Sir Edmund talked for most of the morning.
Now that the thread was gone, everything he had kept inside for seven months came out at once. He sat on a coil of rope at the front of the barge with a cup of Agnes's tea in both hands, and he told them all of it. The palace. The guards. The hours they kept. Which doors were locked at night and which ones were only shut.
Faen wrote it all down.
"You were a guard in the courtyard," Nathan said. "And on the walls. Did they ever put you anywhere else?"
"The kitchens, twice. Carrying flour up from the storeroom." Edmund put his cup down. "The kitchens open onto the courtyard. There's a door at the back, next to the ovens, where they bring in firewood. It's never locked. Nobody in that palace ever thought anyone would want to break in."
"And the people who work in the kitchens. Where do they sleep?"
Edmund looked at Agnes. Then back at Nathan.
"In a long room behind the ovens," he said. "On straw. All of them together."
