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When I said we were stuck with each other, I didn’t mean just to cover our tracks during covert assignments or keep the castle hallways free of weeds. I needed to be there for her whenever she wanted to walk through the countryside, to stop her from blighting the crops and starting a famine. And she had to sleep in the same room I did; otherwise, even within the confines of a stone castle, after a few hours the encroaching mass of flowers would strangle me to death in the night. I’d be trapped and killed like a bug caught by a sundew.

I’ve got nothing against sundews. Sometimes I grow them in summer to keep the mosquito population down. But I have a very good sense of what it must be like to be one of those mosquitoes. To find out that the delicate flower you’ve alighted upon has such a longing for your company that it never, ever intends to let you leave.

I wouldn’t have much trouble persuading Yudit to join me. She’s a romantic at heart. It’s one of the best things about her, even taking the amateur love poetry into account. She’d jump at the chance to do something noble for her nephew. Although that was, of course, assuming I could persuade the king and queen first.

“We wouldn’t be leaving your service,” I told them. “It’s why we’d go.”

The queen’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“A Red Empire wizard came to kill you for money. Now we find out that the Red Empire is raising troops after twenty-five years of peace. There’s a bigger picture here. One that we can’t see yet.”

She stilled, taking that in. “You want to go as a spy?”

“It’s an opportunity we can’t afford to miss. You’ve got better knights to stand guard over you.” Sir Harriet could outrace a bolt of lightning. Sir Maxine could freeze a man to death by taking her hat off. If a horde of those undersea sheep-slug-plant monsters suddenly invaded the courtyard, the other knights would defeat them before I was able to grow so much as a tulip.

After a moment, Jacqueline nodded. A small sharp motion of her head, barely visible. “You’re right. I don’t like it, but you’re right. We need eyes there. Before another wizard comes by with murder in mind.”

“Yes.” Gervase’s hand sought hers and gripped it tightly. “Or before the Red Empire army masses on the southeastern border.”

There was a great deal that still needed to be worked out. I had to talk to Yudit. And we’d want some way to convey information back to the king and queen. I did have an idea about that, if Lulach was agreeable.

My nephew was shading his eyes and peering at the sun. In the time we’d been talking, it had inched its way a bit farther up the eastern sky. “I need tae go,” he said. “I’ve bin here tae long.”

Without another word, he turned and began retracing the trail of his own wet footsteps back to the castle gates. After a moment of surprise, the rest of us followed him one after another like a brood of baby ducks.

When I caught up to him, I gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Stall your mother for a few days. Don’t let her pack you off before Yudit and I get there. We’ll sail over as soon as we can.”

“Is it safe for you to cross the strait?” Jacqueline asked me. “We’ve had some late winter storms this year.” She eyed Lulach with curiosity. Well, she’d find out soon enough why the weather didn’t matter to him.

“It would have to be a very late storm, at this point,” I said. “I know my way around a ship. I grew up on the coast.” There wasn’t much choice, in any case. We had to talk to Gruoch. Getting our oldest sister on our side was a necessity if this was going to have any chance of working. Trying to deceive her would be a terrible idea; Gruoch has many flaws, but no one has ever accused her of being slow on the uptake. And there were dozens of ways she could screw up the whole plan, whether by accident or by design. She had too much power to ignore. Both as a duchess and as Lulach’s mother.

I wasn’t looking forward to trying to convince her. Or to seeing her at all.

“Is there any news from home?” I asked as we passed through the inner archway into the chilly dimness of the barbican. A year and a half had gone by since I’d heard anything. Ever since Gruoch had decided to shun her siblings, there’d been no messages, no letters, not a single word from Lulach or anyone else. I wondered if our old horse Sunbeam’s arthritis had gotten any better. He’d always hated being confined to a paddock.

“We’ve had a bit of dragon trouble,” Lulach said. “Nothing tae terrible. It only eats people who try tae cross the bridge. We put up a sign.”

“How’s Gruoch?” It would be good to know what frame of mind we’d find her in.

At a gesture from the king, the wide outer gates were opened. I blinked in the streaming light as Lulach stepped out onto the bridge. The wind from the bay rushed in, stirring my hair. It carried a powerful odor of salt water and rotting seaweed.

“Mither’s…pure upset, at the moment,” he said. “Some travelers stoapped by the castle a month ago—”

I didn’t need him to finish. “How much money did she lose this time?”

“Aboot half of what was left. She challenged them tae find a ring in the sea, devour a hundred oxen including the bones, and stay awake for three days straight. She tried tae cheat on the last one.”

“Sleeping potion?”

He nodded. I could have told her it wasn’t going to work. But Gruoch never learned.

Whenever strangers dropped by her castle, she would offer them a sucker bet. Most often it involved asking them to perform an impossible task or three. The reward for success was whatever they wanted, generally a fabulous fortune. The punishment for failure was inevitably death. When they beat her—because they always beat her—she’d cheat and try to kill them anyway by throwing them in a deathtrap. Which they would handily escape from and demand their winnings. It caused Gruoch endless frustration—not to mention a slow leak in her personal fortune, each lost bet emptying the treasury that much more.

She didn’t lose because she was stupid. Far from it. She’d simply had the most astonishing run of bad luck I have ever seen, her defeats coming from an unbelievable string of flukes, calamities, and coincidences. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her intended victims had astonishingly good luck. Either way, at some point her losing streak had to break, and some poor unfortunate soul would perish. I didn’t particularly wish to be nearby when that happened, in case the poor unfortunate soul ended up being me.

But until then, her misfortune might end up being to our benefit. If she was strapped for cash, that gave us some leverage. Admittedly, though, it was leverage I wouldn’t be thrilled about using.

Lulach stopped in the middle of the wide bridge that crossed from the island castle to a smaller keep on the far shore. “Thank ye again,” he said. “From the bottom of mah heart.”