I take a step back and reach for the divan. My head spins, my legs feel as though they are being pulled down, and my fingers are so heavy the knife is slipping from my grip.

She is lying! I saw the Prince's sketches, the young woman with the wavy hair, large tormented eyes, and a thin nose.

"You are not Lady Calmi."

"It seems you have been as little informed about me, as I about you. Has the Prince told you nothing?"

I sink into soft cushion, try to curl my yielding fingers back around the knife, but they are unresponsive. The light in her eyes alters as she realizes how little I know. It is impossible to read her, but that tiny change in her flat expression does more to confirm her claim than any words she could utter.

If this is Lady Calmi, who is the young woman the Prince carries in his leather binding, along with the portraits of Kel, Queen Usas and me?

My stomach hurts. Pressure builds in my head. My limbs want to give up. I battle their desire to succumb.

"How are your arms? Have you lost feeling yet?"

"They are tingling."

"Your body fights the poison. Still, we should not delay if you want to live through this."

"The soldier and the maid saw you enter. If I die, you will be arrested within the hour."

The prickling intensifies to a painful sting as though my arms and legs are buried in snow. For an instant they burn, and then numbness creeps in. My shoulders and head slump. I'm about to keel over when she catches me and lowers me onto the divan.

"Stay calm. It is unpleasant, I know. Now, tell me, why has Prince Jakut arrived with his uncle? Why did he not send news he was alive? Why has he refused to speak with me?"

I struggle to focus on the ceiling. Delicately painted birds with blue wingtips decorate a circle in the center. I can smell her citrus perfume and coriander on her breath. The numbness spreads up my neck, but my heart feels as though it's beating double-time and my mind races.

Perhaps she is not afraid of being arrested. Or she is confident any accusations against her will be dropped. Or she is bluffing and will not let me die no matter what.

Three possibilities. But I cannot gamble without knowing the first thing about her. Eyes open, fixed on the ceiling, I dip into her mind; skim the airy, insubstantial surface. I hope to find something recent that will reveal her true nature; but quickly, so she does not guess what I have done.

She walks through an enchanting passage of crisscrossed crescent arches. Arches which start on her level and end higher up, joining to the vertical network of turrets, palace apartment and courtyards. Plants hang like long arms from overhead balconies. A buttressed glass room blocks the fading light, and a twisting stairway starts two levels up, and keeps climbing higher than the eye can see.

Footsteps patter and echo. A nearby bird takes flight.

Calmi turns.

The woman running towards her shouts, "News of the Prince!"

She falters, lifts a trembling hand to push back her long hair. "Is he dead?" Her voice is steady but the fear is there, hidden inside her.

"He has just arrived at the palace, My Lady. The Queen greets him as we speak."

Enough. Calmi has chosen a fast-working poison, and I may only have minutes before it shuts down my organs. It is not much, but at least I know she fears the Prince's death as much as I fear Kel's. I move to the edge of her mind to slip back out.

She runs across the drawbridge of an austere castle, shoes clattering on the wooden slats.

Panic jumps through me. How is this possible? I have been folded further down into her past! But I was so close to the edge. There was no resistance. Getting out should have been as easy as blinking.

"Sixe! Sixe!" she shouts, spinning around the castle's small courtyard. Open doorways ten, twenty, thirty feet high spill from the sheer walls into thin air. An ill kept man, clothes ragged, face weathered, steps into the light almost twenty feet up. Like a rat in a drain tunnel who cannot escape because escape would mean falling to his death.

I test the contours of the memory, searching for an exit.

"Sixe," she pants. "I need my herb basket. Quickly! In the western field by the brook. The slave girl's baby has come early. And bring something to make fire. We must hurry. She's very sick."

I sense a small gap. In my mind's eye, I move towards it, imagine myself on the other side. The outside.

She is in a field, crouched before a girl my age. The girl's bare legs are bent up at the knees, held there by another woman. Blood covers the girl's hands and dress. A baby's head pokes out from between her legs. Thick dark hair covered in a greasy white substance and blood.

"Sixe, hold the head. I have to push on her stomach."

She moves around the girl in childbirth and the woman holding her legs. As she places her hands on the girl's belly, feeling the contours of the baby, the girl starts convulsing.

"No, no, don't hold her. Give her space. Wait!"

The seizure ends. "We must get the child out now or they will both die!"

I change tactics to escape her mind. I push myself through the viscous, transparent film enveloping the memory. I have the sense of puncturing the seal and reaching the outside, but time folds again!

She is eight years old, running through a field of yellow wheat. In the distance, smoke billows to the sky. A small brick house is on fire. She is running so fast she trips on her long skirt and lands face down with a thump. The fall winds her. She rises slowly, pushing hair from her face and gazing at the charred house. On her knees, she starts clawing at the ground, tearing up stems of wheat. In a frenzy, she rises, batting the crop until her arms bleed, tramping it beneath her boots, screaming in rage.

The man with the weathered face, Sixe, limps towards her. She claws the mud where she has pulled up the grain, draws her soiled nails across her cheeks, scratching the dirt into them. Sixe takes her hands. He holds them for a moment, and gives a tiny shake of his head.

I mentally kick and punch at the edges of the memory. I am too far down. Too far into her past, and each time I think I have found a way out, I am swallowed further in. The panic mounts. How much time has passed? Five minutes? Ten? If I do not get out now, if I do not answer her questions, will she let me die?

She is a child, younger than Kel. Lord Strik stands beside her in the castle entrance, four guards watching over him. She stares at the high courtyard walls with their strange arched doorways. Doorways you could step through and fall to your death on the cobbled ground below.

"This is your home now," he tells her. "Sixe will always know where you are. It is his talent." Strik switches to a language of short, clipped sounds where sentences seem only two or three words long. And he is using the voice. She stiffens, scraggly hair falling over her lowered face, hands rough and cut, the skirt of her dress two sizes too big. Still using the voice, he says, "You cannot leave. You will never leave the lands around my home without my permission."

I am catapulted from Lady Calmi's mind, thrown abruptly back to the living world, without understanding how.

Blue wing-tipped birds dip and dart across the ceiling. Something sour fills my nostrils and sits on my tongue. Bile climbs my throat in waves, never quite reaching my mouth.

I cannot move. Heaviness invades my body, but somehow my chest still rises and falls, and I manage to swallow, though it's painful.

Lady Calmi peers over me. I try to adjust my eyes to focus on her face. She dabs a pungent smelling cloth on my lips and cool liquid dribbles into my mouth. When my eyes finally obey my will and meet hers, she simply looks at me, then sits back on the low table, staring.

I tell my fingers to move. Down by my side, where she cannot see, the little one twitches.

"I did not know the poison could put someone into a trance," she says. "I have never heard of it."

"Have you given me the antidote?"

"I cannot question you dead. Yes, I have given it to you." I keep ordering my fingers to respond. Twitching one, then the next, then the next. "Why have you come to the Ruby Palace?"

"I met your grandfather," I say, hoping to distract her as I regain movement.

Her eyes sharpen. It is the first true reaction she has given. "Where?"

"We travelled through his lands from Lyndonia."

She rises and goes to stand by the balcony window. She gazes out so I can only see her profile. While she is not looking, I use all my will to inch my hand down the divan. My fingers graze the bone handle of my knife. "Grandfather saw the Prince?" she asks.

"Yes."

"Then we haven't much time." She turns, her forest green dress shimmering in the sunshine, reflecting in her eyes. I cannot blame the Prince for wishing to defy his father and refuse the Rudeashan princess so that he could marry Lady Calmi. Her uncanny beauty is like her grandfather's voice; there is a strange power to it.

"Much time before what?"

"Before grandfather grows tired of waiting."

When she speaks of Lord Strik, everything about her—voice, stance, eyes—are more empty than usual. She holds no affection for the man who brought her to his castle, and used his influence and the man Sixe to keep her on a leash. Fear. Obedience. But not love.

I wrap my knife into the cup of my palm, practice squeezing it.

"I do not understand why the Prince has brought you here," she says. When I do not answer, she walks to the table, and bends down to tuck several fallen herb packets into her wicker basket.

She has given up and is leaving. I need more time! I curl my toes, and hunch my shoulders, coaxing muscles to respond, wheedling back control of my body.

Once her basket is packed she leans over me. "Tell Prince Jakut I must speak to him."

"I do not imagine you have many friends, Lady Calmi, if you go around poisoning people and then asking them for services."

"I do not," she says.

"But it looks like you are in desperate need of one."

"If I had come to you as a friend, and asked why the Prince has brought you here and what has happened to him, would you have told me?"

"No. But what makes you think it is the Prince and not the Duke who brought me to the Ruby Palace?"

"The Duke?" she says, as though only just considering it. "The Duke is not a fool."

"And the Prince?"

"The Prince is the kingdom's only hope."

I sit up fast, head-butting her. Pain screams in my chest and my muscles moan in agony, but I have the advantage of surprise. She reels back. I grab a fist of her hair with one hand, jerk her towards me and press the tip of my knife into the vee of her throat.

"We now know you were bluffing, Lady Calmi. The question is, am I?"

No reaction. No shock. She is utterly numb to violence. For a brief instant, I wonder what happened to her in Lord Strik's home. What happened to her mother and father?

"Are you an assassin?" she says.

"I will ask the questions. What happened to the Prince's escort?"

"Five of grandfather's men went with Prince Jakut to the north. Grandfather said they would protect him, but I expect they had orders to make sure the Princess of Rudeash and the Prince did not meet. Grandfather's men must have slaughtered the rest of his escort. I expect it was so the Prince would not be suspected of betraying the Carucan army. So it would look as though he was targeted at the same time as his father."

"Did Prince Jakut betray the Carucan army?"

She does not answer straight away, but tilts back her head so the blade no longer scratches her throat. I loosen my hand on her hair. Adrenaline crashes through my body. Did he do it? Is Jakut a traitor after all?

"Yes," she says. "Indirectly. He allowed it."

My ears ring with blood. He might not have killed his escort, but the Prince is responsible for the death of hundreds of men, including his own father.

"And how does this make him the only hope for Caruca?" I sneer.

"It was the only way."

"For the two of you to be together," I spit, adrenaline pumping through me.

"The only way to gain grandfather's trust and kill the old man," she answers.

THANKS FOR READING MY STORY xox