THE FRAME

The dispatch from the Frost Coast arrived on the fourth morning after the Council vote, and it was so perfectly timed, so beautifully phrased, and so thoroughly unlike anything that had ever come out of the north, that Soren read it three times before he understood that it was a trap.

Border emergency, the Chancellor had written, in his tidy, sloping hand, on the Imperial letterhead. Reports of unrest among the fishing villages at Wexmouth, with some talk of a refusal to pay the salt tax. The Garrison Commander requests the personal presence of the Duke of Vandermere, in view of his title and his well-known influence in the northern provinces. I regret the inconvenience, so close to the ceremony. But I know that Your Grace would not wish a matter of this gravity to be settled by letter.

He sat at his desk with the paper in his gloved hand and the winter dawn slowly graying the window. He had been up since four. He had not slept properly in a week, and his eyes burned, and the cold tea at his elbow had grown a film as thick as wax. He turned the paper over and looked at the seal on the back, which was perfect. He looked at the signature, which was perfect. He looked at the logic of it, which was impeccable, and he felt the old cold clarity settle over him like a frost.

He wants me out of the house, he thought. He wants me out of the house for as long as it takes.

He did not know what for. That was the horror of it. He had spent ten years learning to anticipate the Chancellor's moves, and he could not see the one that was coming. But he knew the shape of the thing, as a sailor knows an approaching storm by the pressure in his ears. And he knew that if he refused to go, the Council would say that the Heir had neglected the realm to chase a servant, and the old man would have exactly the excuse he wanted.

"Pike," he said, when the door opened.

Dorian came in, shaking snow from his hat. His expression was unusually grave.

"You have seen it," said Soren.

"I have heard about it, and I have an opinion, which I will keep to myself unless asked." Dorian crossed the room and dropped into the chair by the fire. "I think you ought to send a note saying that you have a cold."

"They would send a physician to certify it, and the physician would certify that I was well." Soren rose and went to the window. The courtyard below was white with a night's snowfall, and a groom was leading a pair of black horses across it. "I must go. I have no choice. But I will not go easy, and I will not go blind. I want you to stay here, Dorian. I want you at the door of my sister's room, day and night, and I want you to go nowhere else, whatever order reaches you and whatever seal is on it."

"I understand completely," said Dorian.

"Do not leave Lila's side." He turned, and met his friend's eyes. "Not for the Council. Not for the Emperor. Not for me."

"Not even if you send for me yourself?"

"Especially then," said Soren.

…

The order came at noon, an hour before his train.

He was in the hall, drawing on his gloves, when a footman in the Imperial livery appeared with a sealed packet on a silver tray. It was addressed to Captain Dorian Pike, and the wax on the back was stamped with the sunburst of the Emperor. Dorian opened it where he stood, and as he read it, Soren saw his friend's easy face go slowly blank.

"What is it?" said Soren.

"It's an order." Dorian turned the sheet so that he could see. "By the hand and seal of His Imperial Majesty. The Captain of the Duke's Household Guard is to accompany His Grace to Wexmouth in the capacity of escort, there being reason to fear for his safety, and is to remain with him until the matter is concluded. The guard on the Princess's person is to be assumed by the Palace Watch." He lifted his eyes. "It's the Emperor's seal, Your Grace. It's his hand. I have signed for his orders for nine years, and I would swear it was genuine."

"He cannot lift a pen," said Soren. "He has not signed a paper since the spring."

"I am well aware of that."

"Then someone has signed it for him."

"I know that too." Dorian's jaw was tight. "But if I refuse it, I am in contempt of the Emperor's authority, and I am dismissed from the Guard on the spot. And then the Palace Watch takes the Princess anyway, and I am not even in the building to see it." He folded the order with a snap. "So I do the only thing I can, which is to go, and keep my eyes open, and come back as fast as I can ride."

Soren stood very still. The great hall was cold and echoing, and the black and white tiles shone like a chessboard, and somewhere above his head Lila was sitting in the schoolroom learning the names of the rivers of the Prairie. He thought of leaving a note for Tamsin. He thought of going up the stair, of finding her, of saying it. He had told himself that they must be strangers in public, and the hall was full of eyes.

He got into the carriage.

…

It was a bitter, endless journey, and it ended in a joke.

The garrison at Wexmouth was a gray stone fort on a cliff above a gray sea, and the Commander, a stout, red-nosed old soldier named Hargreave, met them at the gate with a face that wore an expression of polite bewilderment. There was no unrest among the fishing villages. There was no talk of refusing the salt tax. The Commander had not requested the personal presence of the Duke of Vandermere, and was gratified and flustered by the honor, but could not for the life of him say what had occasioned it.

"A hoax, Your Grace," he said, gazing at the Chancellor's letter. "Or a mistake, perhaps, in the clerks' office. I do hope you haven't come all this way for nothing."

"I have come exactly the distance that was intended," said Soren.

He stood in the Commander's cold parlor with the sea roaring on the rocks outside the window, and the sensation that went through him was almost one of relief. It was over. The suspicion was a certainty. He turned to Dorian, who stood by the door with his hat in his hand and his face the color of ashes, and saw that his friend had reached the same conclusion.

"We take the evening train," Soren said, "and we leave tonight."

"There is no evening train, Your Grace," said the Commander helplessly. "The line is down at Wexford with a snowdrift, and it will be tomorrow noon before it opens. I could put you up at the fort. We have a very tolerable bedroom."

The telegram arrived at ten that night.

It was brought by a trooper who had ridden four miles through the snow, half frozen, with the yellow paper clutched in his mitten. Soren read it by the light of a smoking lamp in the Commander's hall. It had been sent from Vandermere Hall, in the Palace Watch code, and it was signed by Dr. Pell.

HER HIGHNESS GRAVELY ILL. CONVULSIONS AND FAILURE OF THE HEART. FEAR THE WORST. COME AT ONCE.

He did not remember crossing the hall. He remembered the cold slap of the night wind, and the stable boy's frightened face, and the saddle creaking under him as he swung up onto the Commander's best horse. Behind him he heard Dorian shouting, and the clatter of hooves as the captain mounted in pursuit. They rode out through the gate and down the cliff road in a blinding flurry of snow, and the wind tore at his coat and drove the ice into his eyes, and he leaned low over the horse's neck and thought of nothing at all except the sound of a small voice saying someone to not mind.

…

They rode for eleven hours.

It was the worst night of his life. The snow came down in sheets, and the road was a white blur between black hedges, and twice the horses foundered and had to be changed at roadside inns. His hands were frozen to the reins. His face was numb. Frost formed on his sleeves, and he noticed distantly that it was not the weather. It was growing from his own skin, from the backs of his hands and the tips of his fingers, glittering rime that spread up his wrists and across the leather of his gloves. His power was answering his panic. He had not known that it could. He pressed his fists against his saddle and forced himself to breathe, and the frost shrank slowly back into his flesh.

She will be alive, he told himself. She will be alive when I get there. Pell is a liar and a coward and he has exaggerated. She is eleven years old. She is strong.

Tamsin will be with her. Tamsin will have saved her.

It was the thought that kept him in the saddle, and it was the thought that he clung to until the white towers of Vandermere rose out of the gray dawn, and the gates swung open before him, and he drove his horse across the courtyard at a dead gallop and flung himself to the ground.

…

The great hall was full of soldiers.

He saw it from the doorway, with the snow still melting on his shoulders, and the sight stopped him dead. They stood along both walls in rows, in the blue-gray uniform of the Imperial Guard, with their rifles grounded and their faces blank. There were at least forty of them. The chandeliers were lit, though it was barely dawn, and their cold glare fell on the black and white floor, and on the long semicircle of figures standing in the middle of it.

He knew them all. The Quorum of the Council, eleven lords in black, stood in a stiff arc with their hands folded. In front of them, plump and pink and perfectly composed, stood Dr. Mortimer Pell with a black bag at his feet. And at the center, in a chair that had been set out for him on the dais where the Emperor held his audiences, sat Chancellor Harlan Sterling, with a white rose in his lapel and a document on his knee.

"Your Grace," said the Chancellor, rising. "You are come in good time. We have been waiting."

"Where is my sister?" said Soren. His voice was a croak.

"Her Highness is upstairs, in her bed, under the care of three physicians. She is in no immediate danger, thank God, though it was a near thing." Sterling spread his hands. "The attack occurred yesterday evening, just after dark. Dr. Pell, if you would be so good."

The doctor stepped forward. He cleared his throat. He did not look at Soren.

"Your Grace, I regret to inform you that Her Highness the Princess was poisoned." His voice was thin and quavering, but it carried through the hall like a bell. "The symptoms were consistent with an overdose of concentrated Bloodroot essence, administered by mouth over a period of weeks. A bottle of the preparation was discovered this morning in the private chamber of the Princess's tutor, a registered Blightborn, in the bottom of a locked trunk, together with a quantity of dried herbs and a book of formulae in her own hand." He took a handkerchief from his sleeve and dabbed at his upper lip. "I have the bottle here."

He held it up. It was a small green vial with a cork stopper, half full of a dark viscous liquid that shimmered faintly blue in the chandelier light.

Soren looked at it. He felt nothing at all. The hall seemed to have gone far away, and the figures in it had become flat and small and distant, like painted men on a stage.

"Bring in the prisoner," said Sterling.

…

They brought her through the double doors at the end of the hall.

Two guardsmen walked on either side of her. They held her by the arms, though there was no need, since her wrists were bound in front of her with heavy iron manacles that clinked as she walked. She was in her nightgown, with a gray shawl thrown over it, and her bare feet left damp prints on the tiles. Her red-brown hair hung loose and tangled about her shoulders. Someone had torn the ash-ribbon from her arm, and a strip of gray cloth lay trampled on the floor at the end of the hall, and there was a long red scratch on her forearm where the cloth had been ripped away.

She walked with her head up.

That was what he saw, and what he would remember when he had forgotten every other detail of that morning. She walked down the whole length of the great hall, past forty soldiers and eleven lords, with the manacles on her wrists and the scar bare at her throat, and she did not stumble and she did not look down. Her face was white. She had been crying, and the tracks of it showed on her cheeks, but her eyes were clear and enormous and steady. She did not beg. She did not plead. She looked at him across the width of the hall, and in her gray-blue gaze there was no accusation, no fear, nothing at all except a quiet, measuring, desperate trust, as if she were waiting for him to show her what he intended to do.

Tamsin, he thought, and the frost began to prick along his knuckles.

"Miss Tamsin Reed," said the Chancellor, in his gentle, regretful voice. "You are charged under the Quarantine Acts with the administration of Blighted preparations to a minor of the Gilded line, with intent to cause grievous harm. The penalty is Committal. Have you anything to say?"

"I have said it already," said Tamsin. Her voice was hoarse but quite clear. "I did not poison the Princess. The bottle was placed in my trunk. If you will permit me to examine it, I can show you in five minutes that the preparation is not what it purports to be."

"I am sure you can." Sterling smiled kindly. "It is the Quorum's view that the matter has been sufficiently investigated."

…

"The Quorum," said the Chancellor, turning, "has come to a decision, which it now asks Your Grace to ratify."

He gestured, and a clerk stepped forward with a sheet of heavy parchment and a gold pen on a velvet cushion. The document was long and closely written, and across the top, in letters an inch high, ran the words WARRANT OF DETENTION. At the bottom was a blank space for a signature.

"The Quorum requires the Heir's signature on the warrant," the Chancellor said, "since the offense was committed within an Imperial residence and against a member of the Imperial family. It is a formality. But it is a necessary one." He paused, and his pale eyes held Soren's without blinking. "I should add, in fairness, that the Council has also considered the question of the Princess's guardianship. In the light of the Duke's recent conduct, his absences from the Hall, his visits to the Wards, his indulgence of a person now accused of attempted murder, there is some feeling that the Heir's judgment may have been impaired. If he declines to sign, the Quorum will have no choice but to transfer the care of the Princess to a more suitable guardian."

"Who has offered to take her?" said Soren.

"The Lady Delphine has kindly offered."

He turned his head. Delphine stood a little behind her father, in a gown of dove-gray silk, with her hands folded and her eyes cast down. A single tear, exquisitely timed, rolled down her cheek. But beneath it, in the corner of her mouth, he saw a very small, very bright curve, quickly smoothed away.

The clerk held out the pen.

Soren took it.

It was cold and heavy, and he felt the weight of it settle into his palm as though the metal were alive. Around him the hall was perfectly silent. Forty soldiers stood motionless. Eleven lords held their breath. At the far end of the long floor, a girl in chains looked at him with eyes that said, as clearly as any words, Do what you must. I know what it costs.

He bent over the warrant. He set the nib to the paper, above the line. The ink gleamed.

The frost had spread to his wrist. It crept up the gold of the pen and furred the velvet of the cushion with silver, and a fine spiderweb of ice shot out across the parchment and froze the ink in the nib. He heard a sound behind him like a collective sigh. He looked up at the Chancellor, and at the pale, patient, satisfied eyes, and at the white rose in his lapel.

Very slowly, he laid the pen on the table.

He did not sign. He set it down with great care, in the center of the warrant, and straightened, and clasped his hands behind his back.

A rustle ran through the Quorum. The Chancellor's smile did not alter by so much as a hair.

"I see," said Harlan Sterling softly. "Then the girl goes to Frostgaol under my seal."