“If you ran a brush through it once every day while you were traveling, My Lady, this wouldn’t happen.”

Katsa snorted. “Giddon would get a good laugh out of that. My attempts to beautify myself.”

That knot untangled, Helda moved to another. “Don’t you think Lord Giddon finds you beautiful, My Lady?”

“Helda,” Katsa said, “how much time do you suppose I spend wondering which of the gentlemen finds me beautiful?”

“Not enough,” Helda said, nodding emphatically. A hiccup of laughter rose into Katsa’s throat. Dear Helda. She saw what Katsa was and what she did, and Helda didn’t deny that Katsa was that person. But she couldn’t fathom a lady who didn’t want to be beautiful, who didn’t want a legion of admirers. And so she believed Katsa was both people, though Katsa couldn’t imagine how she reconciled them in her mind.

IN THE GREAT dining hall, Randa presided over a long, high table that might as well have been a stage at the head of the room. Three low tables were arranged around the perimeter to complete the sides of a square, giving the guests an unobstructed view of the king.

Randa was a tall man, taller even than his son, and broader in the shoulders and the neck. He had Raffin’s yellow hair and blue eyes, but they weren’t laughing eyes like Raffin’s. They were eyes that assumed you would do what he told you to do, eyes that threatened to bring you unhappiness if he didn’t get what he wanted. It wasn’t that he was unjust, except perhaps to those who wronged him. It was more that he wanted things the way he wanted them, and if things weren’t that way, he might decide that he’d been wronged. And if you were the person responsible—well, then you had reason to fear his eyes.

At dinner he wasn’t fearsome. At dinner he was arrogant and loud. He brought whomever he wanted to sit with him at the high table. Often Raffin, though Randa spoke over him and never cared to hear what he had to say. Rarely Katsa. Randa kept his distance from her. He preferred to look down on his lady killer and call out to her, because his yelling brought the attention of the entire room to his niece, his prized weapon. And the guests would be frightened, and everything would be as Randa liked it.

Tonight she sat at the table to the right of Randa’s, her usual position. She wore the soft green silk and fought the urge to tear off the sleeves that widened at her wrists and hung over her hands and dragged across her plate if she wasn’t careful. At least this dress covered her breasts, mostly. Not all of them did. Helda paid her no attention when she gave instructions about her wardrobe.

Giddon sat to her left. The lord to her right, whom she supposed to be the eligible bachelor, was a man not old, but older than Giddon, a small man whose bugged eyes and stretched mouth gave him the appearance of a frog. His name was Davit, and he was a borderlord from the Middluns’ northeast corner, at the border of both Nander and Estill.