That and the fact that his wife was here.

Sure, Alissa was only fourteen, and hadn't had a lot of education in the last three years, unless you counted being a runaway and falling in with a gang of girls thieves that sometimes sold her to men on the street for a lark as a learning experience. It didn't help with reading and writing much, Tor had discovered, so they'd spent the last month trying to get her up to speed that way. Rolph, his school roommate, had helped them both brush up on math as well. It had been really nice of him, since as heir to the kingdom, he could have just gotten someone else to do it and called it good, instead of taking time each day with them himself.

But then, Rolph was a good friend.

Well, the room situation wasn't the greatest, but they'd manage. He'd just have to see her in the evenings and his off days. Of course he was already expected to spend most of his non-study time working, if only by himself, copy work for the kingdom, his retail business partners and any assignments he got from the King. That had been hinted at when he'd left the Capital for some reason, but Tor didn't really get why. What could he do that someone else couldn't do better? Still, that was his job being a Knight, and some of the things coming up were going to be downright freaky.

Like going to Austra, pretending to marry a completely insane girl so that her mentally unhinged father would let his guard down and he and his grandfather, Count Lairdgren, could rescue their brother from a cell under the man’s palace.

That “brother” part was tricky to explain, so Tor just summed it up for himself for the fiftieth time and hoped he didn't have to explain it too real people too often. Lairdgren was an Ancient, Denno Brown was his brother, made from the same basic materials, some three thousand years before, and Tor was a nearly exact copy of his grandfather, only eighteen, not thousands of years old.