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She didn’t seem much appeased by that. “Here’s a funny thing, though,” she said. “In the version of the story I heard, ye were found oot immediately. Yer disguise would hae failed if the effort tae expose ye hadnae bin so idiotic.”

That was, unfortunately, true. I shifted uncomfortably under her gaze.

“There were some hitches in the plan, yes,” Yudit muttered, “but they were hardly our fault. An evil sorceress recognized Jacqueline and ratted her out to a magical talking lion.”

“Look,” I said. “I know it could have repercussions for you if we’re discovered, but surely it’s better than putting Lulach at risk.”

“Which brings me tae mah second point.” She stood and put her hands on the table, leaning forward. “Lulach haes a way of reporting back tae me. Ye dinnae.”

Well, that cleared up some things I’d been wondering about. Gruoch had never harbored any illusions about her son’s complete lack of fighting prowess. “You want him to spy for you,” I said.

“What?” Lulach sounded shocked. Apparently, she hadn’t bothered to share this part of her plan with him yet.

“Of course I do!” she snapped. “I could hae sent anyone at all and said, ‘Here, this is mah darling boy.’ But they couldnae dae what he can, and we need to find oot what the Red Empire is playing at. Dae they want hostages? Troops? Are they planning another war? Why now, when the emperor is an auld man? He can hardly expect tae see it through tae the end.” She looked me in the eye and showed me a smile that bared most of her teeth. “I’m sure the king and queen of Tailliz are just as curious. Or dae ye want tae claim ye’r here solely for Lulach’s benefit?”

She’d figured that out quickly. It didn’t seem wise to deny it. I wasn’t about to concede the whole game just because she’d scored a point, though. “The king and queen are interested as well, yes. And while we’re spying for them, we could provide the same service for you. Better than Lulach would.” Her plan was remarkably similar to the one I’d concocted, after all; only one small adjustment was needed. It was disturbing to realize how similar her thoughts had been to mine. “He can swim faster than any ship, sure. It won’t be fast enough. He can’t tell the Red Empire army he has to take a few days off. But if he only had to act as a messenger, ferrying information back and forth…” I stopped there, letting the implications settle in.

Lulach frowned. “Wait now, haud yer horses. I’d be traveling all the time? I dinnae like that.” He seemed determined to undercut his own cause. “That would interfere with mah ongoing studies of—”

“Hush,” Gruoch told him. I could practically see the wheels turning in her mind. “I’d thought of that wee difficulty, naturally. He’d fake some chronic malady.”

“There’s still a good chance he’d get caught, and you know it,” Yudit said. “If you could really send anyone else, then you would. But you can’t. You have to send someone you trust.”

“And I can trust ye two?” The scowl on her face wouldn’t have been any sourer if it had been poured out of a vinegar bottle.

There was the crux of the matter. The real reason she wasn’t interested in listening to us—far more so than any doubts she might have had about our ability to pass ourselves off as men. She knew that none of her siblings left Ecossia against their will. If we had, then at some point in the year and a half since, we’d have come back.

We’d run away from her. She hadn’t forgiven us for it.

I doubted it would do any good to appeal to her sisterly feelings. In all likelihood, that bridge hadn’t been burned so much as shattered by a meteor and thrown into a watery gorge where the pieces were devoured by a kraken. Though that didn’t mean there was nothing we had left in common.

“Listen,” I said. “You’re angry with us. We know that. You think we’re ungrateful. But you want to protect Ecossia, and so do we. You don’t want Lulach to come to harm, and we don’t, either. Don’t punish him just so you can punish us.”

She considered that, tapping her foot as she thought it through. I wasn’t sure what else I could try if it didn’t work. If stymieing us was more important to her than saving her son, then there really was no one and nothing she cared for as much as herself.

“Come with me,” she said abruptly. “Not ye, Lulach. Ye’ll bade here till I send for ye. Ye’ve done quite enough already.” She was around the desk and out the door before we had a chance to reply.

Yudit and I exchanged a worried glance.

“She can’t be taking us to a deathtrap yet,” Yudit whispered. “We haven’t even been given an impossible task.”

It wouldn’t fit her usual pattern, that was true. On the other hand, we weren’t her usual prey.

“Be careful, both of ye,” Lulach said.

I smiled with far more confidence than I felt. “We’re her best chance to keep you out of danger. We’ll be fine.”

By the time Yudit and I left the study, Gruoch was already halfway down the corridor. We hurried after her. She wasn’t waiting for us to catch up.

We followed her down a narrow, winding stairway. I stepped carefully; in the dim light, there was a serious danger that I would trip and break my neck. That would have been an embarrassing way to die in a castle full of elaborate murder rooms. I tried to remember what dangers waited for us in the lower levels; when we were children under her care, she’d kept most of the basement off-limits, so I didn’t know it as well as the front halls. Was that where the Raging Half-Bear Half-Snake Broom Closet was? Or the Exploding Pillow Guest Bedroom (with Poison Towels in the En Suite Bath)? There had to have been some new deadly traps put in during our absence. She liked to add a few every once in a while. It was her version of redecorating.

I’ve mentioned my oldest sister’s run of bad luck. To be more specific, the reason she’s never successfully killed anyone, not even once, is that every last one of her intended victims has ended up having some special ability, knowledge, or skill that allowed them to escape from the precise danger she put them in. When she dropped one visitor into a deep oubliette with glass-smooth walls, he drooled out an endless stream of saliva and floated to the top. When she lured another into a nest of arsenic-coated assassin gerbils, it turned out that arsenic-coated assassin gerbils had raised him and he spoke their language fluently. He emerged not only unscathed, but with a written invitation from the gerbils to come back and godparent the next arsenic-coated assassin litter.

Yudit and I couldn’t rely on such an easy victory. Gruoch was intimately familiar with our powers. She’d know full well not to throw us into a situation that could be escaped by means of blossoming flowers or vomited toads. We were, in fact, more vulnerable to her treachery than anyone else.

“I hae three conditions for ye, afore I agree,” Gruoch said as we reached the landing and passed through an archway into a cavern-like passage.

I didn’t allow myself to relax, not yet. Not without knowing what her conditions were.