I’m nothing to them, and as long as things stay that way, my family and my people are safe.

The problem was, he knew very well that could change overnight.

I need to check with Jonaton tomorrow. Maybe his answer will be different this time. Jonaton was so close . . .

I’m clenching my jaw again. Time for bed. Today had been good. Perhaps tomorrow would be better.

3

Valdemar kept “farmer’s hours,” even at the Ducal level, which disconcerted Imperial visitors a great deal. Breakfast was nearly at dawn, and was the biggest meal of the day.

The Great Hall of an Imperial-gift manor was meant for holding massive audiences, ceremonies, and enormous celebrations. It was not meant to be used as Kordas used it: as the communal eating-room.

In an Imperial-style Court, the people of rank ate together in a pleasant, well-lit dining room, while the servants and commoners ate in a larger, windowless, basement room off the kitchen. That was the room that Kordas’s grandfather had cut up into kitchen-staff rooms.

The Great Hall at Valdemar was set up with trestle tables and benches around the clock, and had never, to Kordas’s knowledge, been used as anything but an eating space. Kordas’s father had partially solved the heating problem by suspending a kind of cloth “ceiling” at about the height where a normal ceiling would be, made of painted sailcloth covered in images of stars, moons, and suns against a dark blue background. Kordas had no idea what things looked like above that cloth ceiling these days. It’s probably the home to about a million spiders at this point, he mused as he entered the room.