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“Then we’ll just have to—Ack!” Jacqueline stumbled and grabbed at her stomach. “Sorry. Damned thing kicked me.”

“Please stop calling our offspring a ‘damned thing.’ ”

“I will when it stops kicking me.”

Pregnancy looked pretty miserable to me. But Gervase and Jacqueline needed an heir. Although, to be fair, they genuinely appeared to want children, too. “At least,” I said, trying to get things back on track, “Trebalh said they were going to wait until the baby was born. That’s an improvement over last time, isn’t it?”

Jacqueline grimaced. “No, it isn’t. A royal child would give him a fig leaf of legitimacy for a regency. He could claim he wasn’t usurping the throne, just keeping things running until the heir comes of age. The leader of the conservatives stepping up. I’m sure all his cronies on the Council of Nobles would voice their fervent support, even the ones who aren’t having toad-induced visions in the dungeon right now.”

Right, of course. I should have realized that. I would have, if I weren’t so tired. Exhaustion was dragging at my eyelids. It had probably been a mistake to sit down. For more reasons than one; wild strawberries had begun to take root in the carpet, sending runners twining up my ankles. Yudit would have to deal with them later.

“What worries me most,” Gervase said, “is the wizard.”

We all went silent at that. Jacqueline drummed her fingers against her rib cage.

“I’m sorry you had to deal with that by yourselves,” she said. “If I’d known a wizard was going to be there, I’d have sent backup.”

Someone more competent, she meant. Like Harriet or Maxine. Maybe one of them could have brought the wizard back for questioning, which would have been handy right about now.

“How did the conspirators even get in contact with a Red Empire wizard?” Gervase asked. “Or…did the wizard approach them?”

“I’m not sure, honestly,” I said. “Toad interrogation isn’t an exact science. I was surprised we got as much information as we did. Trebalh kept trying to lick things. Trees. Horses. Me.”

Gervase had raised a perplexing point. There was something very strange about all this. Since when did Red Empire wizards offer their services for hire? Red Empire wizards were sworn to the Red Emperor, attendant to his whim and instruments of his will. They didn’t work odd jobs. For that matter, the least of them would have more money in their pockets than a Tailliziani baron could scrape together in a year. Why stoop to carrying out an assassination plot in some backwoods northern kingdom? Why risk the wrath of an emperor for a handful of petty cash? None of it made sense.

I tried my hardest to suppress a yawn. It didn’t escape Gervase’s notice.

“We should let you go. We can reconvene once the prisoners have recovered their wits, and—” He was cut off by someone pounding on the door. His forehead wrinkled. “Jules, would you see to that? It’s probably important. I told them not to disturb us unless it was for something extraordinary.”

I rose wearily to my feet and stumbled over the strawberry blossoms, hoping the interruption didn’t represent some new threat. On the other side of the door, a panting messenger, his arm still raised to knock, stood beside the bemused knights.

“I’m sorry, Your Majesties,” he said as he hurried past me. “We weren’t sure if you needed to be informed, but it was so very odd, and he seemed harmless, but then we wondered if he might be telling the truth, so I ran here as fast as I—”

“Who seemed harmless?” Jacqueline asked sharply. “What happened? Spit it out.”

The messenger wilted under the weight of her glare. “The guards on the bridge fished someone out of the bay,” he managed to sputter. “Someone who wasn’t wearing any clothes.”

“That doesn’t sound especially extraordinary,” Gervase said. “Unusual, perhaps.”

“He said that he’d swum here all the way from Ecossia. Also that he was, um…” He glanced in my direction.

“My nephew.” At the messenger’s quick nod, I turned to the king and queen. “Lulach wouldn’t have come here without reason. We should see what he wants.”

Gervase was keeping his face carefully free of expression. “You’re certain this is your nephew because…?”

“He swam two hundred miles to get here. In the nude.”

“That’s normal for him?”

It was, in fact. “You’ve met my family.”

“We might as well talk to him,” Jacqueline said, already heading for the door. “The other business will have to wait until the prisoners are coherent anyway.” After a moment, she looked over her shoulder at the messenger and asked, “Did anyone find him some clothing? Please tell me they did.”

The king was only a step behind Jacqueline, and the knights on guard were swept up in their wake. After a quick word of thanks to the messenger, I followed along. Lulach was, after all, my relative, and my sisters were asleep. Someone from the family should be there. No matter how much I wanted to go straight to bed myself.

It had been over a year since I’d last seen Lulach. When the rest of us left Ecossia, his mother had made it clear that she would never, ever allow him to visit. If my nephew was defying her wishes, it wouldn’t be for a minor reason. Gruoch wasn’t someone to be crossed lightly.

However many problems I had already, it seemed likely that I was about to have one more.