The Thorne Maze by Karen Harper

Bettina. Sharp shadows leaped from each turn. Shifting shapes were starkly illumined, then devoured by blackness. The little entourage went on, methodically inspecting each turn and dead end as the queen commanded. Suddenly from somewhere behind, Meg’s voice jolted them.
    “Your Grace! Wait, please!”
    Meg and Kat appeared around a turn more than halfway in.
    “Meg, I told you to wait at the entrance.”
    “But, Your Grace, Kat recalled something to tell you. She says she saw Templar go into the maze when the sun set.”
    Elizabeth turned toward Kat, taking both of the older woman’s shoulders in a firm grip. “Are you certain you know which man Templar Sutton is, my Kat?”
    “I saw him at the masque, didn’t I? Lord Cecil was nearly the only one without a mask. But after everything was ended, Master Sutton took his off too, and kept looking around the room.”
    “Mayhap for me when I took my walk,” Bettina put in with a sniffle. “But he’d said he was going straight to bed.”
    Elizabeth only nodded, but she recalled well that Bettina had said he was already up in bed—reading, though Templar had later remarked that he was working, as usual, on debate topics for his students. No significant discrepancies in all that, she reasoned.
    “Exactly where were you to see Master Sutton when the sun set?” Elizabeth asked Kat.
    “I was in your bedchamber, gazing out over the grounds and distant river, just enjoying the view. I’d been resting in the trundle bed by yours, though Rosie and Meg had actually locked me in, didn’t you, girl?” she asked, turning to Meg with a flash of anger. “But I decided to go out to discover why Master Sutton was lingering at the entrance to your maze—he moved the rope to slip in, too, so I went down to tell him not to.”
    “But if you were locked in …” Meg said.
    “Do you think I can’t use the privy escape entrance King Henry put in all his palaces?” Kat demanded. “It’s bolted only from the inside and didn’t have a guard on it.”
    Elizabeth realized she’d have to put a guard outside to keep Kat from further wandering. A heavy arras covered that locked doorway in her chamber. She had used it herself, as had several members of her Privy Plot Council in the past, though not for several years.
    But when Kat had mentioned Elizabeth’s father, her hopes fell; Kat was going to plunge into the past again. “So I went down,” Kat continued, “and followed Master Sutton into the maze a ways, just inside the entrance, and saw he was stooped over as if he were looking at each leaf. And he’d just plucked off a small, dark piece of cloth from a branch where it must have snagged.”
    Elizabeth felt furious with herself that she hadn’t thought of searching the hedges so precisely. At least she’d been careful to keep Kat from the distress of knowing her royal mistress had been attacked in that very place last night. Though Kat was not a totally credible witness lately, all she had said seemed probable.
    “And then?” Elizabeth prompted.
    “I said he had no right to be in the maze, roped off as it was, but he said he was working with you to care for it—that it needed tending, cutting or some such.”
    Clever Templar. He had not broken his pledge for secrecy and had evidently known not to unsettle Kat.
    “There’s not much else to tell,” Kat went on, sounding suddenly exhausted. “Since he had your permission, I let him walk farther into the maze, and I went back up to bed.”
    “You’ve been a big help, Kat, and Meg will take you back to the palace.”
    “I’m not leaving you, lovey. I never have, and I won’t now!”
    Tears blurred the queen’s vision, and she blinked them back. Kat Ashley had once known never to call the queen her childhood sobriquet before anyone else, but what did that matter now? Elizabeth prayed that, despite Kat’s sinking health, she would never leave her, but she knew better and it scared her. Since she’d nearly died of