him.

He was weighing what he was about to do, a prince of the realm, called in to be questioned like any common witness, in a matter that already reeked of scandal enough without adding the crown's own blood to it. He knew what it would look like, that he'd sat a prince down across this table the same as he'd sat a foreign healer and a farm boy, that word of it would move through the palace faster than he could contain it no matter how quiet he tried to keep the room.

He knew, too, what it would look like if he didn't. He had built his years in this post on the plain fact that Paendrage's intelligence answered to the truth before it answered to rank, and if that stopped being true the moment a prince walked through his door, then it had never really been true at all.

Valere came through the door, and his eyes went to Ryska before they went to anyone else in the room. Karnaet watched it happen, watched the tension drop out of the boy's shoulders the instant his gaze landed on her.

Valere crossed the room and sat before Karnaet had gestured toward the chair. Karnaet's hand stopped half-raised, he put both hand on table instead and held his gaze on the prince for a long moment before he spoke.

"I took her to the healer the moment her name was read," said Valere, "if you are asking whether she had time enough to do what was done to those boys, I am telling you she did not, because every hour of it was spent with me, and the boys were already dead before I let her out of my sight."

He closed it, Ryska thought, a prince's word carried weight no one in that room could question and Valere had to know it. He had to know exactly what it meant to stand there and say it aloud, that there would be whispers after, in halls far from this one, about why a prince of Paendrage had spent an entire afternoon accounting for the hours of a foreign girl accused of murder. He would have known it before he opened his mouth, and he'd said it anyway.

You did that for me? She looked at him and the rest of the room started fading out around his voice.

He had not had to stay; he could have left her with the healer and walked away. He could have spoken in careful, limited terms. He had done neither, instead he had noted the wound, the hours, the exact window in which she could not have done what they accused her of.

She had named them without certainty or hope that they would all come and testify, but they did and he, Valere had done it knowing the risk.

For the first time since her empire fell, someone with actual power had chosen to stand between her and the worst of what remained.

Karnaet had no true reason to press further once Prince Valere had spoken. The prince’s testimony closed every reasonable window of opportunity, yet formality still demanded its due. He inclined his head when Valere stood up and Healer Shalmali came after he left.

"His Highness Prince Valere brought the girl to me in the evening," said the healer. "She came with a dried blood wound; I cleaned and bound it at once. There was no fresh blood upon her hands or clothing, nothing that spoke of recent violence."

Karnaet waited lasty for Teram, who came in unimpressed by the whole affair.

"She did not leave the inn alone," Teram said. "She came in with His Highness Prince Valere, and she left with him the following morning. I know who comes and goes under my roof, and that girl has not gone anywhere she oughtn't."

Ryska came out shortly after Teram, and the rest of they all began filing out into the corridor under the watch of the guards stationed there.

Valere walked toward her and stopped before her, her right hand was pressing against her left thumb, he almost reached for them before thought caught up to it.

“Lord Karnaet is a man of manner," said Valere. "I am certain he would have treated you well, but I should ask still, were you treated with dignity?”

That is what you are worried for? She looked at him, my dignity and not that you had to stand as my alibi in your own father's court. She thought and looked at him properly for what felt like the first time, that deep shifting blue of his eyes was fixed entirely on her, filled with nothing but worry, there was no demand waiting for her to thank him for what he'd just done in his own father's court. He wasn't asking to be repaid, he was only asking if she'd been treated with dignity, as if that alone was the thing worth asking.

A smile broke free before she could stop it and then turned and walked past him down the corridor, leaving him standing there to wonder, for once, what exactly that smile had meant.

Valere blinked, he was caught off guard by the smile. He'd asked a plain question and somewhere between the two of them a smile had appeared instead of an answer that he couldn't account for at all. He opened his mouth to ask, thought better of it, shook his head and fell into step behind her.

They filed out together, back through the plain corridor and into the courtyard, where the sun had shifted enough to catch the white stone of the palace properly for the first time.

Bram stopped and looked up at it, at the whole pale sweep of it climbing the mountain above them. "This is your home, Valere," he said.

Valere looked up at it too, and for the first time since he'd left it, it felt like something closer to home than the room three streets from the gate ever had, the white stone, the particular slant of the light off the eastern wall, a hundred small things he hadn't known he'd missed until they were in front of him again.

Then he saw his brother crossing the courtyard toward them, and a smile appeared on his face.

Ryska followed the line of Valere's gaze to the man crossing the courtyard, he looked like Valere in the way a finished portrait looks like its early sketch, the same features settled into something harder and more deliberate.