Madness Everthorn read the name on the warning board before she read the warning. The board stood at the harbor gate, where every captain and porter passed at dawn. Someone had nailed a small painted apple to the wood beside the hazard notice. The apple was red with green veins, and she had not seen one like it in twenty years. The man who used to grow them was supposed to be dead. She had paid to make sure of it. She pulled the apple from the nail and walked inland without hurrying. Two lords still sat between her and the high throne of Everland. The eastern one was clever, and she meant to take him first, before he learned her face. She had spent three years in the capital under a borrowed name, buying clerks, placing cooks, mapping the eastern lord's routines. One loose tongue at the harbor could undo all of it. The apple in her pocket meant the tongue already had a shape and a memory. Her informant found her by the fountain at midday and told her where the rival held court. He sat each evening in the tavern across from the black-towered castle that loomed over the lower city, buying drinks for any dockhand or maid who had served her in the old country. He asked careful questions. He showed a second apple from his coat, smiled, and waited to see whose eyes changed. Two of her placed servants had already been seen at his table. Madness listened, paid the informant, and told him to invite the rival to a private supper in her name. She sent the painted apple back with the message, so the rival would know she had come herself. He came. He sat across from her in a rented room above a chandler's shop, set his apple on the table beside hers, and began to name the village they had both left. He did not finish the second sentence. She had coated the rim of his cup before he climbed the stairs. He reached for his throat, then for the knife at his belt, then for nothing. She took both apples from the table and dropped them into the fire. She burned his coat and the papers inside it. By the time the watch found the body, she was back in her rooms, writing the next week's orders for the eastern lord's kitchen. The harbor board still carried the nail. She would have it pulled down in the morning. The rival was gone, but two of her servants had sat at his table, and she did not yet know what either of them had said.

By morning the rival lord's death was the only story in the lower city. The watch called it a bad heart. A clerk at the guildhall called it poison. Madness Everthorn heard both versions before breakfast. She sat at her writing desk and counted the problem in plain terms. Two of her placed servants had sat at the rival's table. If either was questioned now, the eastern lord would hear her name before the week ended. She had to move them out of the capital before the watch thought to ask. She sent word to the red-and-black castle on the ridge above the lower city. The building belonged to her under a borrowed name, kept as a private house for a merchant who did not exist. Its outer yard held a squat metal hall full of pipes and lit windows, marked to the tax office as a dye works. The dye works gave the castle a reason to receive carts at odd hours. She used both. She told her steward to prepare two rooms and to open the rear gate at dusk. The harder piece was the road. She could not send the servants through the main gate, where the watch now checked every wagon. She used the old quarry track instead. Halfway along the track sat the rusted shell of a black car with a cracked red hood, left there years ago when the quarry closed. Her drivers used it as a marker. Past the wreck, the track dropped into a gully the watch never rode. She sent her fastest driver down that route with a covered cart at last light. The first servant, the cook, climbed in without a word. The second, a scullery girl, was not at her lodging. Madness found her at a bakery three streets away, buying bread as if the morning were ordinary. Madness took her by the elbow and walked her to the cart herself. The girl asked one question on the way. Madness answered it with a coin and a promise of work in the north. The girl believed her. The cart left the city before the bells rang eight. By midnight both servants were inside the ridge house. Madness stood in the yard and watched the steward bar the gate. She had pulled her two exposed mouths out of reach before the watch knew to look for them. The rival's death would still draw eyes. Rumor would still run. But the eyes would find no one to question, and rumor without a witness died in a week. She rode back to the capital before dawn and wrote the day's orders for the eastern lord's kitchen. Her hand was steady. The plan against him was three years old and still hers. She had bought herself the quiet she needed. She meant to use it.