She hesitated for a long moment, glaring at him, before she said, "Go on, then, disturb a dying man. It's on your conscience, not mine." And she whipped around, leaving the doorway and their presence as quickly as possible.

"You could have at least asked her where the fellow is," Vasili grumbled as he and the others followed Stefan inside.

Lazar chuckled, still finding the situation highly amusing. "It will be easier to find him ourselves, Vasili, than to get any more information out of that one. We have not a palace to search, after all, but a few measly rooms."

"Then let us proceed, by all means. This place is hard to stomach in the light of day."

Actually, it smelled of lye soap, rather than stale beer. Tables were moved aside, chairs upended on them, and the floor was still damp in spots from being scrubbed. The tavern was as clean as it was ever likely to be. Vasili's finding it distasteful was merely a reflection of his mood, primed for ridicule after their unexpected reception.

Up a narrow flight of stairs and down an even narrower hallway, Wilbert Dobbs' voice, raised in complaint about the tardiness of his breakfast, drew them directly to him. He did not sound like a sick man. He sounded like an irate, hungry man.

Lazar was still finding this part of their quest very entertaining, likely because Vasili was not. Close to laughter again, he wondered aloud, "Do you suppose that green-eyed dragon below is the lazy slut he's calling for?"

"Slut maybe, but lazy?" Serge replied. "She's working herself into the grave, if you ask me. She looks about two steps from it."

Serge could be even more blunt than Vasili in speaking the obvious, and having the obvious pointed out so blaringly stirred Stefan's guilt for his sharpness with the girl just now. She did look overworked, cruelly so, and that could be the cause of her bad temper, rather than what had happened last night. At any rate, he shouldn't have let her prod his own temper.

"What is this?" Vasili demanded impatiently. "That impudent bitch isn't worth our curiosity, particularly when the whereabouts of the princess could be revealed in a matter of moments."

"Or not," Serge pointed out, though he reached for the door handle. "And I would just as soon have delayed another 'not'."

"Damn you, Tanya!" they were greeted before the door finished its inward swing. "What excuse..."

The words died off as the four men filed into the small room, crowding it with their size. Wilbert Dobbs jerked up in his bed, no easy feat with his bloated body.

"Here, now, how'd you get in here?" he blustered, though there was a marked improvement in his tone of voice, a deference for his betters, which they personified in the richness of their dress as well as their bearing. "Tanya knows I don't want no visitors."

"If you refer to the wench below, then you may absolve her, for she did her best to turn us away," Lazar volunteered.

"Not good enough," Dobbs snorted. "All right, then, let's hear it. What do the likes of you fine gentlemen want with me?"

"We are here on a matter concerning your deceased wife," Lazar answered.

"Iris? What, has she been bequeathed something by that fine family that disowned her for marrying me?"

Dobbs laughed at the thought that something might finally have come out of that mistake. Iris had married him in desperation because her rich lover wouldn't have her after she got with child. Dobbs had thought she'd add a little class to the tavern he'd just opened in Natchez, so he'd jumped at the chance to offer his name. But she'd lost the brat and got slovenly after that, so they'd both lost out on the bargain.

His hope of a belated inheritance was quickly dashed, however. "We know nothing of your wife's family, Mr. Dobbs," he was told by the same man. "Our interest is in the woman with whom she departed New Orleans nearly twenty years ago."

"The crazy foreigner?"

"Your wife mentioned her to you, then?" Lazar asked.

"I met her myself when I caught up with Iris."

He didn't like being reminded of that time his wife had run away from him, going home to New Orleans to beg her folks to take her back, futilely as it turned out. He'd had every intention of beating her senseless, despite the fact that she was returning to him. But she'd had that foreign woman with her who'd died of the fever within hours of his finding them, and the woman's baby. It had galled him to forgo beating her, but Iris had needed her faculties intact to care for the baby. And the baby had been more important at the time, for he'd already decided to keep it. In a few years she'd be as good as any slave, and she'd cost him nothing.

As he recalled how he'd come by Tanya, his expression turned wary and his tone became belligerent. "There's not much to tell about that woman. She didn't have a penny to her name, but she managed to talk Iris into taking her along with her, even though the going wouldn't be easy traveling by wagon. But Iris always was softhearted. "

"With a direct river route between New Orleans and Natchez, why was your wife traveling by land and without escort?" Lazar asked.

"She didn't have the fare for no riverboat either, not that it's any of your business. But she'd gone down there with the wagon, my wagon. She's damn lucky she didn't sell it—" Dobbs fell silent with a scowl, aware that he was saying more than they needed to know, but having already blurted out so much, he confessed, "The wife thought to run off from me, but realized she had nowhere to go. She was coming back when I found her camped along the river road, trying to nurse the woman. But she was burned up with fever, and shouting all kinds of nonsense about assassins and kings, mostly in languages we'd never heard before, and mostly about failing her duty, whatever that was. She died in her sleep that night, and that's all there is to tell."

"I think not, Mr. Dobbs," said the clipped voice of the dark man with the devil's eyes. "You forget to mention the child."

More than the others, who were all too serious-looking by half, this man unnerved Dobbs with his strange, piercing eyes. He seemed to be in the grip of some powerful emotion, tightly controlled, but frightening just the same. The same intense emotion was apparent in all of them, really, just more obvious in this one, but it made Dobbs wonder what was so important about the information they sought and why, after all these years, they were even seeking it.

His expression still wary, but his tone more affable, he said, "I didn't forget. It's just a sad thing to remember, is all. There was a baby, yes, but it caught the fever from its mother. There just weren't nothing me or Iris could do to save it, much as we tried. "

Chapter 6

"Dead!?"

The incredulous exclamations came at Dobbs from two different directions at once. He didn't know whether to elaborate on what he'd said or demand some answers of his own. But his hands had begun to sweat, his brow, too, not because he was lying, but because those devil's eyes were trying to see right inside his head. He was sure of it.

He cleared his throat, surreptitiously wiping his palms on his blanket. "What's your interest in that baby? You're all kind of young to be the father, ain't you?" No answer came, which unnerved him even more.

And then the blond one, whom he'd barely noticed because his handsomeness made him seem less dangerous than the others, flung a retort at him. "There was only one grave found, the woman's. A mere pile of stones, guaranteed to crumble. "

The contempt in that voice, making it sound as if Dobbs had been deliberately inept, got his dander up.

"What was I supposed to do, dump her in the river?" Dobbs demanded. "When you don't have no shovel, you make do in these parts."

"There was still only the one grave, Mr. Dobbs," observed the one with blue eyes.

"The baby didn't die the same day. We'd already moved on."

The questions came at him from all of them then, and he had barely enough time to answer one before the next was shot at him.

"How many days later?"

"A few."

"Exactly?"

"Two, dammit!"

"What time of day?"

"How the hell should I remember?"

"What time did he die, Mr. Dobbs?"

"He? What he? She's a girl."

"She is? Or was?"

"Was! Was! What the hell is this? It don't make a peck of difference what she was, or what time she died. She's dead — that's all you need to know!"

"I'm afraid not, Mr. Dobbs. We require proof."

"Proof that you will have to supply, Mr. Dobbs, since you claim to have buried her."

"In other words, Mr. Dobbs, you will have to lead us to her grave."

Dobbs stared at the three who had just spoken as if they were crazy. But they were serious, dead serious. The dark one with the unholy eyes hadn't said a word during the interrogation, nor did he now. He just watched, and listened, and made Dobbs even more uneasy with his silence.

"I can't lead anyone anywhere," Dobbs told them, for once glad it was true. "I haven't left this room in six months, not since—"

"The nature of your illness has little bearing," he was informed with a distinct lack of sympathy. "We will supply you a comfortable conveyance, and pay you for your time."

"It wouldn't do no good," Dobbs insisted nervously. "I put that baby in the ground, since she didn't need but a tiny grave, easy enough to scrap out with a sharp rock. But there weren't nothing to leave as a marker, and with twenty years come and gone, even with that other grave to judge the distance by, I'd never find—"

"You needn't explain further," the dark one cut in. "Thank you for your time."

As soon as it was said, they all turned and left the room. Dobbs fell back on his pillow, finally wiping his brow. He couldn't imagine what that had been all about, but he hoped never to go through it again.

At the top of the stairs, Stefan paused to state the obvious. "He was lying."

"Yes," Lazar agreed. "But why?"

"There can be only one reason," Serge said.

Their minds traveled the same path and came to the same appalling conclusion. It was Vasili who burst out, "Don't even think it! She's a tavern whore, for God's sake, and ugly"

"She has the right color eyes," Lazar pointed out.

He was no longer the least bit amused.

"There are probably a hundred women with green eyes in this town alone," Vasili insisted. "And besides, that horrid female downstairs cannot possibly be only twenty years of age. She's thirty if she's a day."

"Hard work can age anyone," Serge said. "And even her name, Tanya, is—"

"Enough!" Stefan hissed. "We each of us know how proof is to be established. I would suggest we establish it one way or the other, rather than argue the possibility."

Vasili still protested. "But even to consider her is insane. "

"There is nothing to consider if she is the one we seek, Vasili. You know that as well as I."

"Then I would just as soon not find out," Vasili replied. "But then I can't believe for a minute that she's the one. Mere circumstance doesn't make it so.

"But the crescent moon on her left cheek will."

"Damn you, Stefan! All right, if you insist on looking for it, you will do so without my help. I refuse to go near that foul tempered wench again."

"I doubt your assistance will be necessary," Stefan said tightly. "I believe I can spare a few coins, which is all it should take to get a whore to raise her skirts."

Vasili flushed crimson at those words. He'd said it himself, called her a whore more than once, but that wasn't the same as hearing it from Stefan. How could his cousin even consider the possibility that a whore could be the future Queen of Cardinia?

Before the two cousins got physical in their disagreement, Lazar stepped between them. "Why don't I find the girl and just ask her if she has any unusual marks on her person?" he suggested. "If she can describe the damned moon, it won't be necessary to embarrass her or ourselves."

"She's not going to answer a personal question like that without knowing why she's being asked," Serge said. "And if she's told why, she'd carve the crescent on her backside herself to have a chance at the life we're offering."

"We're not going to tell her what we're looking for, Serge," Lazar said patiently. "She'd have to tell us—"

"You're still here?" the female in question demanded from the bottom of the stairs, a tray of food in her hands. "Well, there's the door, and hurry up, will you? Dobbs is waiting for his breakfast. "