Chapter 4: The Queen of Cups

On the second dawn she laid the long spread again, and the Queen of Cups came up a second time.

"Describe her," said Bastien.

He was sitting across the desk from her with his tea cooling at his elbow, and he was taking notes.

Liora had not expected that.

"A woman in a hooded cloak," she said, "holding a cup."

"Her face?"

"I never see it."

"Her hair?"

"Hidden. The hood is up. The snow is coming down."

He wrote it down in his square, careful hand.

"Half the north owns a dark cloak," he said.

"Then I'll look at all of them."

She looked at everyone that day.

She looked at the cook, the dairymaid, the baker's wife and two baronesses who had come for the Muster.

Nobody carried a lidded cup, and nobody made her skin crawl.

That evening Isaure dragged her into the Hunt Eve supper in a borrowed blue silk gown with a silver comb in her hair.

"Smile," Isaure hissed. "Hadrian likes a smiler."

The supper was in the smaller hall, and the long table glittered with candles.

Hadrian stood at its head, announcing the hunt he had planned for dawn.

"Four hundred acres of the best pine in Kaldmoor, my friends!"

At his side stood a woman Liora had not seen before.

She was tall and slender, with straight black hair to her waist and a black fur-trimmed cloak thrown over her chair.

The cloak had a hood.

She held a silver pitcher of mulled wine and was pouring it into cups, one by one, down the table.

Liora's heart stopped.

"Who is that?" she whispered.

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