The prince in the tower had not spent long hours mooning out of the windows or singing to passers-by. Heredity had shaped him into a silent man-that and a lack of company, perhaps. Besides, neither were practical options. There were no windows he could see out of.

King Emeric had seen to it that his hostage lacked for nothing-except his liberty, and the freedom to use his mother tongue. The prince had had instruction in several others, Frankish, Greek, Aramaic. He had had tutors for these subjects, of course, Hungarian ones. But other than those and the silent guards, he saw few people, and certainly none of his own age or speaking his own tongue. He had kept the language alive somehow in his memory, reciting the stories and songs of his childhood-silently, under his breath every evening. He had been forbidden to speak or sing them aloud.

He'd done so at first to escape the crushing fear and loneliness of being a small boy taken far from everything he loved and knew, and imprisoned here. And then terrified out of his wits-after being beaten and shown slow death-an act of brutality that as an older, more logical man, he understood had been to ensure that the king of Hungary had a suitably cowed vassal. Instead, his spirit had been shaped by the experience into a secretive but fiercely resistant one. A spirit that sometimes indulged in cruel and wild fantasies of revenge, but more often just longed to be free.

As for sanity… was he mad? Sometimes he wondered.

As prisons went, his apartments had every luxury-except windows. There was a narrow arrow slit high up on the wall above the stair. From a certain angle, he could see the sky through it. Not direct sunlight, but daylight, and sometimes cold breezes wafted in from the outside world, strange in their scents, unfamiliar in their chill.