“I just wanted to make sure you were up in time for chapel,” she said without a smile or any sign of friendliness. She put the umbrella back up and started out again.

“Thank you very much!” I said quickly, wondering if everyone went to chapel every single day. “You know, I don’t even know your name.”

“Gwen, sir,” she said and was gone. I wondered as I ate if she didn’t want to associate with someone as foolish as I must have seemed after the incident with the string. The donuts tasted as though they had been made several days before.

My mood was not improved when I banged my head on the dark stair going up to the chapel and then found, when I reached the top, that the king and the chaplain were the only other two people there. I rubbed my head surreptitiously all during service. At the end, I offered the king my arm, but he shook his head.

“A prerogative of being king is that I don’t have to use those stairs.” A small door which I should have noticed before opened half-way down the inner wall of the chapel, presumably into the royal chambers. He went through it and left me alone with the chaplain.

The chaplain fixed me with his dark eyes. “Don’t think I don’t welcome you in the chapel,” he said. “But don’t come because you think you have to. I hold service every morning for anyone who needs spiritual refreshment, and the king usually comes, but the rest of the castle mostly come on Sunday.” He turned away without waiting for a response.

“In that case,” I thought, “maybe I can start sleeping later.” I would have to tell Gwen, if she was still speaking to me. I wished I could talk to some of my friends at the wizards’ school. The chaplain still seemed like the only person at the castle I could hold a conversation with, and at the moment he was to me profoundly strange and distant.

“There’s incentive for me,” I thought bitterly, groping back down the stairs. “All I need to do to talk to them is get the telephone working.”