“I don’t think I doubt you, catling. One of your Gifts is Mindspeech, after all, and little children sometimes see things we adults miss.”

“You adults? You weren’t all that much older than me! You saw a fair amount yourself, and you’d have seen more if you’d been able to spend more time with me. She was turning me into a little copy of herself, when she wasn’t trying to scare me. Once she’d cut me off from everyone else so that there was no one to turn to as a friend, she kept schooling me in how I shouldn’t trust anyone but her—and how I should fight for every scrap of royal privilege, stopping for no one and nothing on the way. There’s more, something that turned up after you left. When they told me the truth, I got very curious.”

“Which is why I call you ‘catling’—” Talia interrupted with a grin, “—since you’re fully as curious as any cat.”

“Too true. Curiosity sometimes pays, though; I started going through the things she left, and doing a bit of discreet correspondence with my paternal relatives.”

“Does your mother know this?” Talia was a bit surprised.

“It’s with her blessing. By the way, I get the feeling that Uncle-King Faramentha likes me as much as he disliked my father. We’ve gotten into quite a cozy little exchange of letters and family anecdotes. I like him, too—and it’s rather too bad we’re so closely related; he’s got a whole tribe of sons, and I think anybody with a sense of humor like his would be rather nice to get to know....” Elspeth’s voice trailed off wistfully, then she got back to the subject at hand with a little shake of her head. “Anyway, now we’re not altogether certain that the Hulda who left Rethwellan is the same Hulda who arrived here.”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s so much fun to shock you. You look like somebody just hit you in the face with a board!”

“Elspeth, I may kill you myself if you don’t get to the point!”

“All right, I’ll be good! It’s rather late in the day to be checking on these things now, but there was a span of about a month after Hulda left the Royal Nursery in Rethwellan to come here where she just seems to have vanished. She wasn’t passed across the Border, and no one remembers her in the inns along the way. Then–poof! —she’s here, bag and baggage. Father wasn’t among the living anymore through his own stupid fault, and she had all the right papers and letters; nobody thought to doubt that she was the ‘Hulda’ he’d sent for. Until now, that is.”