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Most of my sisters had crawled into bed as soon as the rebel noblemen, still hopped up on toad secretions, were handed over to the guards. Getting back to the castle had taken us the rest of the night and into the morning. I’d volunteered to be the one to make our report, tired as I was. Yudit had wanted to come along, but I’d convinced her to work on the next verse of her poem instead. (The first line: My love has got a red, red nose. When I suggested that might not be entirely flattering, she told me accuracy was important.) The stone confines of the castle provided one of the only places where I didn’t need Yudit close by, as long as I kept moving at a reasonable pace. Even if stalks of lavender and dianthus burst exuberantly out of a loose heap of rock as I passed, their blossoms waving in the breeze that whistled through the damaged corridor, I could get by without her—no one cared about a few weeds sprouting from the uncleared debris.

After a couple of turns and a dangerous stretch where the floor had mostly collapsed, I was back in the populated parts of the castle, nodding to passing guards, grooms, and stonemasons. I climbed up the back stairs to the receiving room, where Sir Harriet and Sir Maxine—two of the queen’s knights with serious foe-stopping magic—were standing guard at the door, alert for any danger. News of the wizard lurking about had clearly preceded me. Harriet had her powers at the ready, vibrating so quickly she was scarcely more than a blurred outline of a person. She welcomed me with a high-pitched greeting that only bats could have understood and let me through to the royal presence.

King Gervase inclined his head. “Sir Jules. Please, be seated.”

He’d long ago learned how to tell me and my sisters apart. Queen Jacqueline, too. A minor courtesy, but refreshing compared to…well, to almost everyone else. It was easiest with me, of course, the oddball of the lot.

“Your Majesties.” I sketched a quick bow before dropping gratefully into the offered chair. While I’d gotten something of a second wind when the sun peeked over the horizon, I was far from being at my best.

“So.” The queen shifted forward on her seat. “Since instead of a simple report, we now have a cellblock full of vividly hallucinating nobles, I take it the mission didn’t go as planned?”

My smile was thin. “You could say that.”

The doors to the balcony over the bay had been thrown open, letting the morning sunlight stream into the room. It was only the three of us in the chamber today, none of the usual counselors present—not even the magical talking lion who’d been bequeathing his advice to the rulers of Tailliz for generations. The receiving room seemed overly large for such an intimate meeting. If it wasn’t quite as vast as the Great Hall, it was still capable of hosting dozens, a grand chamber where foreign ambassadors could bring their entourages to mingle with royalty while nibbling canapés. But at the moment, the great swathes of thick carpet went untrodden upon, and the carefully inoffensive oil paintings lacked their usual throngs of insincere admirers.

That was far from normal, and I found it unnerving, to say the very least. The absence of anyone else spoke volumes about the king and queen’s current dilemma. When deadly plots were afoot, it was difficult to know who to trust.

On the other hand, I didn’t miss the counselors. The lion was a prick, and so were most of the others.

The queen sighed. “All right. Tell us what happened.”

I kept a close watch on their faces as I related what had occurred at the keep and the information the traitors let slip on the way back. They’d spilled a couple of interesting tidbits in between stretches of marveling at their fingertips or trying to have conversations with the moon.

King Gervase was difficult to read, his face unchanging as he listened. The queen, on the other hand, grew visibly angrier with each passing moment. Her pale cheeks reddened with fury until they were the same color as her hair. Jacqueline was a ginger, like my sisters and me. And the rest of her sworn knights, for that matter. Not at all a coincidence, since she’d selected us because the resemblance was close enough to fool potential assassins. Or it had been. The queen was hugely pregnant now, so decoy work would require extra padding.

Her knights weren’t native to Tailliz, and neither was she; we’d followed Jacqueline here from our homeland of Ecossia, sailing across the wide strait that separated the two nations. In the beginning, we’d assumed male names and dressed in men’s clothes as part of Jacqueline’s convoluted plan to save Gervase’s life. That task had been accomplished, although not without difficulties, including an army of monsters leaving the aforementioned holes in the castle walls.

But now that one danger had been vanquished, another had risen to take its place.

When I finished speaking, Queen Jacqueline stared at me in disbelief. “They were planning to murder us,” she said, “because of the Council of Citizens?”

“Because of the precedent it might create,” King Gervase clarified. “Not so much the Council itself.”

She rounded on him, barely restraining herself from unleashing her anger in his direction. “Is that supposed to be better?”

The Council of Citizens was one of the recent innovations introduced by the king and queen. Intended as a counterpart to the aristocratic Council of Nobles, it was an assembly of members of the general public, selected by their peers and charged with proposing new legislation and advising the royals. The idea of anyone but the nobly born having a voice in their own government was, it seemed, a bridge too far for Baron Trebalh.

“Is your country really that backward?” Jacqueline asked.

Gervase raised his eyebrows a fraction of an inch. “Our country.”

That brought her up short. “Our country,” she acknowledged after a moment. Then she sighed. “Our country, a place where getting nonbinding legislative advice from villagers is grounds for homicide.”

“Regicide, in our case.”

“Don’t be pedantic.” With a great deal of struggle, she heaved herself upright. The effort did little to improve her mood. She began to pace, her footfalls thumping on the carpet like it had done her an injustice.

Jacqueline had far too much restless energy to let pregnancy slow her down. In the afternoon, she’d be out drilling the castle guards and putting her knights through tactical training. Exhausting tactical training. I doubted she’d consider my complete lack of sleep a good reason to miss it, any more than her own swollen ankles.

Gervase shrugged. “The nobility see it as a threat to their power and influence. Understandably so. The more authority the Council of Citizens takes on, the more likely it is that the nobles will become irrelevant.”

“Now that would be wonderful,” Jacqueline said. “If I never had to pay attention to their whining ever again. Or the lion’s.”

“Assuming we live that long.” Gervase brought up a hand to massage his temple. His coronet got nudged askew, lying crooked on his blue-black curls. “This is the third attempt in a year.”

“We’ve defeated them handily so far,” I said.

He blew out a breath. “They’re getting worse.”