"I hardly expect it of you."
"Then—"
"You wish to enter my service?" Winslow asked. "It is strange that a former assassin would beg me to gather him to my capacious bosom. It is an amusing idea."
Suddenly Kesley felt like an insect being toyed with before having its wings plucked. Dizzily he glanced at the long rows of halberdiers standing like carven images, at the wax-faced courtiers grouped about Winslow's throne, and for a bewildering instant he thought that this was all some kind of dream from which he would soon wake and find himself back behind the plough, awaiting Tina's call to lunch.
"I never intended to strike a blow against you, Sire," Kesley lied humbly. "You believe that, don't you?"
"Of course I do," Winslow said gently, and without any trace of sarcasm. "Perhaps that's why Don Miguel decided to blot you out. However," he said, sighing, "I'm afraid you represent as great a threat to the Twelve Empires as has ever been born, my young friend."
He gestured to a hawk-faced man in somber robes standing to his left. "Lovelette, take this man and convey him to the dungeons. Tomorrow, he's to be executed. Is that clear?"
"Certainly, Sire."
It had happened so quickly that Kesley did not fully understand it. One moment he had been on dangerously thin ice but managing to keep aloft; the next, he had plunged through into utter cold.
He felt thin fingers bite into his bicep, and a low voice say, "Come with me."