He left the maze and took the winding garden path up to the scouts’ back entrance to the Seventh Forest Manor. He could hear the woodwinds and stringed instruments trickling from the Grand Hall’s windows and could hear girls and scouts laughing in the kitchens. Neb slipped inside and found himself in hallways crowded with scouts and soldiers in the dress uniforms of the Ninefold Forest Houses. Servants bustled about, moving from room to room. Neb took the back stairs, and after a few twists and turns of the hall, he let himself into his small room.

Normally, officers in training stayed in the barracks, but because he was considered a member of Rudolfo’s household they had kept him in the same room he’d used since his first arrival in the Ninefold Forest. It was a small room divided roughly into a living area and sleeping area-the sleeping area was separated from the rest by a heavy curtain. A small wooden desk and chair sat near a large window that led out onto a small balcony. A few scattered pieces of art decorated the walls-two, he thought, were original Carpathius oil paintings of the Great Migration west from the ruins of the Old World. Carpathius had been commissioned for a series of paintings during the first millennial celebration of the settling of the Named Lands. These were from that series, showing the Gypsy folk in their tattered rainbow clothing-their leader, that first Rudolfo of legend, standing apart from the others-cresting a hill to look out over the Ninefold Forest. Those ancient green islands of old-growth timber isolated in the yellow grass of the Prairie Sea were to become their new home, and though their faces were tiny, Neb was convinced of the hope on them. Neb wondered what it had been like to be the first setting foot in a New World so long ago.

Unbuckling his knife belt, he hung the twin blades over the back of a chair.