Page 90 of The Priory of the Orange Tree

Days after he had last heard from her, she had told him to meet her again in a darkened solar. Now they were in a warren of tunnels behind the walls, where a clever system of copper pipes conducted water from the hot springs to the bedchambers.

At the end of the passage was a spiraling stair. The Donmata began to ascend.

“Where are you taking me?” Loth said stiffly.

“We are going to meet the one who plotted the murder of Queen Rosarian.”

His hand grew clammy on the torch.

“I am sorry, incidentally,” she said, “for making you dance with Priessa. It was the only way to get you the message.”

“Could she not have given it to me in the coach?” he muttered.

“No. She was searched before she left the palace, and the coach driver was a spy, there to ensure she could not flee. No one is permitted to leave Cárscaro for long.”

The Donmata detached a key from her girdle. When Loth followed her through the door she unlocked, he coughed on the dust in the chamber beyond, where the only light stemmed from his torch. The furniture stank of sickness and decay, with a mordant edge of vinegar.

The Donmata lifted her veil and draped it over a chair. Loth followed her toward a four-poster bed, hardly breathing for fear, and held up his torch.

A blindfolded figure sat in the bed. Loth made out waxen skin, charcoal lips, and chestnut hair that straggled to the collar of a crimson bedgown. Chains bound two emaciated arms. Red lines branched down them, following the tracery of his veins.

“What is this?” Loth murmured. “This is the killer?”

The Donmata folded her arms. Her jaw was a steady line, her eyes bereft of emotion.

“Lord Arteloth,” she said, “I present to you my lord father, Sigoso the Third of the House of Vetalda, Flesh King of the Draconic Kingdom of Yscalin. Or what is left of him.”

Loth looked back at the man in disbelief.

Even before the betrayal of Yscalin, he had not seen King Sigoso, but in his portraits, he had always looked hale and handsome, if cold, with the amber eyes of the Vetalda. Sabran had invited him to court several times, but he had always preferred to send representatives.

“A flesh king rules as the puppet of a wyrm. A title Fýredel hopes to bestow on every ruler in the world.” The Donmata walked around the bed. “Father has a rare form of the Draconic plague. It allows Fýredel to . . . commune with him, somehow. To see and hear into the palace.”

“You mean at this very moment—”

“Peace. I put a sedative in his evening drink,” she said. “I cannot do it often, or Fýredel becomes suspicious, but it keeps the wyrm from using him. For a short while.”

At the sound of her voice, Sigoso stirred.

“I had no idea wyrms could do such a thing.” Loth swallowed. “Control a body.”

“When High Westerns die, the fire goes out in the wyverns who serve them, and in the progeny those wyverns sired. Perhaps this is a similar kind of connection.”

“How long has he been like this?”

“Two years.”

He had fallen ill when Yscalin had betrayed Virtudom. “How did hebecomethis?”

“First you must hear the truth,” the Donmata said. “My father remembers enough to tell you.”

“Marosa,” Sigoso croaked. “Marossssa.”

Loth flinched at his voice. It was as if a knot of rattlesnakes were nesting in his throat.

“Where are you, daughter?” the king asked very softly. “Must I come and find you?”

Expressionless, the Donmata turned to him and set about removing the blindfold. Though she wore velvet gloves that covered her to the elbow, Loth could not breathe while she was so close to her father, fearing Sigoso might bite through the velvet or make a grab for her face. When the blindfold came away, Sigoso bared his teeth. His eyes were no longer topaz, but gray all the way through. Hollows of cold ash.

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