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died. They say he died of arsenic poisoning—but we don’t know what the poison had been in.’’

‘‘I’m sorry,’’ Jerin whispered, hugging her, wrapping her in his warm comfort.

She held him, finding peace within his arms. ‘‘At the time, we were so bitter about his death that we never thought how lucky we were that he was the only one killed. The explosion at the theater taught us to count the small blessings.’’

They stood for a while, hugged close. Finally, she resolutely set him aside. He had to know how to keep himself safe. She showed him how the dressing room doors bolted. The locks were simple bolts, but disguised within elaborate woodcarvings to hide the function of the room.

‘‘Keep the doorways clear of clothing or chairs.’’ She recalled the instructions her sister had given her six years ago when she was judged old enough to know the family secrets. ‘‘You might want to keep the smaller bedroom’s door bolted at all times. This is the bolt-hole’s door here, behind this wood paneling, so you want to keep this clear too.’’ She showed him the catch hidden in the carved trim, and had him trigger it himself. The door creaked open; the chamber beyond was musty from disuse. ‘‘The dressing room doors give you time to get here and shut this door after you. There’s a lamp here with a box of matches.’’ She grimaced as the cobwebs on the lamp clung to her hand when she set the glass chimney aside. ‘‘Don’t waste time lighting them until you’ve got the door barred solid. There’s a light well here, so during the day you’ll see even with the door closed and locked.’’

He nodded, so solemn. Locks of hair were escaping his braid, spilling onto his face, and he brushed them back absently. Distracted by him, she dropped the matchbox after lighting the lamp.

‘‘Oops!’’ She bent down, lantern in hand, to scan the floor for the box. It sat on a pile of burned discards. She frowned at the blackened matchsticks, picked up the
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matchbox, and glanced into it. Five lone matches rattled about the box, while their spent sisters lay on the floor, covered with dust. The lamp, she noticed now, was almost empty too, the chimney black with soot, the wick badly trimmed.

She, Halley, and Odelia had been shown the bolt-hole shortly before her father’s death. Eldest made them spend the day taking care of the secret route—a rite of passage, Eldest called it. Together, they secretly cleared the outside door, swept the floor clean, counted the crowns in the emergency purse, and replaced the unused matches and lamp with new. Trini would have been the next to do maintenance on the passage, but by the time she turned sixteen, Keifer was dead.

There had been no attacks on the palace. No attempted kidnappings. The lamp should be clean and full. The matches unused.

Keifer had used the bolt-hole.

Cursing, barely aware of Jerin now, she hurried down the secret passageway. A straight shot back, down a tight flight of stairs, and through a series of sharp turns, she hit the end.

The door was bolted, but dropping down with the lamp, she could read old evidence of a betrayal that went beyond words. Tracked in from a muddy garden, dusted now with six years of disuse, footprints of various sizes led in toward the sanctity of the husband quarters.

‘‘Oh, Gods, how could he have done this?’’ she moaned, sick, sick. She fumbled with the door, stumbled out, and threw up in the sweet, sharp profusion of roses. Jerin followed her out, held her head as she was sick.

‘‘What is it? What’s wrong?’’

‘‘Keifer! Gods damn the crib bait slut! He was bringing women into our husbands’ quarters! Oh, gods, night after night, he turned us out, refusing us sexual services while he was whoring himself with someone else.’’

‘‘Who?’’

‘‘I don’t know.’’ She thought of all the spent match-
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sticks, far outnumbering the number normally found in a box of that size. ‘‘Perhaps half the guard by the count I can figure.’’

He nodded, then glanced about the garden. ‘‘We should go in, before we give away the door.’’

The door is given away,
she almost snapped, but swallowed it. He was right. She followed him back inside and bolted the exit carefully shut. Jerin was silent the whole trip back. It wasn’t until they were in the dressing room that she realized he was holding something back from her.

‘‘What is it?’’

He refused to look at her. ‘‘Ren, you were with Keifer, weren’t you?’’

‘‘Yes.’’ She was puzzled.

‘‘Odelia too?’’

‘‘Yes.’’

He whispered so softly, she almost didn’t hear him.

‘‘Ren, you two should be checked, before the marriage, so if Keifer passed—if Keifer had—who knows if his lovers were clean? We should be sure. For the youngest’s sake, for Lylia’s sake, we should be sure.’’

‘‘Ren! What’s wrong?’’ Queen Mother Elder asked as Ren stumbled into her room and collapsed into the chair before the fire.

‘‘Keifer betrayed us.’’ Ren gazed numbly at the fire. Had Keifer died instantly in the explosion, or had he been pinned and burned alive? ‘‘When he was refusing Eldest and others services, he was servicing strangers he brought in through the bolt-hole. Jerin—Jerin thinks it would be wise if Odelia and I were checked, since we can’t be sure we’re clean.’’

‘‘Oh, dear gods in the heavens,’’ Mother Elder whispered.

‘‘Halley will have to be checked, if we ever run her to earth. And Trini—sweet Mothers—he could have infected her too.’’ She pressed a trembling hand to her
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eyes as she realized the true depth of the danger. ‘‘I don’t know about these diseases, Mother, how intimate you need to be to pass them. I might have already infected Jerin. There was no joining, but otherwise, we were extremely intimate.’’

Ren stared numbly at the fire, trying not to think of all the horrible ramifications. Keifer had died six years ago. Surely, if they were infected, at least one of them would have fallen sick by now.

Gods, she hoped Keifer hadn’t been killed immediately by the explosion. She hoped he burned slowly. The doctor was a thin, old woman, part of a family that had treated Ren through sore throats and broken arms. She examined Ren with dry, cold, dispassionate fingers, then asked a myriad of questions, reminding Ren often to think carefully and to hold nothing back. With a growing sense of relief, Ren could truthfully say that she never had a sore on her vagina or rectum. She had never lost patches of hair. Her eyebrows had never thinned. She never had rashes on her body, and especially not on the bottoms of her feet or the palms of her hands.

‘‘You know if you’re lying, you’ll give any child you conceive this awful disease while it’s still in the womb. It will be born dead, or so damaged you’ll wish it had been.’’

‘‘No. I’m not lying. It would be stupid to lie,’’ Ren said.

‘‘Yes, but it never seems to stop people from doing it,’’ the doctor said. ‘‘It would be helpful to have Princess Halley here as well, but so far, I see no sign of disease. Recently, they’ve developed a test. A device has been invented that allows one to see things so small they’re invisible. We actually have small organisms living in our blood.’’

‘‘I know. I’ve worked with a microscope.’’

‘‘Oh. Well, they couldn’t see syphilis for a while.
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Turns out it’s white. On a normal slide, you can’t see it. Recently, they found a way to examine things on a black background. The syphilis shows up. It still isn’t very accurate in the early stages of the disease, but if you were exposed six years ago, it should be fairly simple to spot.’’

‘‘How soon can we have it done?’’

‘‘I’ll come back in an hour or so with equipment to take your blood and have it tested.’’

Jerin attacked the mystery of Keifer’s lovers. Surely, somewhere in the husband quarters, well secured and untouched these last six years, there had to be clues. No one outside the family, not even the Barneses, were allowed into the husband quarters. Once Ren’s father died, Keifer could have kept lovers’ mementos with no fear of discovery. Since Keifer died suddenly, any damning evidence should have remained. Jerin tore through the accumulation of the ages. He carried armfuls of objects out to the balcony, examining each piece carefully before setting it aside. When shelves, dressers, and closets were empty, and the balcony was overflowing, he attacked the furniture itself. The massive bed in his bedroom yielded up an earring, a bold hoop of gold, with strands of golden hair caught fast in it. Had the earring been Keifer’s? Certainly the rest of the Porters were blond. He checked the wellstocked jewelry boxes and found no mate; in fact there were no earrings at all. Keifer, it seemed, didn’t follow the recent fashion of men’s piercing their ears. Jerin placed the earring carefully in the center of a piece of paper, and then tackled the smaller bedroom. Tucked up under the support boards of the bed, he found a box wedged onto the shelf made by the bracing. He pulled it out. It was six inches square, and locked. Resisting the urge to beat it open, he got his lockpicks and sat tailor-fashion, amid the wreckage he’d caused, to tweak it open. At first his find seemed disappointing, a handmade book, containing hundreds of small yet in-
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credibly detailed pictures. The first pictures were portraits of the Queens, then women that must have been Ren’s older sisters, and finally Ren and the others, the surviving sisters, almost unrecognizable in their youth. Detailed drawings of palace rooms followed. As he reached abstract pictures—a dining table set for dinner, a ballroom filled with dancers, a theater with actors on the stage and a crowd of people watching—he noticed the cant. Beside each detailed drawing was a small cant symbol. The dining table was represented by a circle in a rectangle, crude knife, fork, and spoon. Two stick figures with a line joining them indicated a ball. Jerin flipped back to the beginning. A crown and a counter marked the Queens. A crown under a bar and a counter ticked off princesses.

It was a lexicon, he realized, of someone’s personal cant. Keifer’s lovers must have given it to him so they could communicate with him. Under the book, little scraps

of

folded

paper

contained

Keifer’s

secret

messages.

Jerin unfolded one: a ball, Heraday, a cant name, talk. Despite the unknown symbol, the meaning was fairly clear.
At the ball on Heraday, talk to cant-named person.
The second message sickened Jerin: Claireday, a clock showing midnight, a simple drawing of a bed, a key unlocking a door.
Unlock the door to your bedroom Claire-
day at midnight.

The third message sent Jerin to the lexicon for the first symbol.
Picnic. Food
was the second word, though he checked the lexicon to be sure. The third symbol couldn’t be found in the lexicon. Jerin’s grandmothers, though, had carefully taught it to him: an
X
with an oval drawn over it—to stand for skull and crossbones.
Poison
. The husband quarters looked like Keifer still lived there, throwing his fits, wreaking his anger on anything at hand. Ren stopped just inside the door, shocked.
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Surely Jerin wasn’t like Keifer! Surely Jerin didn’t turn his anger on everything and anything.

The rooms were strangely quiet. No howls of anger. No screams of ugly, yet childishly simple names. Was Jerin even here?

She walked to the bedrooms, noting with some relief that nothing seemed broken. No shards of glass. No splintered, battered furniture. In fact, there seemed to be a strange order to the chaos.

Jerin wasn’t in the big bedroom, with the bed stripped down to the frame, nor the dressing room, where not a stitch of clothing remained. It was the stark emptiness of the dressing room that turned her annoyance to concern. This was far too orderly and systematic to be compared to Keifer’s random acts of destruction. Jerin sat tailor-style on the floor of the little bedroom. He sat silent, statue-still, a box and a book both open on his lap, a scrap of paper dangling in his hand, nearly slipping from his fingers.

‘‘Jerin?’’

He looked up, pale, his eyes wide with shock. He gazed at her, seemingly too stunned to move or speak.

‘‘Jerin? What’s wrong?’’

‘‘I—I thought I might find out who Keifer’s lovers were.’’ He held up the paper and book to her. ‘‘I was searching for clues.’’

It was thieves’ cant, written out on a piece of good stationery. Three neat symbols. There was also a lexicon for translating it, the simplified symbols expanded into pictures a child could understand.

‘‘Keifer’s stupid, Ren. He’s a cow!’’
Trini had sneered her contempt of their husband.
‘‘I know you don’t marry
men for their brains, but there’s a limit!’’

Keifer’s lover had apparently known his mental limits as well as Trini had. The book left little chance for misunderstanding. Ren looked at the quality of the stationery and the lexicon with its careful renderings of the
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palace, its occupants, and the daily life of gentle society and realized the truth. ‘‘This isn’t thieves’ cant. This is the personalized cant of the cannon-stealing gentry that nearly killed Odelia.’’

The color drained out of Jerin’s face. ‘‘The ones that killed Egan Wainwright?’’

Ren flinched in memory of the mutilated, raped man. Had Jerin’s sisters told him about that? ‘‘Yes. Them.’’

‘‘How could they get into the gardens to get to the bolt-hole door?’’

Ren knew that the gardens weren’t perfectly secure despite the wall and the guards. It was unlikely, however, that such a vast number of women scaling the wall could go unnoticed. The Barneses? They had access to the gardens. No. The Barneses never left the palace in any large number—they couldn’t have been the ten women escorting the cannons on the
Onward.
Nor had one of the Barneses vanished mysteriously when the redhooded thief had been killed. Only palace guests could have been in the garden unobserved.