“Alas, brave lady, it is but a hunting sword. Yet it will be better than nothing, for I see you are without your own.”

He had put his hand on her shoulder, and she could see many things in his brown eyes. Things she did not wish to think about.

“Come back ...” he began, and she thought he might have finished with “to me,” but he turned hurriedly away without saying another word.

Karigan wrapped her hand around the hilt of the sword now. It was a fancy thing with an intricate guard and blade etched with a hunting scene. Hopefully she would not have to use it. A hunting sword it was, but she did not pursue sport.

Before she knew it, her tired feet brought her within the shadows of the castle gates. A curious sight greeted her there: the Anti-Monarchy Society, gathered together, as if making some sort of plan. She moved closer and heard the confident tones of Lorilie Dorran who stood in the middle of the group.

“We can’t deny something big has happened,” Lorilie said. “But even if Zachary is dead and his brother now rules, it shouldn’t change our plans. After all, monarchy in all forms is tyranny, and this monarch seems more tyrannical than some.”

Her supporters glanced toward the gates. The gates were wide open, but well guarded by soldiers in Mirwellian scarlet. Others stood watch in silhouette on the surrounding wall, archers among them. Torches illuminated corpses swaying from nooses on either side of the gates.

Karigan would have to move fast lest the torches break the spell of fading and arouse the Mirwellians to her presence. A pair of sentries marched back and forth beyond the gates, and she would have to time it just right.

The Anti-Monarchy Society broke its huddled grouping and defiantly faced the gates. As one voice, they chanted: “Monarchy is tyranny, no king is a good king. Monarchy is tyranny ...”

The sentries beyond the gate passed one another, and Karigan sprinted across the drawbridge. She nearly ran into a hulking soldier who appeared out of nowhere in the gray mist of her vision. She veered just in time to miss him. She bolted over to the guardhouse and leaned against the cold, stone wall.

Boots swung above her head. Ropes creaked on timbers. The sound knotted her stomach. The hanged hovered above her like stiff marionettes some puppeteer had abandoned, the flickering of torches distorting their bloodless, wooden features.

The guard Karigan had nearly run into had simply stepped out onto the drawbridge to get a better look at the Anti-Monarchy Society. Miraculously, he seemed unaware of her.

She felt her way around the guardhouse and watched the sentries pace back and forth beyond the gates once more.

Instead of running straight across the courtyard, she continued to edge along the guardhouse, hurrying past the open doorway where lamplight glowed, and under the portcullis. Once she was inside the gate, she adhered to the shadows of the inner castle wall. One of the sentries paused his rhythmic pacing. The other joined him.

“Something wrong?”

“No . . . Just . . . I thought I saw something by the guardhouse caught in the light.”

His companion glanced in Karigan’s general direction. “Nothing there. Torchlight can trick your eyes.”

“I suppose, what with those corpses hanging about.”

Karigan listened no further and sprinted across the courtyard. There was a breezeway here, that separated the outer courtyard from the ornamental gardens of the inner courtyard and connected two wings of the castle. A glance at the main entrance to the castle convinced her she would gain no entry there, for it was heavily guarded by Mirwellians.

She swung her legs over the low wall and into the breezeway. Surely some guards would patrol this way. No sooner had the thought entered her mind than guards appeared from either end of the breezeway bearing torches. They paced toward one another. Karigan dived over the low wall on the other side of the breezeway, and fell to the ground of the inner courtyard right into a clump of rose bushes.

She yelped involuntarily and bit her lower lip before more could spill out of her mouth. The sickeningly sweet fragrance of crushed roses thickened in the air about her.

A torch-bearing guard paused near her on the breezeway and waited for the other to join him.

“You hear something?” he asked.

“Nope,” the other said affably. “Quiet as the dead. Only interesting place is the throne room.”

The first guard snorted. “I would like to show some of those nobles a thing or two myself.” He sniffed. “Phew. Just smell those roses.”

The two moved off, conversing companionably, and Karigan breathed again. She plucked thorns out of her hands, arms, and legs, and stood up.

“I’m doing well,” she muttered to herself with sarcasm as she unsnagged her coat from one of the bushes. “Vicious shrubs.”

She trotted along the garden paths to where she remembered the ballroom was. Perhaps she could enter there, undetected. But when she reached the ballroom entrance, it was ablaze with light. Inside, soldiers in silver and black were jammed together under many watchful guards in scarlet.

She turned away, but the sound of a commotion just outside the doorway caught her attention. A guard pulled on the arm of a small, struggling prisoner.

“C’mon, li’l Greenie. Tagard wantsa li’l fun.”

“Nooo!”

Mel? Karigan cursed silently. As a member of the Green Foot, Mel would be treated just like any of the other soldiers, or even worse.

The guard slapped the writhing girl and knocked her to the ground. Mel cried out again in a terrible sob.