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this training school, the lord of this castle, and I gave you an order!”
    “Did you hear anything?” the man holding my right arm said.
    “Just a big yellow fly buzzing around,” the other responded. Neither smiled.
    To my handlers Robert said, “Secure this gentleman in one of the serving rooms. I’ll speak to him in more detail shortly.”
    “Hey, wait a minute,” I said as they pulled me away. “You know this kid was already dead when I got to him, right?”
    “I know he’s dead now, ” Robert said, then turned to the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, I ask that you remain calm. No one’s leaving the hall until we know more about what happened, so I suggest you take advantage of the free food and drink.”
    Trying to take on a roomful of Knights of the Double Tarn would be efficiently fatal, so I let them drag me away without a fight. The knights handed me over to a pair of the newly minted soldiers, whose grip was no less formidable. “Take him into a side room and sit on him,” one veteran said. “Sir Robert will be along shortly to question him.”
    “Yes, sir,” the first soldier replied, and they quickly hustled me out of the hall. Great, I thought, a whole new irony: in trying to help a stranger, I’d fallen into the middle of something deadly here in Grand Bruan, where I knew no one and had no resources at all. Who was laughing now?

chapter
    THREE
    My keepers slammed me down so hard the wooden chair cracked from the impact. “Sit there and be quiet,” one of them snarled. He’d clearly perfected it in a mirror and would need a lot more practice before it had the desired effect. Given my circumstances, though, I didn’t point that out.
    They’d taken me to a tiny room outside the main hall. I was far enough away that I heard nothing except the breathing of my minders, the occasional pop from the torch outside the door, and my own thundering heart. It wasn’t a cell, though; it was filled with wooden crates, box-laden shelves, and the distinctive odor of disuse. Most castles were full of forgotten rooms like this, and I was grateful it wasn’t a fully equipped interrogation chamber. Maybe it was all there was: had the castle been so thoroughly decommissioned for peacetime training that no prison cells remained?
    “Hold out your arms,” the other one said. He produced a pair of elaborately engraved manacles. A few links of chain attached each wrist cuff to a thick metal disk the size of a saucer. He snapped the manacles around my wrists.
    My guards seemed to think pitching me into the chair and cuffing me meant I could no longer hear them talk. “Did you see the look on his face?” the taller man asked his friend. “He was spitting up black foam. Black foam .”
    “I know,” his compatriot agreed. He had short sandy hair and was missing half his left earlobe. His voice shook a little.
    “And did you see the look on the queen’s face?” the other said. He had one of those high, insinuating voices that seemed naturally suited to gossip. “She was aiming for Gillian.”
    “No, man, I don’t believe that. She’s the queen.”
    “She’s also a woman, and they’re a hell of a lot meaner than men. That fancy headband doesn’t make her any less female.”
    “Don’t let Kay hear you say that,” the first soldier whispered urgently. “You’ll have us both peeling potatoes for a week.”
    “Look, you stand guard here. I’m going back upstairs.”
    “Me? Why do I have to stay?”
    “Because I have seniority.”
    “A week and a half is not seniority.”
    “I was commissioned before you, soldier,” the taller man said with a quavering attempt to pull rank. “That’s a fact. So you stay here and wait until someone relieves you.”
    The taller man departed. The remaining guard stood with his back to the door, hand on his sword hilt, and watched me with what he assumed was an ass-puckering glare. I smiled, closed my eyes, and settled in to wait, a skill I’d mastered long