For a moment, I couldn't make the words fit into anything that made sense.
"Alaric's retinue," I repeated slowly, as if saying it again might reveal it to be a mistake, a trick of exhaustion and fear distorting Sienna's memory into something more dangerous than it truly was. "You're certain that's what she said?"
"Her exact words, Your Highness." The physician's discomfort was plain, the reluctance of someone who understood she'd just handed a lit torch into a room full of dry kindling. "She was lucid when she said it, if that's any comfort. Frightened, but lucid."
Ryan's jaw had gone tight beside me, his mind clearly working through the same tangled possibilities already unspooling on my own. Tywen ordered the report, yes that fit neatly with everything I knew of the stepqueen's brothe
