Any man could kill an outlaw with no bloodguilt falling on him. Valmar drummed his fingers on his belt and wondered if it would be hard to kill him, if the outlawed king would fight with desperate, inhuman strength. But he would not even know him if he met him.

When Valmar finally slipped away, he noticed that many of the attendants who had accompanied the kings had also left the proceedings, and even two men he was fairly sure were kings themselves stood some distance off, talking to each other. No one paid him any attention as he went up to the castle.

It was a castle like none he had ever seen, its smooth walls reaching high above his head, towers on every corner. Pennants snapped from the towers, and all the stones were whitewashed. There was a moat where swans glided, seeming to ignore him pointedly. A guard in livery as elegant as his own best clothing stopped him at the bridge.

“I would like to see the Princess Karin. Tell her- Tell her it’s her little brother.”

When he was escorted a few minutes later across the bridge and into the courtyard, he was amazed to see that everything here seemed built of stone, and built connecting with everything else. There was nothing like the cluster of weathered oak buildings that surrounded the stone hall at home. He was led up a long stair, through a narrow room, back outside, and up another set of stairs before reaching the great hall.

Karin was sitting in a window seat, reading a book he recognized, a book she had made herself by sewing together sheets of parchment. In it were written, in a firm though childish hand, the favorite tales she had heard as a little girl. She had told him once that she had made it before coming to Hadros’s kingdom, not realizing that many of the same old tales would be told there as well-and also not yet realizing, she said, how much different tales, or even different versions of the same tale, might contradict each other. She read it now with a frown and her full concentration, as though hoping in it to find certainty.