Then we'll know the gods are as confused as all of the rest of us, Cazaril did not say out loud.

Umegat, stroking the bird to calm it, gave a slight bow. "As the truth is sacred to the gods, let the crow fly to the honest man, sire." He did not glance at Cazaril.

"Oh, very good. Carry on, then."

Umegat, with what Cazaril was beginning to suspect was a fine sense of theater, positioned himself precisely between the two accused men, and held the bird out on his arm, slowly removing his controlling hand. He stood a moment with a look of pious quietude on his face. Cazaril wondered what the gods made of the cacophony of conflicting prayers no doubt arising from this room at this instant. Then Umegat tossed the crow into the air, and let his arms hang down. It squawked and spread its wings, and fanned a tail missing two feathers.

Dy Maroc held his arms widespread, hopefully, looking as if he wondered if he was allowed to tackle the creature out of the air as it swooped by him. Cazaril, about to cry Caz, Caz to be safe, was suddenly overcome with theological curiosity. He already knew the truth—what else might this test reveal? He stood still and straight, lips parted, and watched in disturbed fascination as the crow ignored the open window and flapped straight to his shoulder.

"Well," he said quietly to it, as it dug in its claws and shifted from side to side. "Well." It tilted its black beak, regarding him with expressionless, beady eyes.

Iselle and Betriz jumped up and down and whooped, hugging each other and nearly frightening the bird off again. Dy Sanda smiled grimly. Dy Jironal gritted his teeth; dy Maroc looked faintly appalled.

Orico dusted his plump hands. "Good. That settles that. Now, by the gods, I want my dinner."

ISELLE, BETRIZ, AND DY SANDA SURROUNDED CAZARIL like an honor guard and marched him out of Ias's Tower to the courtyard.

"How did you know to come to my rescue?" Cazaril asked them. Surreptitiously, he glanced up; no crows were circling, just now.

"I had it from a page that you were to be arrested this morning," said dy Sanda, "and I went at once to the royesse."

Cazaril wondered if dy Sanda, like himself, kept a private budget to pay for early news from various observers around the Zangre. And why his own arrangements hadn't worked a trifle better in this case. "I thank you, for covering my"—he swallowed the word, back—"blind side. I should have been dismissed by now, if you all hadn't come to stand up for me."

"No thanks needed," said dy Sanda. "I believe you'd have done as much for me."

"My brother needed someone to prop him," said Iselle a trifle bitterly. "Else he bows to whatever force blows most proximately."

Cazaril was torn between commending her shrewdness and suppressing her frankness. He glanced at dy Sanda. "How long—do you know—has this story about me been circulating in the court?"

He shrugged. "Some four or five days, I think."

"This was the first we heard of it!" said Betriz indignantly.

Dy Sanda opened his hands in apology. "Likely it seemed too raw a thing to pour in your maiden ears, my lady."

Iselle scowled. Dy Sanda accepted reiterated thanks from Cazaril and took his leave to check on Teidez.

Betriz, who had grown suddenly quiet, said in a stifled voice, "This was all my fault, wasn't it? Dondo struck at you to avenge himself for the pig. Oh, Lord Caz, I'm sorry!"

"No, my lady," said Cazaril firmly. "There is some old business between Dondo and me that goes back to before... before Gotorget." Her face lightened, to his relief; nevertheless, he seized the chance to add prudently, "Grant you, the prank with the pig didn't help, and you should not do anything like that again."

Betriz sighed, but then smiled just a little bit. "Well, he did stop pressing himself upon me. So it helped that much."

"I can't deny that's a benefit, but... Dondo remains a powerful man. I beg you—both—to take care to walk wide around him."

Iselle's eyes flicked toward him. She said quietly, "We're under siege here, aren't we. Me, Teidez, all our households."

"I trust," sighed Cazaril, "it is not quite so dire. Just go more carefully from now on, eh?"

He escorted them back to their chambers in the main block, but did not take up his calculations again. Instead, he strode back down the stairs and out past the stables to the menagerie. He found Umegat in the aviary, persuading the small birds to take dust baths in a basin of ashes as proof against lice. The neat Roknari, his tabard protected by an apron, looked up at him and smiled.

Cazaril did not smile back. "Umegat," he began without preamble, "I have to know. Did you pick the crow, or did the crow pick you?"

"Does it matter to you, my lord?"

"Yes!"

"Why?"

Cazaril's mouth opened, and shut. He finally began again, almost pleadingly. "It was a trick, yes? You tricked them, by bringing the crow I feed at my window. The gods didn't really reach into that room, right?"

Umegat's brows rose. "The Bastard is the most subtle of the gods, my lord. Merely because something is a trick, is no guarantee you are not god-touched." He added apologetically, "I'm afraid that's just the way it works." He chirped at the bright bird, apparently now done with its flutter in the ashes, coaxed it onto his hand with a seed drawn from his apron pocket, and popped it back into its nearby cage.

Cazaril followed, arguing, "It was the crow that I fed. Of course it flew to me. You feed it too, eh?"

"I feed all the sacred crows of Fonsa's Tower. So do the pages and ladies, the visitors to the Zangre, and the acolytes and divines of all the Temple houses in town. The miracle of those crows is that they're not all grown too fat to fly." With a neat twist of his wrist, Umegat secured another bird and tipped it into the ash bath.

Cazaril stood back from him as ashes puffed, and frowned. "You're Roknari. Aren't you of the Quadrene faith?"

"No, my lord," said Umegat serenely. "I've been a devout Quintarian since my late youth."

"Did you convert when you came to Chalion?"

"No, when I was still in the Archipelago."

"How... came it about that you were not hanged for heresy?"

"I made it to the ship to Brajar before they caught me." Umegat's smile crimped.

Indeed, he still had his thumbs. Cazaril's brows drew down, as he studied the man's fine-drawn features. "What was your father, in the Archipelago?"

"Narrow-minded. Very pious, though, in his foursquare way."

"That is not what I meant."

"I know, my lord. But he's been dead these twenty years. It doesn't matter anymore. I am content with what I am now."

Cazaril scratched his beard, as Umegat traded for another bright bird. "How long have you been head groom of this menagerie, then?"

"From its beginning. About six years. I came with the leopard, and the first birds. We were a gift."

"Who from?"

"Oh, from the archdivine of Cardegoss, and the Order of the Bastard. Upon the occasion of the roya's birthday, you see. Many fine animals have been added, since then."

Cazaril digested that, for a little. "This is a very unusual collection."

"Yes, my lord."

"How unusual?"

"Very unusual."

"Can you tell me more?"

"I beg you will not ask me more, my lord."

"Why not?"

"Because I do not wish to lie to you."

"Why not?" Everyone else does.

Umegat drew in his breath and smiled crookedly, watching Cazaril. "Because, my lord, the crow picked me."

Cazaril's return smile grew a trifle strained. He gave Umegat a small bow and withdrew.

Cazaril was just exiting his bedchamber on the way to breakfast, some three mornings later, when a breathless page accosted him, grabbing him by the sleeve.

"M' lord dy Cazaril ! The castle warder begs you ‘tend on him at once, in the courtyard!"

"Why? What's the matter?" Obedient to this urgency, Cazaril swung into motion beside the boy.

"It's Ser dy Sanda. He was set upon last night by footpads, and robbed and stabbed!"

Cazaril's stride lengthened. "How badly was he injured? Where does he lie?"

"Not injured, m'lord. Slain!"

Oh, gods, no. Cazaril left the page behind as he clattered down the staircase. He hurried into the Zangre's front courtyard in time to see a man in the tabard of the constable of Cardegoss, and another man dressed as a farmer, lower a stiff form from the back of a mule and lay it out on the cobbles. The Zangre's castle warder, frowning, squatted down by the body. A couple of the roya's guards watched from a few paces back, warily, as if knife wounds might prove contagious.

"What has happened?" demanded Cazaril.

The farmer, in his courtier's garb taking, pulled off his wool hat in a sort of salute. "I found him by the riverside this morning, sir, when I took my cattle down to drink. The river curves—I often find things hung up upon the shoal. ‘Twas a wagon wheel, last week. I always check. Not bodies too often, thank the Mother of Mercy. Not since that poor lady who drowned herself, two years back—" He and the constable's man exchanged nods of reminiscence. "This one has not a drowned look."

Dy Sanda's trousers were still sodden, but his hair was done dripping. His tunic had been removed by his finders—Cazaril saw the brocade folded up over the mule's withers. The mouths of his wounds had been cleaned of blood by the river water, and showed now as dark puckered slits in his pale skin, in his back, belly, neck. Cazaril counted over a dozen strikes, deep and hard.

The castle warder, sitting on his heels, pointed to a bit of frayed cord knotted around dy Sanda's belt. "His purse was cut off. In a hurry, they were."

"But it wasn't just a robbery," said Cazaril. "One or two of these blows would have put him on the ground, stopped resistance. They didn't need to... they were making sure of his death." They or he? No real way to know, but dy Sanda could not have been either easy or safe to bring down. He rather thought they. "I suppose his sword was taken." Had he ever had time to draw it? Or had the first blow fallen on him by surprise, from a man he walked beside in trust?

"Taken or lost in the river," said the farmer. "He would not have floated down to me so soon if it had still been dragging him down."

"Did he have rings or jewelry?" asked the constable's man.

The castle warder nodded. "Several, and a gold ear loop." They were all gone now.

"I'll want a description of them all, my lord," the constable's man said, and the warder nodded understanding.

"You know where he was found," said Cazaril to the constable's man. "Do you know where he was attacked?"

The man shook his head. "Hard to say. Somewhere in the bottoms, maybe." The lower end of Cardegoss, both socially and topographically, huddled on both sides of the wall that ran between the two rivers. "There are only half a dozen places someone might pitch a body over the town walls and be sure the stream would take it off. Some are more lonely than others. When did anyone here see him last?"

"I saw him at supper," said Cazaril. "He said nothing to me about going into town." There were a couple of places right here in the Zangre where a body might also be pitched into the rivers below... . "Has he broken bones?"

"Not as I felt, sir," said the constable's man. Indeed, the pale corpse did not show great bruises.

Inquiry of the castle guards disclosed that dy Sanda had left the Zangre, alone and on foot, about the mid-watch last night. Cazaril gave up a budding plan to check every foot of the castle's great lengths of corridors and niches for new bloodstains. Later in the afternoon the constable's men found three people who'd said they'd seen the royse's secretary drinking in a tavern in the bottoms, and depart alone; one swore he'd left staggering drunk. That witness, Cazaril would have liked to have had alone for a time in one of the Zangre's stony, scream-absorbing cells off the old, old tunnels going down to the rivers. Some better kind of truth might have been pounded out of him there. Cazaril had never seen dy Sanda drink to drunkenness, ever.

It fell to Cazaril to inventory and pack dy Sanda's meager pile of worldly goods, to be sent off by carter to the man's surviving older brother somewhere in the provinces of Chalion. While the city constable's men searched the bottoms, futilely, Cazaril was sure, for the supposed footpads, Cazaril turned out every scrap of paper in dy Sanda's room. But whatever lying assignation had lured him to the bottoms, he'd either received verbally or taken with him.

Dy Sanda having no relatives near enough to wait upon, the funeral was held the next day. The services were somberly graced by both the royse and royesse and their households, so a few courtiers anxious for their favor likewise attended. The ceremony of departure, held in the Son's chamber off the main courtyard of the temple, was brief. It was borne in upon Cazaril what a lonely man dy Sanda had been. No friends thronged to the head of his bier to speak long eulogies for each other's comfort. Only Cazaril spoke a few formal words of regret on behalf of the royesse, managing to get through them without the embarrassment of referring to the paper, upon which he had so hastily composed them that morning, tucked in his sleeve.

Cazaril stood down from the bier to make way for the blessing of the animals, going to stand with the little crowd of mourners before the altar. Acolytes, dressed each in the colors of their chosen gods, brought in their creatures and stood round the bier at five evenly spaced points. In country temples, the most motley assortment of animals was used for this rite; Cazaril had once seen it carried through—successfully—for the dead daughter of a poor man by a single overworked acolyte with a basket of five kittens with colored ribbons tied round their necks. The Roknari often used fish, though in the number of four, not five; the Quadrene divines marked them with dye and interpreted the will of the gods by the patterns they made swimming about in a tub. Whatever the means used, the omen was the one tiny miracle the gods granted every person, no matter how humble, at their last passing.