She didn't think. She dropped to his side and broke Harch's bubble herself. She heard the ragged, strangling gasp of his first breath, and stared at him, wondering, bewildered. He didn't move, didn't wake up and smirk at her—he hadn't saved himself.

  Instead, he'd lost consciousness, and magic was a thing utterly dependent on conscious intent. The moment that he dropped to the floor was the moment he could no longer have broken the bubble, no matter how mighty a wizard he might have been. No real wizard would have ever let himself reach that point.

  Val would have died, and she would have killed him. The truth was as simple and plain as that. Magically, he wasn't capable of even a blink. He was innocent. He hadn't caused the gun to explode, he hadn't killed anyone, he hadn't schemed against the Watchmistress. No matter what the facts seemed to have been, Rhiana had been wrong.

  She stroked his hair and whispered, "I'm so sorry. I was wrong. I'm so sorry," over and over. She was still saying it when he opened his eyes.

  He looked up at her and shook his head slightly. "You didn't kill me," he murmured. "Why am I still alive?"

  "I'm sorry," she told him again. "I was wrong."

  "I know, but that isn't the point."

  "The point? What do you mean, it isn't the point?"

  "I know you were wrong. But you didn't kill me, and you seem to be truly sorry, and if I'm alive and you're sorry, then I must have been wrong as well." He sat up and rubbed his head. "And if we're both wrong, who killed Errga and wounded Tik? Kate? Callion?"

  "One of the two must have. And Kate has the bottle with the Watchers in it."

  "Kate. I can't see that. Callion must have acted on his own."

  Rhiana said, "But he didn't. He couldn't have; and so Kate must have helped him. She isn't going anywhere, though. We could wait until morning, and take the Watchers from her before the trial starts." She shook her head. "But I don't want to leave this matter unresolved. I don't understand how Kate fits into this now, and I have to understand. Let's find her now."

  "Lady Smeachwykke . . ." Val's expression was pained. "My apologies, but as long as the real culprit thinks you still hold me to blame, the plan, whatever it is, will remain unchanged. I could take the time needed to bathe and dress in other clothes than these."

  She nodded. "The matter isn't life or death . . . yet. It will be come morning when the Watchmistress arrives. Very well, Lord Faldan. One of the guards will show you to the baths, and I'll have a girl bring you some clean clothing. Please hurry." She stared into his eyes, trying to see if the stiff, formal "Lady Smeachwykke" had been because people were listening or because he hated her. Probably because he hated her. She hated herself.

  He rejoined her as she stood waiting in the servants' corridor with Harch and her captain of guards. Clean and dressed in a tunic and leather breeches loaned to him by one of the guards, he no longer looked beaten or lost. "I'm ready."

  "Then let's find out what's going on."

  Rhiana led them through the maze of passages and up two full flights of stairs to Kate's room, set off in a wing of the castle away from the noise and bustle common elsewhere. When Rhiana had first married Haddis, she had been young and lonely and burdened by obligations and duties and tremendous amounts of work, and she had lacked a quiet place or a quiet time from the moment the sun rose to the moment she pinched out the candles. But when she explored Smeachwykke, she'd discovered the far wing, used almost exclusively for visitors. And she had discovered the room she'd given Kate. She'd liked its prettiness and its comparative coziness. She'd liked the balcony and the view of the inner courtyard and the light that came through the windows and the intimate little fireplace and the tapestries that weren't more takes of blood and battles, but that showed women dancing in a meadow accompanied by minstrels, surrounded by children and birds and harts and flowers and beautiful trees and waterfalls and leaping fish. She didn't know who had once lived in the room, but whoever she'd been, she'd had a peaceful spirit.

  Rhiana had thought Kate would appreciate the beauty of the room, and that perhaps its peacefulness would soothe away some of her hurt. Now she wondered if she had misplaced her kindness.

  They reached the room at last. Harch's magical light illuminated Kate's door. Rhiana rapped on it. "Kate?" she called. "Wake up."

  She waited a moment, expecting that after the time shift and everything else Kate had been through, she would need some time to wake. But when she'd waited and heard nothing, Rhiana rapped again, louder. "Kate! Wake up!"

  Still nothing.

  She frowned and tried the door. It was locked. She took the key ring from her waist and found the key that opened the doors in that hall, wondering at the same time how Kate had managed to lock it in the first place. After all, she'd had no key, and the door required one to lock as well as unlock it, from either side.

  She opened the door and peeked inside. "Kate?"

  The fire burned low. A tapped hogshead sat upright on the hearth, and two wooden mugs beside it. Two? Only one chair was pulled to the fireside. Harch's light moved into the room, illuminating all of it, and then Rhiana could see what she hadn't seen before. All of Kate's belongings from her backpack had been dumped in a pile on the floor. Someone had rummaged through them with little care. The wardrobe doors had been opened, too, and the clothes stored in it piled at the foot of the bed.

  "What manner of madness is this?" Harch asked. Rhiana turned to see that he'd pulled back the heavy draperies on the canopy bed, and stood shaking his head at what he saw there.

  Rhiana moved to his side as he summoned his wizard-light beneath the canopy. As she saw what he'd seen, the hairs on her arms stood up and her heart pounded and the air in the room seemed to become too thin.

  Kate lay on the bed, sprawled atop the counterpane like a rag doll thrown by an angry child, her shirt ripped open and pulled inside out so that the sleeve cuffs, buttoned into place, kept it on her wrists. The twists of shirt fabric held both arms behind her back. She still wore her jeans and shoes, and the odd breast-binder favored in her world; her body faced the far wall.

  "Is she dead?" Val stood behind Rhiana, looking over her into the bed.

  "I don't know," Rhiana whispered.

  Harch climbed onto the bed beside Kate and touched her shoulder, and Rhiana saw a current of magic run from his hand into her. "She isn't dead," he said after a moment, "but she's been deeply drugged. So deeply I could almost say she's been poisoned— and she's been spelled, too. A compulsion spell. . . ." He frowned and increased the amount of power he used, and Kate began to glow softly. "Extraordinary piece of work . . . truly extraordinary; certainly isn't the sort of thing I've seen before in that it doesn't seem to use the old forms; really a pretty spell, you know, as nicely done as a bit of good lace, all tight and twisted and knotted just so and patterned sweet as anything—I'm saying it's the work of a master even if it is just a little spell, because it's on so tight and hooked into so many—"

  "What are you talking about?" Rhiana interrupted.

  "Eh? Oh." Harch didn't look at Rhiana. "Just a minute, I almost have it ... damn, it slipped . . . it's bound by a tie to the Rift, I think . . . and if ... oh, yes, that will do it. . . ." He smiled up at Rhiana, triumphant. "There. No more spell. And I've undone as much of the drug effects as I could. She should wake now."

  "Kate!" Rhiana yelled.

  Kate jerked awake, tried to move her arms, thrashed with her shirt, rolled, saw the room full of strangers, shrieked and pulled her knees up toward her chest, and Rhiana grabbed Harch away before Kate could kick him into the middle of Holy Brodmert's Week, which she tried to do.

  Rhiana heard fabric ripping and suddenly Kate's hands came free and she launched herself toward Harch, eyes focused on him; before she could grab and strangle him, which appeared to be her intent, Val jumped past Rhiana and grabbed her.

  "Kate," he said, "wake up."

  Kate growled. Not words but mad, crazed animal noises. Beast sounds.

  Rhiana shouted, "Kate! Kate! It's us! Wake up!"

  "Oh, dear," Harch said. "Lord Faldan, please hold her for me a moment. I didn't get it all."

  "All?" Val said, but he hung on to Kate as she slammed her head back at his face and kicked his shins and jammed her heels into his insteps. "Ow!" His face twisted with pain and he grabbed her arms at the wrists, pulled them across her chest, and yanked her back against his chest. "Do it fast," he said, and grimaced again as she twisted her head around to try to bite him.

  "Didn't get all the spell. One moment. . . just one moment. . ."

  The back of Kate's head caught Val on the chin and Rhiana jumped in to try to help him steady her; Kate lifted both feet and kicked out at Rhiana, using Val as her brace. She caught Rhiana squarely in the middle of the chest, and Rhiana flew across the room and came up against the tapestry-covered wall with a thud. She lay stunned, trying to coax air back into her lungs, startled by the spinning white lights that suddenly filled the room. When her head cleared, she sat up; she realized had she flown only a bit further to the left, she would have crashed through the balcony doors and been slashed by shards of glass and perhaps thrown over the balcony to her death in the cobblestoned courtyard below.

  Rhiana realized all sounds of struggle had died. She pulled herself to her feet and rejoined Val, Harch, and the guard. The guard had given his surcoat to Kate, who sat on the edge of the bed wrapped in the scarlet-and-gray, pale and wide-eyed with fright.

  "... get you something to drink?" Harch was asking.

  Kate shook her head vehemently. As Rhiana approached the bed, she looked up at her. "What happened to me?" she asked.

  Rhiana shook her head. "I don't know. What do you remember?"

  Kate frowned. "I don't . . . oh!" She clutched the sides of her head between her hands and began to rock back and forth. "Oh! It hurts."

  Harch said, "Damn . . . still not all . . ." and touched Kate again.

  When he pulled his hand from her shoulder, she put her hands down at her sides and said, "Better. Pain's gone. That was odd. That was . . . very odd ..."

  "What?"

  "Oh. I was feeling so sorry for myself; terrible, really, and Tik came by with that barrel of beer, wanting to talk. It would have been great if we'd had a pizza to split between us—would have killed the taste of the beer. And he wanted me to leave here ... to go home—not to Peters, you understand, but just to Earth ... I mean the Machine World. He said he could arrange for one of his friends to make a gate for me, but I needed to do it before the Watch-mistress came . . ." She rubbed the sides of her head. "And I said, no, no, can't go back until after the trial and he said, 'but after the trial will be too late' and I said, 'I don't understand what you mean' or something like that, and he wouldn't tell me, but then something funny happened with the beer . . . Yes. The beet. I'd only had one and part of another, and he took my mug away from me and poured some more, and walked across the room to get something to show me, and when he came back he handed me my mug, and showed me something so silly. So silly. Some sort of glowing stone. God, why can't I remember what he showed me?" She laughed.

  "That's part of the spell," Harch said. "That amusement at what was happening . . . she's reliving the spell that was cast on her."

  Kate's expression returned to its earlier seriousness. "And I drank my beer, and I changed my clothes so that I could go with Tik— I didn't want to go with Tik, but for a while there I felt that I had to, and I was fighting it pretty hard—but then I started getting so sleepy while I drank ... I only had two beers . . . just two . . . and this is the really funny part. I remember as clear as anything that Tik said he could send me home another time after all, and he left, and as soon as he left a small, dark man with a scar across his face came in and ripped my shirt off and stole my gun—which I had tucked into the waistband of my jeans—and searched the room and stole the bottle with the Watchers in it."

  "The bottle!" Rhiana gripped Val's arm.

  "Her gun," Val said.

  "And that's what's so funny," Kate said, not seeming to notice their reactions. "I remember it so clearly, but it didn't happen. The little man with the scar ... I can see him but he wasn't really there. Tik did all of that. Took my gun. Took the bottle. And I can hear him saying, 'Even if you wouldn't go, at least now you'll be safe.' What did he mean by that? And why did he do that to me?"

  Rhiana said, "Tik. It fits. It all fits, but how? And why? And ..."

  She looked from Val to Harch to the captain to Kate. "Tik had terrible injuries from that exploding shotgun. He lost an eye, his arm broke in several places. If he cast the spell that killed Errga, why was he so badly hurt?"

  Val said, "Because he's brilliant, that's why."

  "What?"

  "Brilliant," Val insisted. "With his grievous injuries, you never once questioned his innocence. Neither did I. Neither did anyone. He killed Errga. He must have discovered that you knew there was a traitor, and by using a short, untraceable bolt of magic he exploded the gun he held, killing Errga and injuring himself. So he shifted the blame to me—I was the only person left who could be suspected. You locked me up with Callion, while he was left free to do what he needed to do: to whit, gather up Kate's gun and the Watchers in their bottle. And tomorrow Kate would have been up here, locked into the room and unable to get out because she didn't have the key. Maybe she would even have still been drugged into sleep, so that she couldn't attract any servants by pounding on the door or shouting from her balcony." He paused. "Meanwhile, Callion and I would be led to trial, Tik would appear as a spectator, holding the gun and the Watchers. He would . . . what. . . use the gun to force you to release Callion? Possibly. Then what? Give Callion the Watchers, Callion would release them, and everyone present would die."

  Rhiana said, "He still has the Watchers. The Watchmistress will still be here by dawnbell with the council. The danger isn't behind us simply because we've found out the truth."

  Kate had been listening. Now she said, "You can't allow him to be in the same place as the Watchmistress and the council. He was willing to lose an eye and suffer terrible pain to keep his plan alive. I think if he finds himself within reach of them with the Watchers in his possession, nothing will stop him from releasing them."

  "But the full council will step through gates into our inner chamber at the sound of the dawnbell."

  Kate shook her head. "You can't let that happen. But I think I know what you can do instead."

  Forty-two

  Dawn struggled to arrive, giving little notice of its presence beneath the bitter gray skies. More snow seemed imminent; the air was colder for being wet, and the clouds crowded close to the earth. In spite of Harch's intervention, Kate still felt compulsion clinging to her ... a desperate desire to flee the castle, to flee Glenraven, to go back to her world and to fight anything that stood between her and home. Maybe, though, it was no longer the spell that filled her with such fear. Maybe at that moment the compulsion to flee came from inside of herself.

  Dressed in the mail coat and cloth surcoat of Rhiana's guard, with a guard's cloak wrapped around her and with the deep hood pulled forward to hide her face, she stood in the snow with a few genuine guardsmen, waiting behind Rhiana while a dozen heavily armed soldiers brought out Callion and Val. Six of the soldiers carried Callion , still bound with Rhiana's spelled binders—between them. The other half dozen dragged Val.

  Rhiana stood off to the side of the courtyard with her advisor and her wizard. Next to them stood a handful of grim-faced Kin, including the Kinlord, Val's father. Neither Rhiana's group nor the Kin group said anything; the silence felt both angry and dangerous, weighted with portents of an end to the tenuous peace Machnan and Kin had briefly enjoyed.

  Tik burst out of a side door, saw Rhiana, and ran up to her. "What's going on?" he shouted. "I've been looking everywhere for you. Everything's going wrong—Kate told me last night that she wanted to go home and now I can't find her; I've been to the audience chamber looking for you and no one was there; now you're all outside in the cold when the Watchmistress and the council should be here any moment."

  "The Watchmistress changed her plans," Rhiana said. "She and the council are meeting us at the Rift. She wants to see the Rift closed with her own eyes. Val's father has arrived to stand in Val's defense—he says he doesn't believe his son did the things we say he did. Kate found me earlier and told me she had to leave; she said it was urgent that she get back to her home. She seemed quite ill. Harch made a gate for her and now she's gone."

  His eyes widened. "Kate gone? But you were going to have her testify."

  "She said she couldn't. She seemed very confused—someone attacked her last night. An outsider."

  "Ah. Then the search parties I passed were looking for her attacker?"

  "More than an attacker. The man robbed Kate last night—stole her gun and the Watchers. She described the thief as a small man with a long, vivid scar across his face, with dark eyes and a twisted back that gives him a distinctive walk. I know no one in all of Ruddy Smeachwykke who matches his description, but I have every soldier I could spare searching for him."

  "Won't that leave you shorthanded for the trials and sentencing?"

  "Our main concern is with the Watchers, Tik," Rhiana said. "I have Callion and Val under control; if the thief releases the Watchers, however, that won't matter. The Watchers can devastate all of Glenraven."

  "So you'll only have a light force at the Rift? That seems risky."

  "I'm keeping my people where I need them." Rhiana glanced back at the castle. "If they can't find the thief within the building—and the guards report that no one arrived or left the castle last night, so I think he must still be in there—then they will widen their search to the village. We will find the man."

  Tik nodded thoughtfully. "Of course. Where do you need me, my lady?"

  "Since Kate is gone, you'll have to testify. You'll have to tell the Watchmistress about the injuries Val caused you, and about how he killed Errga, and you'll have to tell what you can about Callion. I would spare you facing off against Val's father, since I know he's your lord, but with Kate gone we have no one else."