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Ophele’s world was filling up with new people.

Every afternoon they marched dutifully behind her into the offices above the storehouse to take their positions behind her small desk. Sir Leonin was the very image of a guardsman, formal and intimidating, his sharp blue eyes quietly watchful. One-eyed Sir Davi—it was official now, Remin had given him his knighthood two days ago—looked lazy and a little disreputable, slouching against the wall in the corner, but every time the door opened, his head came up.

And her third sentry, stationed between the two men with sturdy legs braced in unconscious—or perhaps conscious—imitation of Sir Leonin’s perfect posture, as if the sky would fall before she deserted her post. Elodie’s unruly brown hair was well outside the control of her ribbon and her dress was much-mended, but clean. The sight sent a pang of sympathy through Ophele.

“I’m all right, my lady,” Elodie said firmly when Ophele entreated her again to sit down. “Mama said I’m s’posed to be quiet and not move ’less you say, or I can’t be your page.”

“If you get tired, you can sit on the floor,” Ophele said a little helplessly, and stood as she saw Sir Edemir directing a man to her. She had been steadily interviewing Remin’s men about the devils for a week now and it was every bit as fascinating as she had hoped, but she still chafed at the slowness. It was hard to get them away from their work even for an hour, and she knew from her discussions over the supper table that the more information she had, the better.

There were several goals she had set for herself. Her objectives, as identified by Remin, were to prepare his men for the Berlawes and protect them from the scholars of the Tower, which to Ophele meant that she must produce something as similar to one of her scholarly books as possible. Sir Justenin had confirmed it: over supper, he had suggested she analyze The Will Immanent in particular and pretend she was Mr. Aubriolot, to describe the devils as he would.

She also had to describe the devils for Master Didion, and only after that could she satisfy her own curiosity about the devils’ origins. That was the hardest part, when she was writing her initial list of questions; it was more difficult than she expected to find the questions that would elicit the information she wanted. And then she found out, after several painful interviews, that there was no way she was getting through all those questions in an hour.

Ruthlessly, she cut down the list by two-thirds, only for Sir Edemir to deflate her further by taking one man to task for exaggerating.

“Her Grace doesn’t want to hear your fish stories,” he had snapped, his gray eyes flashing. “And His Grace won’t thank you when he reads it.”

As a general rule, Ophele learned, estimates of size and numbers could safely be revised downward.

“Thank you for coming,” she said to her next appointment, fighting the surge of shyness that always accompanied a stranger. She gestured to the chair opposite hers at her small desk. “Archand Boyse?”

“Aye, m’lady,” the man replied, glancing at the guardsmen behind her and noting Elodie with a little puzzlement. “Master Selassey said as ye was wanting to ask questions about the devils?”

“Yes, if you don’t mind.” Ophele took her seat and smoothed her skirts. “There are a lot of people interested in them, and of course His Grace wants to figure out how to get rid of them. It may be that you know something that will help him do that.”

It was far easier to talk when she had a script. Ophele had refined this introduction over a dozen interviews, with generally good effect .

“Help if I can, m’lady,” said Mr. Boyse, brightening at once. “What d’ye want to know?”

“Actually, a bit about yourself first…” She scratched his name at the top of a page. Unless she took her time, her handwriting was atrocious. “When did you first come to the valley?”

“That’d be 819, m’lady. Came in with Count Embe. Took the oath to His Grace in 821. Spring, it was.”

“So, you’ve been here seven years,” she said sympathetically, not a question so much as an acknowledgement of his sacrifices.

“Aye, lady. Seen a bit.”

“When did you first hear about the devils?”

His eyes shifted as he thought back. He was a plain man with receding brownish-blond hair, built like a sturdy but rather irregular tree branch. One of his shoulders drooped much lower than the other. “Think that was the summer of 822.”

“Do you remember where you were, or who you were fighting at the time?” Ophele’s quill dipped and moved. A lot of the men had trouble with dates, sometimes unable to narrow it down to even a particular month. A soldier only knew that he was sleeping, marching, or fighting.

“Aye, I do at that. We was pushing north with His Grace’s main force, clearing out the plateau. Hot fighting, that was. No cover.”

For most of them, the story was more or less what Remin had told her: initial rumors of strange wolves or hairless bears or cannibal mercenaries. All the men seemed to accept that the devils came from the mountains, but she had yet to hear a concrete reason for that belief. It was not enough to just make note of the claim. There had to be an explanation.

If there was one thing Ophele loved, it was finding patterns.

“And what about the next year?” she asked, her quill working messily away. Ink drops spattered the page.

“Still heading north, my lady,” he said. “War slowed down that year, as I recall. T’was April before we heard about devils again. We thought they was gone for good, ye see, hadn’t seen hide nor hair of them since October. His Grace started making fortified camps then, taking down and putting up palisades every bleeding day, but it did keep the devils off us.”

“On the north end of the Talfel Plateau,” she repeated, scribbling. The timelines were the most tedious part of the interview, but she was determined to do her best. And while the basic information about each type of devil—appearance, size, and behavior—was more or less the same from man to man, there was still a surprising amount of detail to be gleaned from the stories of their encounters.

“Wouldn’t say the devils are smart exactly,” Mr. Boyse said thoughtfully. “Stranglers are probably closest to clever. That was the first one we saw in ’24, it got a friend of mine. Where we were, there was a palisade, with only a couple gaps in the torchlight…”

His fingers rapidly sketched out the positions of the wall and the torches on the desktop, jabbing a finger to indicate where he and his friend had been standing.

“We was there halfway to morning, just watching our bit of wall, and a bit nervous about it, too. We heard there was devils at the other camps nearby. Normally it’s wolves and ghouls that come first, racketing around and squabbling with each other. And it was dark that night, new moon, uncanny-like. We was back up and down all night, feeding the braziers, knowing all it takes is a space of dark. Not even a minute,” he said, his voice filled with old grief and anger. “One of my lights went out, then Sebb’s at the other end, and I took my eyes off him once . And that was all it took. Strangler must’ve crawled up under the palisade early and then just hung there, waiting for the brazier to go out. Last I saw of Sebb, the strangler was dragging him off through the snow.”

“How awful,” Ophele said, in reflexive sympathy. But then… “Snow? Where were you?”

“Round about Raida, I think, lady. Pushed into the mountains that year, didn’t we? And got an early start, too, the ground was still freezing most nights…”

New moon.

Snow.

Pushed into the mountains.

Ophele’s quill halted, his voice fading into a faraway buzz.

How many times had she already written some variation of those words? Capturing a chronological record of the war, a geographic record of Remin’s campaign through the valley, noting the earliest and latest sightings of the devils without understanding what that information implied. She barely noticed when Mr. Boyse took his leave; suddenly she was riffling frantically through her pages, seeking out the crucial details in her slapdash scrawl, visualizing them as clearly as the little lead figures Remin and his men sometimes used to demonstrate the movements of their army.

And then her eyes lifted to the map hanging on the wall behind Sir Edemir, and her lips parted with a silent gasp.

Was it possible?

Could she find the devils this way?

Oh, but she would have to be so sure! Rapidly, she counted the references in her interviews, dates, battles, locations. How many men could she interview? How certain could she be of the dates they provided? The moon, the moon, yes, that would help: full moon, new moon, at least it would give her a range, if she could consult an almanac—

Pushing back her chair with a screech, she rose to ask Sir Edemir at once, and then spotted Elodie beside her. The girl’s eyes were popping out of her head with excitement.

“Oh. Oh, no, I hope that didn’t frighten you,” Ophele said, catching the girl’s hands anxiously. She was appalled with herself. “Were you? Oh, bother, you shouldn’t have heard that, I wasn’t even thinking—”

“All about the devils!” Elodie crowed, shaking Ophele’s hands in excitement. “I heard ’em at night and papa always says they’re nothing to be scared of but mama says it’s because the valley’s still Cursed with magic.” Her tone implied the capital letter. “She always makes me and Pirot go to bed when Uncle Auber starts telling about them, oooh, wait ’til I tell Pirot, he’ll die! I bet—”

“No, don’t tell him!” Ophele interrupted frantically. “And don’t tell—oh, I suppose we must tell your mother.”

This was not because Ophele thought it was the right thing to do. If Sir Leonin and Sir Davi hadn’t been standing right there, she would have sworn a blood oath with Elodie to take the secret to their graves.

“Why?” Elodie wanted to know.

“What if you have nightmares?”

The girl made a dismissive noise.

“Only babies are afraid of things like that,” she said scornfully. “Uncle Auber says we have the best knights anywhere and nothing will ever get us and besides, the devils will be gone soon ’cause His Grace is going to go kill ’em all, isn’t he?”

Ophele would have liked it if the nine year-old was a little bit afraid .

“We-ell, we still have to go tell your mother,” she said, quailing at the thought of facing one of Sir Auber’s formidable sisters-in-law.

Retreating, she burrowed back into her notes. She wished she could speak to more of the men who had fought in the mountain campaigns, but they seemed to be particularly difficult to locate. But then, that was where half of Remin’s friends had died, she remembered. She had heard their names a few times when Remin and his knights had been drinking. Victorin, who had found the apple orchard, and Clement, and…Bon, that was his name.

But there was a man who had been there right beside her.

“Sir Leonin,” she said, turning in her chair. “You were with His Grace’s mountain army, weren’t you?”

“Yes, my lady,” he said politely.

Ophele eyed Elodie, who was breathless with anticipation.

“Would you mind if I asked you a little bit about it?” The words emerged slowly and weightily, as if her tongue might run away with her if she slackened the reins just a little bit. Surely it would do no harm to get his timeline. Sir Leonin’s eyes flicked pointedly to the little girl, but in the end he acquiesced.

The devils did come early to the mountains. Sir Leonin was very careful in his description of the hordes of devils that descended on the mountain passes every April, and so expert in his circumlocution that Ophele had to pause a few times just to appreciate it, as an apprentice might admire a master.

“Was it a particularly hot summer the second year?” she asked, her brows puckered together as she scribbled away. Both Sir Leonin and two other men had noted that the second summer was worse than the first, at least in the mountains.

“It would be difficult to say for sure,” Sir Leonin said, though there was a shading of interest in his polite mask. “It would be a very subjective thing.”

That was true. In Noreven they measured the cruelty of their summers by the water, or lack thereof, and she had read about a device in Navatsvi that measured the heat of water, but there was no way she could think of to find out how hot the summer had been two years ago. Ophele chewed her lip .

“Everyone keeps saying this is the hottest summer they’ve ever seen in the valley,” she mused. “I just wonder if there’s a way to prove it, or if it has anything to do with when the…with the times they arrive and depart,” she said, skirting the more exciting words. Elodie was wilting with boredom. “It might not mean anything at all…”

Or it might be the key to discovering where the devils came from.

Ophele bound up her papers to take home, her heart racing all over again. Remin and his men were already batting ideas about over supper, wondering when and how they might best follow the devils, without risking having the horde turn around and devour them. Oh, just imagine if she could produce the answer herself! Ophele’s mind spun delicious fantasies of telling them over supper, and how astonished they would all be, and the look of pride in Remin’s eyes…

Perhaps then he would not care that there were so many things she did not know, and could not do, or how very many things frightened her…

Like confronting Elodie’s mother.

With the dread prospect before her, Ophele’s feet dragged up the long road to the cottages by the north gate, miserably aware of Sir Leonin and Sir Davi at her back. Elodie marched ahead of her with the oilskin satchel in her arms, delighted to fulfill her destiny as a pagegirl at last.

“Your Grace?” Mistress Conbour appeared in the doorway at Elodie’s gleeful summons, a sturdy, practical-looking woman with light brown hair pulled into a tidy knot at the back of her head. She dropped a curtsy. “Elodie said you wished to speak with me? I hope she wasn’t any trouble…”

“No, no, no, not at all,” Ophele said, her hands nervously waving the idea away. The words were coming out too fast, breathless and high-pitched. “No, I beg your pardon, she was with me in the storehouse today and I’m afraid she overheard my talk with His Grace’s men. About the devils. I didn’t think. But she didn’t seem troubled, but I thought I should tell you, it’s not a subject for a child. I do beg your pardon, I should have realized…”

“No…no,” Mistress Conbour—her name was either Lisset or Amise, but Ophele had no idea which—looked at her hard. “If you don’t mind, Your Grace, what exactly did she overhear?”

She was not trying to be cruel. But the explanation was nonetheless excruciating for Ophele, especially once she began blushing. The heat blazed in her cheeks and then flushed up to her ears, a prickling heat that descended her neck and made it impossible to meet the other woman’s eyes. With every breathless spate of words, the jeers in the back of her mind grew louder, all of them in Lady Hurrell’s scornful voice. Speak up, little mouse.

“I really am terribly sorry,” Ophele concluded, scarlet and forcing back tears with an effort of sheer will. She would not embarrass Remin by bursting into tears in front of his commonfolk. “If you don’t want Elodie to come again, I understand.”

There was a squeal of protest from the depths of the cottage, instantly quelled by a hard glance from Mistress Conbour.

“I don’t think it’s so bad as that, Your Grace,” she said awkwardly, turning her attention back to Ophele. “I’d rather she didn’t hear more such tales, but seems to me it would do her good to learn a bit from a proper lady. It’s very good of you to look after her. Please don’t trouble yourself, my lady.”

Ophele had to bite her tongue savagely to keep from confessing that she was no sort of lady at all.

“Thank you,” she said, forcing a smile. “I will do my best. Please excuse me, good evening.”

Mercifully, neither of her guards spoke to her on the way to the stables, where she fed Eugene carrots and took her time currying his soft gray coat, giving herself time to compose herself. It wasn’t so bad. Elodie’s mother hadn’t even been angry.

But that wasn’t the trouble. The trouble was the Duchess of Andelin was an ignorant little mouse and no sort of lady and Ophele buried her face in the little donkey’s neck, grateful that she had learned to weep in silence. In her mind was the upright, cruel example of Lady Hurrell, far eclipsing the gentle ghost of her mother, each a role model and a tormenter in their own way.

A poisoned sweet. How many times had Remin and his men said that? Among themselves, they spoke about it openly, and it was a perverse compliment that they were comfortable enough to say it in front of her. Outwardly, she nodded her agreement whenever they talked about the latest dose of the Emperor’s poison, all while cringing inside. She was one of the Emperor’s backhanded gifts. They just didn’t know it.

Eugene blew softly, rubbing her with a bristly cheek .

“Are you well, wife?” Remin asked when he came home that evening to find her buried among her papers.

“I’m a little tired,” she said, lifting her chin for a kiss as he knelt down beside her. This was not a lie.

His fingers sank into her hair and his thumb stroked her cheek, a rough caress that made her hastily lower her gaze. Her eyes looked all right in the mirror, she had checked, but Remin was getting very good at reading her face.

“Are you sure?”

“I missed you.” His arms went around her and even wet from the rain he was so warm, she closed her eyes and burrowed into him. She had made mistakes today. But they weren’t so bad that anyone was likely to mention them to Remin. If only the books would come soon, she knew she could learn, if she just had a chance. And in the meantime…

Again, she looked at her papers with a thrill of fear and hope.

Tomorrow, she would try harder.

* * *