"You question Furis?"

  "I — I do not. I question only other options."

  "No." Calvai shook his head. "I have considered all. Marjeta may yet give me a living son, she is ripe still for ploughing. If she does not, there are other women. But I have only one daughter. She will understand. She was bred to."

  "This crown has changed you," Lilika said, before she could think to stop herself. She had fallen in love with a man bright and beautiful, had hidden her love as best she could, had twisted it, yes, with magic, but she had repented for that love. And now — now she looked at him anew, and the veil of love had grown thin. It was hard to pretend that Calvai was still that young man. His cruelty had grown, slow as a worm in a rotten branch, hidden away, but Lilika could not pretend to be blind to it now.

  "I wear no crown," he said.

  "You wear Furis' crown, all the same."

  Calvai bowed his head as though exhausted by the weight, but Lilika found that she had no pity. It was one thing to send her daughter to Coriast to be a duchess-wife to a man who loved her only as a sister, but it was another thing altogether to send her far from the safety of her countrymen and -women, and into a foreign land with ways that were dark and strange and evil. Furis could not have commanded this.

  Would not have. She bit her tongue and prayed, tasting blood. Sacrifice. What must I do?

  Starling's Flight

  A man from her father's army escorted Silviana back to her rooms. They passed the Duchess Suite, and for a moment Silviana paused before the bright blue wood and considered throwing open the doors and pointing out the false mother and false cousin, and all they did together, betraying them as they betrayed her. But she did not. Her father had not asked after his wife, had barely bothered to acknowledge that he had, however briefly, had a son. He had summoned his daughter to tell her future, then kept Lilika at his side.

  The maids and ladies in her rooms looked troubled, gathered together like hens after the fox has been. She ignored them. All except one who would perhaps speak truth if Silviana asked.

  "Lady Genivia," she said, and the curvy woman craned her neck. "Attend me, the rest of you will leave."

  She waited grim faced as the gaggle of women gathered their tapestries and books, their half-sewn shirts and hymnals, and left walking on whispers.

  "What is it, my lady?" Genivia asked. "How may I serve you?" There were no truths or untruths in the questions, just showers of words that fell like grains of sand blown by a string summer breeze.

  Silviana sat down in her chair and breathed slowly, trying to pull ghosts and shadows apart, trying to think clearly. It was hard. Her father's words had wound serpent coils about her throat, and the knowledge that Lilika went to him like a wife sliced at her wrists. "I would know," she said, and the words were choked and small. "How long you kept the truth from me."

  Genivia frowned.

  "About my cousin, and Marjeta."

  The silence was profound, and Silviana felt her world spin again. She was alone. "Leave me," she commanded.

  "My lady—" Genivia grew uncertain, her hands twisting. "I know they meant to leave, but—"

  "You knew. Of course you did. For how many months. No, do not answer." The blackness whirled in on Silviana from all sides and she stood at the centre of her own private storm, her vision darkened by fear and rage. Everyone had known the truth. Marjeta full of magic and lies, Lilika warming her father's bed, Devan entwined with Marjeta and making a cuckold of her father. Genivia, stolid, solid Genivia, who looked like no falsehood could take root on her tongue — she had kept secrets from Silviana. "Did everyone know that my nursemaid was my father's whore, and my stepmother lay with my cousin? Did you all look at me and laugh behind your hands? Did you think me simple?"

  "Not simple," Genivia said. "We did not want to hurt you."

  "Get. Out." Silviana spat each word like a stone. She stood, rage stiffening her spine as she watched Genivia curtsy regretfully and leave.

  Leave.

  That's what everyone in this palace did. They left in coffins, or they left on horses, or on beds of lies. Silviana held her hands out before her face and concentrated. What had she dreamed of, so long ago when she'd first fallen ill? Of hares and bears and forests.

  She would not stay. Her cage was open, and there was nothing worth staying for. Certainly not to be married off to some distant emperor, so that she could be a second wife, always a shadow, always a girl in a cage.

  Like Nanna's birds, who had been passed down to her, convicts in their own little hells of wire and wood. "You too," Silviana said to them. "You are reminders, and you are warnings." The birds whistled and chirped, buzzing from perch to perch in scatterings of song and seed. Silviana went to the first cage and opened it, and the second and third. All down the room full of birds she went, releasing the captives. Some waited longer in their cages, but others flew straight out, until the room was filled with flying bodies, testing the limits of their new world.

  Most of the windows were great frames that held the mullioned glass, but there were smaller windows that could be opened with hinged framework, and Silviana struggled one of these open, letting out the miasma of perfume and wine and feathers, letting in autumn, red as fox fur, cold as first ice.

  The birds flew.

  *

  Perhaps it was magic, or perhaps her dead eye simply showed her the right path to walk, but Silviana saw not another soul as she left the palace. They had dissolved like mud men under rain. She walked with one hand tracing the cold grey stones. The strength of her resolve had reduced them to their atoms. All she saw around her were the birds, dark guiding stars, yellow breasted, red capped, their songs leaving trails of truth like marsh-lights through the shadowing sky

  She went wrapped in the scatter dark of visions, between thought and dream. The twilit sky in green and gold, the sounds of herded animals headed home tolling from the distant fields. The faint murmur of speech, but no words. The river rushing in the gorge below the palace. The distant yip of foxes as she passed the empty hanging cages that crowned the High Gate. The cages moved in the wind, but there was no meat, and so no ravens, no crows, no pewter-beak rooks or mocking jackdaws. They had left to hunt carrion pickings in the fields and forest.

  She left Crow-Hill road and turned down a dirt track that cut between the fields of high grasses, meadows that edged the forests. “Starling," Silviana said her name to the empty sky, its underwater near-light, its flicker promise of coming stars. With a caw like a startled bird, she flew her stone cage and followed the deer trails though jaggy brambles that prickle-stained her with their blood and hers. The birds had gone, flown further than she could ever hope to follow.

  A shadow-hare ran into the gloaming, and Silviana followed. She left the roads of men, and went deep into the forests, following badger trails and deer paths through the dying bracken and nettles.

  She ran until she lost her leather slippers, until her dress was torn to rags and her net of jewels ripped from her hair to garland some sprightly birch, slender as a wand. She ran until she fell to her knees in a clearing, her breath tearing in her chest.

  She felt rather than heard the arrow. It thudded into the ground before her face, shaft quivering, flights crow black and shining.

  "What have we here?"

  Silviana looked up to see a ring of young faces. Boys and almost-men worn rough and raw and scabbed and hard. She knew what they were: thieves and murderers, wildling orphans who made the forest their kingdom, who bowed to no throne but the mountain, and respected no borders but the rivers and streams. As soon as they realised who she was, she was dead. All they saw now was a maiden who was ancient before her time. Half-blind, thin as a winter rabbit, with bare and bleeding feet, a face scratched, a dress that was no longer fine. They would not see the daughter of a duke.

  "Starling," Silviana said.

  "You're a funny looking sort of bird," said the boy, and he stepped out from the shadows of the trees, his bow held with a casual grace that Silviana recognized from Marjeta. He would pin her as surely as Marjeta would hit the painted circle of a target from a hundred paces. "Where do you come from then, Starling?"

  Silviana shook her head and swallowed the pooled saliva in her mouth. "From nowhere. I have no home. I have no hearth. I have no sister nor brother. I have no mother," she said, "I have no father."

  "What do you have?"

  Silviana tore her knotted necklace free from under her shift. Lilika had given it to her back when Marjeta had first arrived in the palace. A witch stone for protection on a leather thong. It had proven itself useless. "This."

  The boys laughed, but they did not kill her.

  Passion Play

  "You should eat." Lilika gestured at the food the servants had brought for the duke, but he merely grunted. Exhaustion rolled off him, palpable as a stench.

  "I'm not hungry," he snapped.

  "Then bathe," she said. The water in the wooden tub still steamed, scented with dried flowers and oils. "I will wash you." She'd done that before, so many times. She had a lifetime of washing babes, even as they grew, and what was a man but another child. Calvai did not argue this time, and she helped him out of his leathers and breeches, bundling the rank cloth for the laundry maids. She soaped his shoulders and back, running her hands down skin piebald with sun, rinsing his knotted hair clean and smoothing it with more oils.

  And while she washed him, her hands moving in unconscious patterns she had repeated a hundred times, she thought of what she would do.

  It was Furis who had to lead her. Lilika closed her eyes and squeezed her hands along the ridges of muscle, massaging the journey from Calvai's shoulders. She prayed, while her hands were consumed by other tasks.

  Show me, she begged, over and over. I am lost, I do not know the way. In her mind, she saw the flicker of a bright tail and long ears as a hare leaped past, then disappeared. She could smell the rank musk of bear pelts and she squeezed her eyes tighter still. Not you, never you. She had long since left the Three. Furis would show her. This time she would do right.

  After a while, lulled by the gentle slap of water and the repeated curve of her own hands, the hares and bears were drowned under as a red light filled her skull. The air smelled now of heart-ease and pine wood, it smelled of burning and blood.

  The shadows of the great horns passed over, twin points that trapped her, stilled her and Lilika listened to her god speak in the spaces between her heart beats.

  She moved dreamwise, drying the duke, dressing him carefully, kissing the skin of his chest and fingers.

  "You're different tonight," he remarked. "Quiet."

  "I am thinking," she said, still lost in her instructions.

  Calvai laughed, a little of his regular good humour restored. "It doesn't do to think," he said, "could get a woman into trouble."

  Lilika smiled blankly. "Sit," she said as she steered him to the table. "I will feed you." She sat on his lap and fed him fragments of bread and meat from her fingers. She filled his wine glass and drank from it between each sip. Calvai, sated and calmed, ran his hands along her hips and breasts, and Lilika allowed him this, as one allows a condemned man his final joys.

  When he was spent, Lilika slipped away to clean herself. She gathered her clothes and as she dressed, found a small vial in the very bottom of one of her deep pockets. She had once intended to use this in the drink she'd given Marjeta while she was pregnant, but Furis had stayed her hand. She had forgotten where the vial had gone, had no memory of putting it in this skirt pocket, and surely it would have been found by laundry maids, or crushed? She held it up — small and round as a coin, the blue glass stoppered and waxed. A drop could send a man into a coma. Three drops would fell him. She slid it back into her pocket and went to make her duke a dessert of sliced apples and cheeses.

  She had to be careful about this, Lilika thought. Too much, and she was dead, too little, and she was dead anyway, hanged or burned or quartered. Poison was not a game she played, and if she wanted her accusations to hold against Marjeta, she would need to suffer. It was no easy thing, coming back from the dead.

  She held out the plate of apple slices. "Eat, my love," she said, and after he had taken one slice, she took her own, swallowing down the sour taste of her fear. The apples were red as fallen blood, their flesh sweet and white and crisp, but Lilika could not taste anything but bile. She made her final meal last, while Calvai ate until his mouth began to foam.

  The pain started in her chest under her ribs, small as a baby's fist, and it spread up her throat and choked her. The pain grew with each ravaged breath, and Lilika felt the tears and blood pressing out from under eyelids and running down her cheeks. Her mouth filled with copper. Lilika stared into Calvai's bulging eyes and clenched his hands in hers as they fell to the ground. He convulsed under her and she shuddered likewise, a mummers' pantomime of coupling; a little death.

  Lilika's last sight was not Calvai's death. It was the great bull head of Furis, and her heart was his, and her knowledge was this: There would be no king uniting the duchies.

  But there would be a queen.

  And a witch would burn.

  An Empty Cage

  "We shouldn't have waited so long," Marjeta said after Silviana had left her rooms. Her hands were shaking, and she couldn't understand why. What did it matter that the girl knew, that she would feel betrayed? Silviana was not a sister, not a daughter. Barely even a friend. They were simply two girls who had been thrown into the same cage by circumstance. Each of them had to make a meal of the bones they were given.

  "I thought it would still be a day or so before my uncle reached here," Devan said. "The armies will have camped and taken refuge in the Verrin barracks and fort, and it would have been a hard day's ride from there to reach the summer palace so quickly." He sounded tired, doubtful. "He should not be here."

  "And now?" Marjeta sat down on the edge of her bed and stared at her half-packed bags. The plan had been simple enough. Devan would leave on his hunter that day, ostensibly to go meet his duke; but would veer off to follow a path he and Marjeta had agreed on. She would wait till nightfall and go down to the paddocks where the older horses grazed, feral and heavy-coated, and call Dust to her. They would slip away under spellwork, and the pair would be gone from Calvai's lands before the duke entered the palace. They were both hunters, they had coin and small treasure enough between them. Two riders could travel fast and untracked and live off the autumn land long enough to get to safety. Winter was at the borders, restless, but they could find shelter before the first snowfalls.

  All that was gone. "We should have left sooner," Marjeta whispered to her clenched hands. She kept her head down, looking at her lap, at her white and red knuckles. Her head beat mercilessly. The duke had not called for her, even though he had returned and must surely have rested and eaten by now. What was going on? Had some whisper of her infidelity reached his ears? That serpent Lilika had hissed in his ear long enough that he would find a reason to have the marriage ended. There was little chance that would go well for Marjeta, accused of being a cuckolding witch. Lilika would be happy enough to see her dance in the flames below the Penitent's Tower, and she could only hope for the blessing of a friendly arrow through her eye.

  "There is still time." Devan got to his feet. "We must leave tonight." He crossed to her and knelt, taking her folded hands in his and warming them, callous to callous. "Whether or not my uncle knows now, I cannot stay longer. I cannot see you so unhappy. You kill yourself each day, your flame grows smaller and colder. We will run."

  "And you will give up everything," Marjeta said. It was an argument they'd had many times. It was worn, safe and comfortable as an old woollen dress.

  "I told you, I would rather a ship than a crown, a horse than a throne. And I would rather be with the woman I love than married to a queen who feels like a little sister."

  "You never were one for ambition," Marjeta said, and pulled one hand free from his grasp to stroke at his head, to curl her fingers through the dark hair that fell across his forehead.

  "I know," he said. "I'm terribly disappointing." He smiled at her, awkward, but honest. "Come." Devan pulled her to her feet. "Perhaps he will not call you tonight. I will leave now — make some excuse, and you will use your magic to slip out tonight. Nothing has to change, perhaps it's better that Silviana knows the truth. She will not pine for something she hates."

  A rapid knock sounded at the door, and Marjeta frowned as she got to her feet. That had been Genivia's sharp tattoo of warning, and she stood, weaponless but ready for whatever came her way now.

  It was Genivia alone, but the woman was flustered, her freckled skin flushed as though she had burned under a summer sun, her red hair in tangled disarray. She looked as though she had run from one end of the palace to the other — an unlikely thing, Genivia was more musician than athlete.

  "What is it?"

  "The lady Silviana," Genivia panted. She pressed one hand to her side. "Oh, Furis damn my ribs."

  "What, what has happened?" Marjeta felt her heart rise, her throat close. Surely the girl could not have been so upset that she had leapt from a window or done something equally foolish and permanent. But she'd always been a strange and emotional thing, and only more so after her illness. "Please, Genny, tell me quickly."

  "She's gone."

  "Gone?" Devan and Marjeta spoke simultaneously, then Marjeta asked, softer, one hand held out to Devan to still him. "What does that mean, gone? She hasn't, she hasn't—" The words would not come, the thought too big and dark.

  "Oh no." Genny shook her head, then said, "Or at least, I think not. I hope not. I mean to say she has fled the palace. She's disappeared and I cannot find her."