“Oh, that. I believe there’s a war going on, isn’t there?”

  “The war with Chorny? That’s surely fought with tools other than blades.” (Not exactly.) “Do you fear cutpurses in Seveno? I suppose there are some. I find Bellogard a very safe town.”

  “Compared with what?”

  “Why, with Letto province. Bandits hide out in the marshes. There’s military trouble on the borderland. Incursions. A village burnt. Would it be possible, do you suppose, to peep inside the palace? Naturally I wouldn’t exhibit or sell any private palace views.”

  “In that case, why paint them?”

  “To pick up the atmosphere-in case of a future royal commission. My work’s starting to sell modestly, to discerning local burghers. I could afford a few crowns to grease a guard’s palm, if need be. That’s wholly at your discretion, my friend. I would entrust the money to you, asking no further questions.”

  “How many crowns?” I asked.

  “Twenty? Maybe I could stretch to thirty.”

  “You must have sold a few panes of glass!” “Oh, I don’t let them go for a song. I’d rather starve than cheapen them. Anyhow, I had the forethought to bring a small sum of savings with me. How did your own luck fare last night?”

  “Rotten. I nearly pulled it off, damn it!”

  He paced. “Oh the beauty, the grace of grey. I find bright colours rather brash. Letto is a grey district. One grows sensitive to nuances, Dino.”

  While Meshko rhapsodized to himself artistically and refrained from watching me too eagerly, I too wandered the attic apparently deep in thought.

  I spotted an edge of paper under a discarded shirt, draped to hide it. Casually blocking Meshko’s view with my body I shifted the cotton, found a sketch-pad. I turned a page. And my heart stood still.

  Here was a charcoal drawing of Sara, stripped to the waist. I flipped quietly; saw several other portraits of Sara. Hastily I shut the pad, pulled the shirt back. I swung round.

  “Thirty crowns should buy you entry.”

  “Oh marvellous.”

  “Just for a couple of hours, understand?”

  “Fine. When?”

  “Day after tomorrow?”

  With Meshko’s money in my purse, I hastened to the Samostan. I took a roundabout route to make sure I wasn’t being followed. On the way I had time to think about what I’d seen in the sketchpad.

  Item: Sara’s playful interest in the palace and its secrets, our little masquerade of prince and paramour. Item: whenever I visited Groody Lane she had been available, as though reserved for me alone. The first occasion might have been coincidence; not thereafter. Item: Meshko must be as besotted with her as I was. His sketches were so richly sensual. He hadn’t spent a night with her recently. Yet he had money.

  Maybe the money came from her. She was controlling Meshko, subsidizing him; permitting him to sketch her at her convenience in return for services. Such as painting strategic scenes and trying to breach the palace. Had she let Meshko bed her too?

  What had Veck said to me once during training? “Magic often gravitates to magic.” I hadn’t really chosen Sara’s door at random. She possessed magic; my undermind had sensed this.

  If so, Sara was more than a mere spy. She must be the missing black squire. She hadn’t yet made her first magic move; her eidolon couldn’t yet be observed on the chequerboard.

  I might be totally wrong: that was why I wanted to consult Slon. When I arrived at the Samostan, however, the bishop wasn’t there. He and Prince Ruk had gone hunting. They wouldn’t be back till late at night. I debated sending an urgent message to the hunting lodge. I debated rushing to the palace to ask the queen to sing the summoning of the eidolons. Both courses of action seemed hysterical, lacking in initiative. Should a squire hasten to his queen to confess that he has fallen in love with a whore down Groody Lane and suspects that her heart is black, not white?

  Two days hence I had undertaken to smuggle Meshko into the palace; there was that to bear in mind as well.

  I couldn’t bear to think of Sara checked for years in the palace dungeons. Had she possessed Meshko, as Samo surmised? Or merely intoxicated him-as she had intoxicated me?

  Could Samo advise? Hardly. He was only an agent.

  Use your instinct, I’d been told.

  So I used it. That night I went to Groody Lane.

  Sara’s orange lamp burned bright as a beacon, apparently for no one else but me. Hers was a clever cover for an enemy power (though how could I think of her as an enemy?). Who would query or distrust a whore? A whore who needn’t be abroad by day when physiognomists were about. A whore who could receive any number of visitors at odd hours, visitors who wished to remain discreet. A whore, who wasn’t quite a whore.

  How did she deter unpromising customers? Did she have to apologize often? “Sorry if you rapped on the glass, sir, but I’m waiting for somebody else.” Did she use some love-magic taught her by Queen Babula to make the majority of mundane men pass by?

  I rapped. She immediately doused her lamp; admitted me. “Ah, my prince has come!” She preceded me upstairs to that room which was haunted with my joy.

  Had Meshko reported success in suborning a palace employee? Did Sara connect me with the employee in question? Maybe not, as yet. She might be playing two games which hadn’t yet come together.

  Would Sara have seen an eidolon of me in some black chamber in Chorny, and known me at once? Maybe not. She couldn’t have travelled to Bellogard directly by magic. She must have come wanderingly on horseback or even on foot, a journey of weeks or months. She might have arrived a year ago, two years ago.

  “Aren’t you going to undress, Karol?” Sara had already done so, and was sitting on the bed. She held out her slim arms. I ached for her.

  I shook my head. “You hop into the sheets, love. As this is our last time I’d like to tell you who I really am.”

  Naked, wrapped up in bed, she could hardly pose much threat to a reasonably muscular, fully clad, armed youth. Obediently she pulled a sheet up her body, though she let a breast poke out.

  “It’s a long story, Sara.”

  “I’m all ears. Why not tell it in comfort?”

  I grinned. “If you were only ears, I might.” I too could keep up a pretence.

  So I began to tell her the story of my life to date, much as I’m doing now, though omitting my commission to uncover a spy.

  “You’ve been wanting to know all along how magic really works, haven’t you, Sara?”

  “Yes.”

  “All your life you’ve been aware of magic as a distant background. What are the tools and techniques, eh? What does one actually do? The question a young virgin puts to her best friend.

  “I’ve dropped hints: the magic language, weapons (sometimes) which bristle with lightning-and body movements (forward, diagonally, a skip aside).

  “I think the main point is that people like me occupy mundane space and also magical space. Mundane space is huge, the size of a couple of kingdoms. Magical space is smaller. Not simpler, oh no! A thousand million permutations of position and action are possible. Lines of force are forever opening up or blocking one another. Along these lines of force we can leap, to strike or counterstrike.” I paused. “Go on, Prince Karol. Or should I say, Squire?”

  “Of course you already know all this extremely well, don’t you, Sara?” I slipped the poniard from inside my jacket. “That’s why I ought to kill you now. Opasnost po Zhivot, Sara!”

  “You’re mad!” she cried. “You’re one of those twisted men who hurt and kill women like me. They always need an excuse. A pretext to justify their filthy crime! They need to believe the woman is evil.” She threw the sheet aside. “Look at me. Look. I shan’t cover myself to make murder easier. To make it like stabbing a pillow.”

  I almost believed her. Almost.

  “I should kill you, black page,” I said, “to save you from a miserable lifetime held in check in a dungeon.”

  “To. save me?” Her voice faltered. “I think that killing me might be a cruel kindness.”

  “If only you could change sides! Chorny is evil and ruthless. Look how they’ve used you.”

  “Haven’t you used me?”

  “Maybe at first-but not subsequently, Sara. You know that! And I no more used you, than you were using me, whatever your cajolery. The body tells the truth. The undermind knows.”

  In one fluid movement she was out of bed, standing poised beside it. “We all do what we have to do, my lover.”

  “No, we do what we choose to do.”

  She no longer denied that she was from Chorny, I noticed.

  “By winning,” I said, “we lose. We lose the whole world.”

  She shook her head. To dispel confusion?

  Her hands stiffened. Those gentle hands took on a fighting, chopping edge. She chanted a few phrases in the magical language as spoken in Chorny. I held my dagger towards her and spoke words which made it flash and sparkle with blue fire. She took a pace towards me. Her hands were sheathed in crackling blue.

  Thunder crashed shockingly outside again and again. Through her window I saw lightning dancing madly over Bellogard. I felt awful tensions in those lines of force that connected me to other white magics in the realm. I sensed hewings, dartings, slashings.

  Surely a major assault had begun. Black Squire Sara had been exposed, was being sacrificed-and the royal powers of Chorny were attacking.

  She took another step towards me; another.

  Without signalling my intention I leapt aslant-to take her and stab her.

  I didn’t stab. At the last moment I reversed my dagger and clubbed her on the side of the head with the pommel.

  She collapsed.

  I rushed downstairs and out into Groody Lane. Soon I was sprinting along Pozoristu Street, where night strollers had taken refuge in theatre doorways in case lightning toppled chimneys. Goaded by intuition rather than by any rational plan I raced out of Seveno. Instinct told me not to leap magically, but to run.

  I ought to have been checking the captured squire, binding and gagging her with torn-up sheets. If I’d killed her, I would still have been in her room. Instead, I found myself in Terga Square, poniard in hand. I leaned against a pillar fronting a cafe, to recover my breath.

  A figure in a black dalmatic ran diagonally across the deserted square. He trampled through a bed of dahlias. He rushed over the road in my direction-not that he had seen me. Soon he would run right away, all the way back by magic to where he had come from. He scattered cafe seats, left out for the night. He would pass right by me, unsuspecting.

  I stepped out. I recognized the man’s startled face, from his eidolon. It was Bishop Zorn of Chorny. I spoke magic and stabbed him through the heart.

  The following day we survivors of that brutal nocturnal exchange gathered in the Chequer Chamber.

  Queen Alyitsa was dead-murdered by Prince Feryava of Chorny. Bishop Slon was dead, killed by Bishop Zorn. Squire Iris was dead, protecting Bishop Veck.

  The survivors were: the king, Bishop Veck, Sir Brant, Prince Ruk, and five of us squires. Henchy was injured; his wrist had been broken. It would stay that way for the rest of his life. Magical injuries did not heal unless you killed the person who inflicted them. Henchy’s right arm hung in a white sling.

  Young Pyeshka was perspiring nervously. So, for that matter, was I.

  “We must crown a new queen immediately,” insisted Veck.

  Ruk demurred. “The new queen would only have half of Queen Alyitsa’s strength. She would only be able to move two magic steps at once.”

  “She might never need to move more than two! At least she would have the omnidirectional queenmagic.”

  “It might be better to retain a simple squire,” Sir Brant said.

  And I understood: it wouldn’t be the youngest squire-myself-who was sacrificed to create a new queen. I had acquitted myself admirably, astonishingly, by killing the enemy bishop. Instead Pyeshka would be sacrificed; and Sir Brant was trying to protect his squire. (To all appearances I’d distinguished myself! I hadn’t confessed the full events of the previous night or how I’d spared the black squire in Groody Lane.)

  “I present two arguments against,” continued Sir Brant. “If we don’t crown a new queen, the squire could still give us a new knight in extremis-at a crucial moment when a knight’s askew move might save the kingdom from catastrophe. A queen could never leap askew. Secondly, we need that pawnsquire simply for the sake of extra numbers. Thanks to Pedino an enemy bishop died last night. Did Bishop Slon or Squire Iris kill or injure anyone? We don’t know. Did Chorny only lose one fighter? We lost three; and Henchy is disabled.”

  “That’s exactly why we must urgently examine the eidolons,” said Veck. “Only a queen can sing the summoning of those.”

  King Karol pulled out a pipe. “I could blow a bubble which might divine the future numbers on the board.”

  “How far into the future?” Veck frowned. “How accurately? Divination is a matter of probabilities, not certainties.”

  The king tucked his pipe away. “Yet I deserve a new queen, do I not? To invigorate me; to help me carry on cheerfully.”

  The argument circled round for a while, without us squires having much of a voice, though Veck was in vociferous vein. Finally King Karol clapped his hands and said, “The queen is dead. Let there be a new queen.”

  Prince Ruk and Sir Brant bowed their knees.

  “Pyeshka,” sighed Sir Brant, “oh my Pyeshka.” (Even though he was shaking, Pyeshka stood to attention.) “Proceed to the square before the queen’s square.”

  Pyeshka did so. “Now then, Beno,” said King Karol, “go and fetch Princess, hmm, Princess, let’s see, Princess.”

  “Isgalt,” I said.

  “Hmm? What? Eh? Yes of course, Princess Isgalt. The best possible choice.”

  Prince Ruk protested. “Izold is more devious and forceful.”

  “Isgalt’ll be the better bride in bed,” said the king. “In my chamber. That matters too.”

  “Majesty, this concerns the whole kingdom!”

  “I agree with the nomination of Isgalt,” said Veck. “I believe that young lady has “Beno,” repeated the king, “fetch Princess, yes, Isgalt.”

  So Isgalt was fetched.

  She was excited, nervous, happy, horrified. To be queen-but so soon! To wed-King Karol, who smirked at her. To have queenmagic descend on her, and promptly become a prime target for the savagery of Chorny.

  She darted a glance at me as if for assistance. After all, I would soon be her squire. I smiled encouragement, yet it was Veck who by rights took her by the arm. He led her to stand on the vacant queen’s square.

  “Wait,” said Isgalt. Veck raised an eyebrow.

  Isgalt stepped round in front of Pyeshka. She laid a hand on his shoulder as if for mutual support.

  “Be brave,” she said, “then I will inherit your bravery, Pyeshka. Be true to the last; then I shall acquire your truth. Be strong without flinching; thus I shall be strong and never flinch. May you live in me until victory, until the whole world empties out.” She kissed him on the cheek.

  That was a very pretty speech. No, it was more than pretty; it was remarkable. Veck nodded his approval as the princess resumed her position.

  Promptly Brant drew his sword. Without hesitating he ran Pyeshka swiftly through. Poor Pyeshka’s eyes opened ever so wide, and his mouth gaped, but he only uttered one terrible gasp, and died. Brant’s sword had passed right through the page’s vitals like a huge nail driven fearsomely through a fence post. The point stuck out, almost touching Isgalt. Blood had sprayed her flower dress in the belly region. Sir Brant was struggling. I saw how he was holding dead Pyeshka up by main force.

  “Long live the queen!” cried Ruk.

  Isgalt shut her eyes and rocked from side to side. She moaned then began to sing to herself; magic words.

  “Long live!” we all chorused.

  Beno and Josip hurried to support the corpse. They held it firm while Brant wrenched his sword free, then they hauled Pyeshka away by the shoulders, heels dragging, to deposit him temporarily in the ExChequer Chamber.

  When Queen Isgalt opened her eyes again, I moved closer to attend her. Veck sketched a magic blessing. Karol advanced and kissed his bride. Isgalt didn’t flinch.

  Karol emitted a hearty chuckle. “Release all the news to Noveeny. I decree public mourning for three days, to be followed straightway by wedding festivities. Let there be royal banners on all spires, blaziers by night. Bells are to be rung. Notify the kitchens. Let Bellogard enjoy three days holiday. A pageant at the Samostan. Wine running from the fountains. The usual.”

  “Of course,” agreed Veck, “but let’s consult the eidolons first. That’s urgent.”

  Isgalt nodded. “I can summon them. The knowledge wells in me.”

  We stood back from the chequerboard. Isgalt sang, waveringly at first, then firmly.

  Our own semblances took on phantom existence. Isgalt changed key, and the black forces appeared.

  No eidolon for Bishop Zorn. And Prince Feryava’s eidolon was injured! The black prince had been wounded in the leg. His image stood there crookedly, resting on a crutch.

  “That’ll shorten the bastard’s moves,” growled Henchy.

  My main attention was on a different eidolon, one which I’d never seen before upon this board but whose face I knew. intimately. She was my lovely Sara.

  “New squire,” Ruk rapped out. “Their eighth. Young, female. Why did that one make her move; and where?”

  I said nothing.

  Might Sara still be in Bellogard? Surely not in Groody Lane. She would have woken soon after I hit her. I didn’t think I had injured her. She would be fleeing back to Chorny.

  Maybe I would learn something if Meshko turned up at our rendezvous the next day. If he turned up. In the wake of a battle royal this seemed dubious, especially if Sara-his instigator and control-had disappeared. Did Meshko know that yet?

  There was a fair chance that while Sara was busy playing me like a fish she hadn’t confided in Meshko, had even ordered him to keep out of the way for a couple of weeks. Meshko mightn’t have tried to report back to her yet.