“Even at bedtime they quarrel?” Alisande stared.
“Of course,” Matt said. “Why waste a perfectly good chance for a fight?”
But as they said it, a Bretanglian sergeant came panting around the corner with half a dozen troopers following. Ignoring his fellow soldiers who guarded their monarchs’ portal, he pounded his fist on the door. The arguing inside cut off abruptly.
“Oh, no!” Alisande moaned.
“Maybe it’s better if we aren’t the ones to tell them the news, anyway,” Matt consoled her.
The door opened and the sergeant hurried in.
“One.” Matt counted seconds, holding up fingers. “Two… three… four…”
A scream tore through the door and wrenched at their heartstrings, but the roar that followed it should have shattered the panel. The sergeant stumbled out backward, pressing one hand to his cheek and the other to his forehead, then fell unconscious. Petronille stepped over his body and turned toward Alisande. She saw her hostess and screamed again, running toward her, hands hooked into claws. “You have slain him! Your vile people have slain him!”
“Traitors! Poltroons!” Drustan roared, only one step behind her. “Have you no guards, have you no Watch? How could you let your scum slay a true prince?”
“Your Majesties, I am most deeply sorry,” Alisande said, face pale. “I share your grief.”
“Be sure that you shall!” Drustan bellowed. “Be sure that you shall share it at spear’s point!”
Every Merovencian soldier in the hallway slanted his pike or halberd to guard position. The Bretanglians saw and readied their own weapons.
“Nothing can console you for such a loss,” Matt said quickly, “but I shall find the murderer and haul him before you for your vengeance!”
“We have the murderer,” one of the Bretanglian soldiers snapped. “It’s the pimp who—”
Petronille spun to face him, eyes wide and wild.
“—who fought him trying to ravish the maiden,” the soldier ad-libbed quickly. “We have both him and one of his doxies in custody, Majesty!”
“I shall see him drawn and quartered!” Drustan thundered, glaring at Alisande.
“That is the punishment for treachery or the slaying of a prince,” she agreed, wooden-faced.
“The surgeons must save him first,” the Bretanglian soldier said in his heavy accent “Your son gave the man quite a drubbing, Majesty, and slit his weasand for him.”
Something about the way the man said it set Mart’s built-in lie detector shrilling.
“Call out all your surgeons!” Petronille commanded. “We must preserve the louse for royal vengeance!”
“Indeed we must,” Alisande returned. “Death in combat is far too gentle an ending for a prince-killer.”
“Did he act alone?” Matt asked.
He said it softly, but the whole hallway fell silent. Then Petronille asked in a strangled tone, “What do you mean?”
“Only that,” Matt told her. “Princes are trained in fighting; alley urchins only learn it by winning often enough to stay alive. I don’t think a street fighter could have killed a skilled swordsman without help.”
“The prince had no sword,” the Bretanglian soldier said instantly, “only a dagger. He was disguised as a peasant.”
Again Matt’s alarm rang, but this time because he was guessing right. He ignored the question of why the prince had dressed down for his evening’s recreation and said, “With or without a sword, he should have been more than the equal of a gutter rat. Who came at his back?”
The hall was silent, the Bretanglian soldiers staring at one another.
Finally Drustan smelled a running rodent, too. He turned on his guardsmen, demanding, “Well?”
“There was the man who went out the window,” one of; them said hesitantly.
“And you did not pursue him? Fool!” Drustan backhanded the man across the chops so hard that he fell back into his mates. “No one will find him now! The trail is cold!”
“Cold or hot, I’ll find him,” Matt assured the king. “If you don’t have one murderer to chop up, you’ll have the other.”
“Then you shall accompany him!” Drustan jabbed a finger at Sir Orizhan. “You, disgraced knight who failed in your charge!” He kicked the fallen sergeant. “Wake this one and send him, too.”
The assignment spoke of a lack of trust, but under the circumstances, Matt could understand it. He stepped around the king to the Bretanglian guardsmen. “Tell me about this man who went out the window.”
They eyed him warily, and one said, “How could you catch him when the trail is more than an hour cold?”
“I’m the Lord Wizard, remember?”
“Tell him!” Drustan shouted.
They told.
CHAPTER 3
If anyone happened to be awake and noticing Matt through their windows that midnight, they must have shuddered and pulled the drapes shut, muttering a quick charm. Dressed in a dark brown leather jerkin and black hose, Matt looked pretty grim. Sir Orizhan wore similar clothing, and Sergeant Brock’s indigo livery was just as gloomy. It didn’t help their image that they were nosing around under the tavern’s window.
“What do you think to find, milord?” Sergeant Brock asked, but there was no respect in his tone.
“I was hoping for soft ground and a footprint,” Matt told him.
The sergeant gave a mirthless laugh. “In a back alley in the roughest section of your town?”
“He is correct, I fear,” Sir Orizhan said. “You will find only hard-packed earth with a light coating of garbage.”
“Gotta remember to tell the queen about a public health program …” Then Matt grinned “Whattaya know! Cheese rinds and horse dung work just as well as the soft dirt in a garden bed.” He pointed.
The other men stared down at the footprint in the garbage.
Sergeant Brock frowned, doing some pointing of his own, farther away from the wall, sweeping his finger in a broad arc. “There are more footprints there, many more. What makes you think this one was made by the foot of our runaway?”
“Because those are all going to left and right,” Matt said. “This is the only one going away from the wall. Besides, it’s cutting into the others and over them, which means it’s much newer.”
“Good enough,” Sir Orizhan said, frowning, “but I see only two prints going away; then they join the others. How shall you follow them?”
Matt took a vial of powdered chalk from his pocket, tapped a few grains into the footprint, then set the bottom of the vial on top of them chanting, “Marking powder carbonate, With this footprint resonate! On rocky road or bog path sodden, Show me where this foot has trodden!”
Sergeant Brock frowned. “You use wizard’s words among common ones, but what good will they do?”
“There!” Matt pointed.
The others looked and saw a trail of tracks gleaming brighter than the rest, reflecting moonbeams as though they, too, had been dusted with chalk.
Matt put the vial back into his wallet. “Let’s go!” He set off through the moonlit night, imagining sinister presences looking over his shoulder and watching him from the shadows— at least, he hoped he was imagining.
They came to a patch of shadow, and Sir Orizhan stared. “The footprints glow without light!”
“It’s a useful spell.” Matt glanced at Sergeant Brock. The man’s face was set and grim—maybe his response to fear of the supernatural; Matt had seen people react to his spells in a host of different ways.
The footprints came out of the shadow and gleamed in the moonlight again, and the knight and sergeant relaxed a little. Matt blessed the silver crescent and wished it could stay up a little longer, but it was a young moon early in the month, and had to be in bed at a decent time. If it stayed with him another hour, he’d be lucky. Of course, Sergeant Brock was holding a torch to guide them after that.