“Marry Liutbold! Is that what that was about? That’s the first I heard of it. What can she have been thinking?”

“She’s stupid,” said Blessing.

Berthold halted beside the girl, scratching at the peach fuzz he had been growing for the last three months. “Princess Mathilda is a royal princess just as you are, Your Highness. You’d do better to make her an ally than an enemy.” He had switched to Wendish, which the guards did not, perhaps, understand.

“She’s an enemy.”

“Perhaps. But she keeps stumbling into you when she isn’t supposed to see you at all.”

“That’s because she hates me.”

“She might. Or she might wish for a child her own age to play with. She might want to like you, and act like this because she doesn’t know how else to get your attention.”

How had this youth come to be so wise?

“She’s not my own age! I’m older!”

“You look older, brat. But you don’t act it!”

“I do!” She bit her lip. She pouted. But she shut up and fixed a stare on Berthold that would have eaten another man alive.

“Come, brat,” he said more fondly, extending a hand.

She laid her head against his arm as a dog rests its muzzle lovingly along its master’s thigh.

“Here is Brother Heribert. He’s found you a green apple left over from last season. Isn’t that amazing?”

“It’ll make me puke!”

‘Anna can stew it up with herbs and make it all tasty. He found some flowers, too, a kind I’ve never seen before. Maybe you can dry them and press them to make something pretty.”

“I don’t want to. Papa let me fight with swords. I want to fight with swords!”

One of the guards made a noise halfway between a hiccup and a cough.

“I can so! I can so!”

“Blessing!”

She shut her eyes and to Antonia’s amazement did not burst into tears, as she would have done just two months ago. She struggled, that dusky face mobile in all its expressions, flashing quickly from thwarted anger through innocent bewilderment into a determination that showed itself by the way she jutted out her jaw.

“Your Highness, I have found you an apple.”

Antonia looked away, letting the branches ease back into place. It was bad enough to hear his voice. She could not bear to look at him as well.

“Thank you, Brother Heribert.”

“Properly spoken, brat,” said Berthold with a laugh. “We’ll teach you manners yet.”

“I hate you,” said Blessing in a tone that meant exactly the opposite. “Come, Brother Heribert,” she added grandly. “We’ll go up to Anna. We don’t need him anymore.”

“It’s time for your lessons,” he said in the voice that sounded like Heribert but not like him.

“I hate books!”

“You must learn. It is what he wanted.”

“Go on, brat. Learning is a weapon as sharp as steel.”

“You’ll come too, Berthold?” she asked plaintively.

“In a bit.”

Her sigh seemed loud enough to rattle the leaves. She tromped off.