"Where away, boy?" Cazaril called after him.

He turned and danced backward for a moment. "Temple, lord. Dare not stay—Royina Sara—the roya has collapsed!" He turned and sprinted in earnest through the gates; the guards stared at him, and, uneasily, back toward Ias's Tower.

Teidez's arm, beneath Cazaril's hand, lost its stiff resistance. Beneath his scowl, a scared look crept into his eyes, and he glanced aside warily at his self-appointed detainer.

After a moment's indecision, Cazaril, not letting go of Teidez, wheeled around and started for Ias's Tower instead. He hurried to catch up with the waiting woman, who had ducked back inside, and called after her, but she seemed not to hear him as she scurried up the end stairs. He was wheezing as he reached the third floor, where Orico kept his chambers. He stared in apprehension down its central corridor.

Royina Sara, her white shawl bundled about her and a woman at her heels, was hurrying up the hall. Cazaril bowed anxiously as she came to the staircase.

"My lady, what has happened? Can I help?"

She touched her hand to her frightened face. "I scarcely know yet, Castillar. Orico—he was reading aloud to me in my chambers while I stitched, as he sometimes does, for my solace, when suddenly he stopped, and blinked and rubbed his eyes, and said he could not see the words anymore, and that the room was all dark. But it wasn't! Then he fell from his chair. I cried for my ladies, and we put him in his bed, and have sent for a Temple physician."

"We saw the roya's page," Cazaril assured her. "He was running as fast as he could."

"Oh, good..."

"Was it an apoplexy, do you think?"

"I don't think... I don't know. He speaks a little, and his breath is not very labored... What was all that shouting, down by the stables, earlier?" Distractedly, not waiting for an answer, she passed him and mounted the stairs.

Teidez, his face gone leaden, licked his lips but said no more as Cazaril turned him around and led him down to the courtyard.

The royse did not find his voice again till they were mounting the stairs in the main block, where he repeated breathlessly, "It cannot be. Dondo told me the menagerie was black sorcery, a Roknari curse to keep Orico sick and weak. And I could see that it was so."

"A Roknari curse, there truly is, but the menagerie is a white miracle that keeps Orico alive despite it. Was. Till now," Cazaril added bitterly.

"No... no... it's all wrong. Dondo told me—"

"Dondo was mistaken." Cazaril hesitated briefly. "Or else Dondo wished to hurry the replacement of a roya who favored his elder brother with one who favored himself."

Teidez's lips parted in protest, but no sound came from them. Cazaril didn't think the royse could be feigning the shocked look in his eyes. The only mercy in this day, if mercy it was—Dondo might have misled Teidez, but he seemed not to have corrupted him, not to that extent. Teidez was tool, not co-conspirator, not a willing fratricide. Unfortunately, he was a tool that had kept on functioning after the workman's hand had fallen away. And whose fault was it that the boy swallowed down lies, when no one would feed him the truth?

The sallow fellow who was the royse's secretary-tutor looked up in surprise from his writing desk as Cazaril swung the boy into his chambers.

"Look to your master," Cazaril told him shortly. "He's injured. He is not to quit this building until Chancellor dy Jironal is informed what has occurred, and gives him leave." He added, with a little sour satisfaction, "If you knew of this outrage, and did nothing to prevent it, the chancellor will be furious with you."

The man paled in confusion; Cazaril turned his back on him. Now to go see what was happening with Umegat...

"But Lord Cazaril," Teidez's voice quavered. "What should I do?"

Cazaril spat over his shoulder, as he strode out again, "Pray."

As he turned onto the end stairs, Cazaril heard a woman's slippers scuffing rapidly on the steps. He looked up to find Lady Betriz, her lavender skirts trailing, hurrying down toward him.

"Lord Cazaril! What's going on? We heard shouting—one of the maids cried Royse Teidez has run mad, and tried to slay the roya's animals!"

"Not mad—misled. I think. And not tried—succeeded." In a few brief, bitter words, Cazaril described the horror in the stable block.

"But why?" Her voice was husky with shock.

Cazaril shook his head. "A lie of Lord Dondo's, nearly as I can tell. He convinced the royse that Umegat was a Roknari wizard using the animals to somehow poison the roya. Which turned the truth exactly backwards; the animals sustained Orico, and now he has collapsed. Five gods, I cannot explain it all here upon the stairs. Tell Royesse Iselle I will attend upon her soon, but first I must see to the injured grooms. Stay away—keep Iselle away from the menagerie." And if he didn't give Iselle action, she'd surely take it for herself... "Wait upon Sara, both of you; she's half-distracted."

Cazaril continued on down the stairs, past the place where he had been—deliberately?—decoyed away by his own pain, earlier. Dondo's demonic ghost made no move to grip him now.

Back at the menagerie, Cazaril found that the excellent Palli and his men had already carried off Umegat and the more seriously injured of the undergrooms to the Mother's hospital. The remaining groom was stumbling around trying to catch a hysterical little blue-and-yellow bird that had somehow escaped the Baocian guard captain and taken refuge in the upper cornices. Some servants from the stable had come over and were making awkward attempts to help; one had taken off his tabard and was sweeping it up, trying to knock the bird out of the air.

"Stop!" Cazaril choked back panic. For all he knew, the little feathered creature was the last thread by which Orico clung to life. He directed the would-be helpers instead to the task of collecting the bodies of the slain animals, laying them out in the stable courtyard, and cleaning up the bloody mess on the tiles inside. He scooped up a handful of grains from the vellas' stall, remains of their last interrupted dinner, and coaxed the little bird down to his own hand, chirping as he'd seen Umegat do. Rather to his surprise, the bird came to him and suffered itself to be put back into its cage.

"Guard it with your life," he told the groom. Then added, scowling for effect, "If it dies, you die." An empty threat, though it must do for now; the grooms, at least, looked impressed. If it dies, Orico dies? That suddenly seemed frighteningly plausible. He turned to lend a hand in dragging out the heavy bodies of the bears.

"Should we skin them, lord?" one of the stable hands inquired, staring at the results of Teidez's hellish hunt piled up outside on the paving stones.

"No!" said Cazaril. Even the few of Fonsa's crows still lingering about the stable yard, though they regarded the bloody carcasses with wary interest, made no move toward them. "Treat them... as you would the roya's soldiers who had died in battle. Burned or buried. Not skinned. Nor eaten, for the gods' sakes." Swallowing, Cazaril bent and added the bodies of the two dead crows to the row. "There has been sacrilege enough this day." And the gods forfend Teidez had not slain a holy saint as well as the sacred animals.

A clatter of hooves heralded the arrival of Martou dy Jironal, fetched, presumably, from Jironal Palace; he was followed up the hill by four retainers on foot, gasping for breath. The chancellor swung down from his snorting, sidling horse, handed it off to a bowing groom, and advanced to stare at the row of dead animals. The bears' dark fur riffled in the cold wind, the only movement. Dy Jironal's lips spasmed on unvoiced curses. "What is this madness?" He looked up at Cazaril, and his eyes narrowed in bewildered suspicion. "Did you set Teidez onto this?" Dy Jironal was not, Cazaril judged, dissimulating; he was as off-balance as Cazaril himself.

"I? No! I do not control Teidez." Cazaril added sourly, "And neither, it appears, do you. He was in your constant company for the past two weeks; had you no hint of this?"

Dy Jironal shook his head.

"In his defense, Teidez seems to have had some garbled notion that this act would somehow help the roya. That he'd no better sense is a fault of his age; that he had no better knowledge... well, you and Orico between you have served him ill. If he'd been more filled with truth, he'd have had less room for lies. I've had his Baocian guard locked up, and taken him to his chambers, to await..." the roya's orders would not be forthcoming now. Cazaril finished, "your orders."

Dy Jironal's hand made a constricted gesture. "Wait. The royesse—he was closeted with his sister yesterday. Could she have set him on?"

"Five witnesses will say no. Including Teidez himself. He gave no sign yesterday that this was in his mind." Almost no sign. Should have, should have, should have...

"You control the Royesse Iselle closely enough," snapped dy Jironal bitterly. "Do you think I don't know who encouraged her in her defiance? I fail to see the secret of her pernicious attachment to you, but I mean to cut that connection."

"Yes." Cazaril bared his teeth. "Dy Joal tried to wield your knife last night. He'll know to charge you more for his services next time. Hazard pay." Dy Jironal's eyes glittered with understanding; Cazaril took a breath, for self-control. This was bringing their hostilities much too close to the surface. The last thing he desired was dy Jironal's full attention. "In any case, there is no mystery. Teidez says your amiable brother Dondo plotted this with him, before he died."

Dy Jironal stepped back a pace, eyes widening, but his teeth clenched on any other reaction.

Cazaril continued, "Now, what I should dearly like to know is—and you are in a better position to guess the answer than I am—did Dondo know what this menagerie really did for Orico?"

Dy Jironal's gaze flew to his face. "Do you?"

"All the Zangre knows by now: Orico was stricken blind, and fell from his chair, during the very moments his creatures were dying. Sara and her ladies brought him to his bed, and have sent for the Temple physicians." This answer both evaded the question and abruptly redirected dy Jironal's attention; the chancellor paled, whirled away, and made for the Zangre gates. He did not, Cazaril noted, stay to inquire after Umegat. Clearly, dy Jironal knew what the menagerie did; did he understand how?

Do you?

Cazaril shook his head and turned the other way, for yet another weary march down into town.

Cardegoss's Temple Hospital of the Mother's Mercy was a rambling old converted mansion, bequeathed to the order by a pious widow, on the street beyond the Mother's house from the Temple Square. Cazaril tracked Palli and Umegat through its maze to a second-floor gallery above an inner courtyard. He spotted the chamber readily by the reunited dy Gura brothers standing guard outside its closed door. They saluted and passed him through.

He entered to find Umegat laid out unconscious upon a bed. A white-haired woman in a Temple physician's green robes bent over him stitching up the lacerated flap of his scalp. She was assisted by a familiar, dumpy middle-aged woman whose viridescent tinge owed nothing to her green dress. Cazaril could still see her faint effulgence with his eyes closed. The archdivine of Cardegoss himself, in his five-colored vestment, hovered anxiously. Palli leaned against a wall with his arms crossed; his face lightened, and he pushed to his feet when he saw Cazaril.

"How goes it?" Cazaril asked Palli in a low voice.

"Poor fellow's still out cold," Palli murmured back. "I think he must have taken a mighty whack. And you?"

Cazaril repeated the tale of Orico's sudden collapse. Archdivine Mendenal stepped closer to listen, and the physician glanced over her shoulder. "Had they told you of this turn, Archdivine?" Cazaril added.

"Oh, aye. I will follow Orico's physicians to the Zangre as soon as I may."

If the white-haired physician wondered why an injured groom should claim more of the archdivine's attention than the stricken roya, she gave no more sign than a slight lifting of her eyebrows. She finished her last neat stitch and dipped a cloth in a basin to wash the crusting gore from the shaved scalp around the wound. She dried her hands, checked the rolled-back eyes under Umegat's lids, and straightened. The Mother's midwife gathered up Umegat's cut-away left braid and the rest of the medical mess, and made all tidy.

Archdivine Mendenal clutched his fingers together, and asked the physician, "Well?"

"Well, his skull is not broken, that I can feel. I shall leave the wound uncovered to better mark bleeding or swelling. I can tell nothing more until he wakes. There's naught to do now but keep him warm and watch him till he stirs."

"When will that be?"

The physician stared down dubiously at her patient. Cazaril did, too. The fastidious Umegat would have hated his present crumpled, half-shorn, desperately limp appearance. Umegat's flesh was still that deathly gray, making his golden Roknari skin look like a dirty rag. His breath rasped. Not good. Cazaril had seen men who looked like that go on to recover; he'd also seen them sink and die.

"I cannot say," the physician replied at last, echoing Cazaril's own mental diagnosis.

"Leave us, then. The acolyte will watch him for now."

"Yes, Your Reverence." The physician bowed, and instructed the midwife, "Send for me at once if he either wakes, or takes a fever, or starts to convulse." She gathered up her instruments.

"Lord dy Palliar, I thank you for your aid," the archdivine said. He added, "Lord Cazaril, please stay."

Palli said merely, "You're entirely welcome, Your Reverence," then after a heartbeat, as the hint penetrated, "Oh. Ah. If you're all right, Caz... ?"

"For now."

"Then I should perhaps return to the Daughter's house. If you need anything, at any time, send for me there, or at Yarrin Palace, and I'll ‘tend upon you at once. You should not go about alone." He gave Cazaril a stern look, to be sure this was understood as command and not parting pleasantry. He, too, then bowed, and, opening the door for the physician, followed in her wake.

As the door closed, Mendenal turned to Cazaril, his hands outstretched in pleading. "Lord Cazaril, what should we do?"

Cazaril recoiled. "Five gods, you're asking me?"

The man's lips twisted ruefully. "Lord Cazaril, I've only been the archdivine of Cardegoss for two years. I was chosen because I was a good administrator, I fancy, and to please my family, because my brother and my father before him were powerful provincars. I was dedicated to the Bastard's Order at age fourteen, with a good dower from my father to assure my care and advancement. I have served the gods faithfully all my life, but... they do not speak to me." He stared at Cazaril, and glanced aside to the Mother's midwife, with an odd hopeless envy in his eyes, devoid of hostility. "When a pious ordinary man finds himself in a room with three working saints—if he has any wits left—he seeks instruction, he does not feign to instruct."