“I know what you’ve asked us to do, Lady Princess,” Patch said beside her.

This time she looked at him with true surprise. He watched the passing trees, his face grave.

“Captain Faun told me,” he said. “She’s told a few of us—a very few. She wants a number of us on her side when the time comes to tell the rest.”

“And are you on her side, then?” Katsa asked.

“She brought me to her side, eventually.”

“I’m glad,” Katsa said. “And I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t your doing, Lady Princess. It’s the doing of the monster who’s the King of Monsea.”

A light snow began to fall. Katsa reached her hands out to meet it.

“What do you think is wrong with him, Lady Princess?” Patch asked.

Katsa caught a snowflake in the middle of her palm. “What do you mean, wrong with him?”

“Well, why does it pleasure him to hurt people?”

Katsa shrugged. “His Grace makes it so easy.”

“But everyone has some kind of power to hurt people,” Patch said. “It doesn’t mean they do.”

“I don’t know,” Katsa said, thinking of Randa and Murgon and the other kings and their senseless acts. “It seems to me that a fair number of people are happy to be as cruel as their power allows, and no one’s more powerful than Leck. I don’t know why he does it, I only know we need to stop him.”

“Do you think Leck knows where you are, Lady Princess?”

Katsa watched flakes melting into the sea. She sighed.

“We crossed paths with very few people,” she said, “once we left Monsea. And we told no one our destination, until we boarded this ship. But—he saw both of us, Patch, both me and Po, and of course he recognized us. There are only a few places we could hide the child. He’ll look for her here eventually. I must find a place to hide, in the castle or on the lands. Or even someplace in the Lienid wilderness.”

“The weather will be harsh, Lady Princess, until spring.”

“Yes. Well, I may not be able to keep her comfortable. But I’ll keep her safe.”

PO HAD SAID his castle was small, more akin to a large house than a castle. But after seeing the way Ror’s castle filled the sky, Katsa wondered if Po’s scale of measure might differ from other people’s. Randa’s castle was large. Ror’s was gargantuan. Where Po’s fit in was yet to be seen.

When she finally did see Po’s castle, she was pleased. It was small, or at least it seemed it from her position in the riggings of the ship far below. It was simply built of whitewashed stone, the balconies and the window frames painted a blue to match the sky, and only a single square tower, rising somewhere from the back, to suggest it was more than a house.

Its position, of course, was far from simple, and its position pleased Katsa even more than its simplicity. A cliff reached up and out from the water, and the castle balanced at the cliff’s very edge. It looked as if it might tumble forward at any moment, as if the wind might find purchase in some crack in the foundations, and tip the castle, creaking and screaming, over the drop and into the sea. She could understand why the balconies were dangerous in winter. Some of them hung over empty space.