The castle itself was an enormous building with a wide, square moat, six mismatched towers, four balconies, and far too many staircases. One of the previous Kings of the Enchanted Forest had been very fond of sweeping up and down staircases in a long velvet robe and his best crown, so he had added stairs wherever he thought there was room. Some of the steps wound up one side of a tower and down the other without actually going anywhere, which caused no end of confusion among visitors.

The inside of the castle was worse than the outside. There were corridors that looped and curled and twisted, rooms that led into other rooms, and even rooms that had been built inside of other rooms. There were secret passageways and sliding panels and trapdoors. There were several cellars, a basement, and two dungeons, one of which could only be reached from the sixth floor of the North-Northwest Tower.

“There is something backwards about climbing up six flights of stairs in order to get to a dungeon,” the King of the Enchanted Forest said, not for the first time, to his steward.

The steward, a small, elderly elf named Willin, looked up from a handwritten list nearly as long as he was tall and scowled. “That is not the point, Your Majesty.”

The two were in the castle study, going over the day’s tasks. Willin stood in the center of the room, ignoring several chairs of assorted sizes, while the King sat behind a huge, much-battered oak desk, his long legs stretched out comfortably beneath it. He was not wearing a crown or even a circlet, his clothes were as plain as a gardener’s, and his black hair was rumpled and needed trimming, but somehow he still managed to look like a king. Perhaps it was the thoughtful expression in his gray eyes.

Willin cleared his throat and went on, “As the center of Your Majesty’s kingdom, this castle—”

“It’s not at the center of the kingdom,” the King said, irritated. “It’s only close. And please just call me Mendanbar and save all that ‘Your Majesty’ nonsense for a formal occasion.”

“We don’t have formal occasions anymore,” Willin complained. “Your Majesty has canceled all of them—the Annual Arboreal Party, the Banquet for Lost Princes, the Birthday Ball, the Celebration of Colors, the Christening Commemoration, the—”

“I know,” Mendanbar interrupted. “And I’m sure you have them all written down neatly somewhere, so you don’t have to recite them all. But we really didn’t need so many dinners and audiences and things.”

“And now we don’t have any,” Willin said, unmollified. “And all because you said formal occasions were stuffy.”

“They are stuffy,” King Mendanbar replied. “Stuffy and boring. And so is being ‘Your Majestied’ every third word, especially when there’s only the two of us here. It sounds silly.”

“In your father’s day, everyone was required to show proper respect.”