Completely not to her surprise, her father was waiting in his little workroom when she got back to the suite. “I reckon everythin’ went all right?” he said with a half smile as she paused in his doorway.

“So far,” she replied. “Kat likes them. They got over being dazzled pretty quickly. I did give Rudi the ‘be careful around highborns, they can turn on you’ advice, though.”

“Prolly wise. They seem t’ be good lads,” was all he said—which told her his investigations hadn’t uncovered anything to worry about. “You c’n bring ’em up here t’ study whenever you like,” he added, which told her he trusted them, which meant rather more.

“I was thinking,” she said carefully. “They might be worth cultivating as informants later.”

“Then start feeling them out ’bout it now,” he advised. “Nothin’ specific, ’f course, an’ as vague as ye like, but yer right, they could be useful.”

And that told her exactly what she needed to know. Mags was prepared to welcome them into his network. She smiled; that was almost better than that the Royals liked them.

She listened with one ear to the conversation over the dinner table. Her mother was relaxed and so was her father, and when they spoke of “intrigues,” it was all petty nonsense. The King was a popular man, and thanks to the birth of a fourth son, the Queen had never been held in higher esteem. No, what was going on in the Court now was all maneuvering among the three current “factions,” if you could call them that.

The first faction was composed of people who had made their money, rather than inheriting it—or who had inherited money and a lucrative trade. Because the Queen herself came from among those of that sort, rather than from the highborn, they alternated between a proprietary pride in her and the feeling that she somehow owed them favors. When she had been younger, Abi had never been able to understand the latter; now she knew it was just human nature. People who were not already divided into factions would make factions given the chance, and they would always want the most important people to belong to their faction, whether the person in question agreed with that or not.

The second faction was those whose titles stretched generations back, sometimes into the mists of time and the founding of Valdemar. Some of the fortunes of those people had increased with time, some had dwindled until they had little more than a name, a rank, and pride. And the third faction was, of course, the “newly” ennobled—which, so far as the old highborn were concerned, meant people whose titles went back “only” five generations.