Next came Duke Serrostin and his wife, short and plump. Lady Serrostin peered up at Arian with pale blue eyes but what seemed a genuine smile. “I’ve never met an elf before,” she said. “And is that elven costume? How lovely it looks on you … on me, of course, it would be ridiculous.” She bustled on to the king and greeted him with “Mikeli, lad, you get handsomer every day. You should find an elf like Queen Arian,” and to her husband, “Yes, yes, I’m coming.”

After her came the counts and their wives, then the barons and their wives, and then the older sons and daughters. Finally the line was done, and Arian wandered the room, flanked by her Squires and a servant ready to fetch food or drink. She imagined Kieri in this crowd as he had been when she first saw him or when he first became a peer. For all the trappings of the military about the nobility, for all their practice in grange and salle, none of them, she was sure, had Kieri’s skill with a blade. Dorrin must have been a shock. For the first time she felt a little sympathy—not much—for these women when they first faced the new Duke Verrakai.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Vérella

Queen Arian’s arrival put the entire palace in a frenzy. Except for the few brief formal moments when Camwyn was presented to her and made his own short speech of welcome (she could not, he was sure, really be as old as King Kieri), she had the welcome effect of removing even more attention from what the boy prince was doing. No one cared where he was as long as he was out from underfoot. He attended his lessons, but outside them, he explored. No one asked awkward questions.

Still, it took him days to discover a possible route to the skylight, a route involving a trip out onto the palace’s complicated roof. The library held a large plan of the palace, but the librarians, remote from the ceremony of a visiting monarch and with Queen Arian having already made her appearance there, were the only ones who seemed to notice him these days. They’d already raised eyebrows at his interest in secret passages the year before. He did not want them remembering his new curiosity.

From the rooftop, it was much easier to see just how ridiculously complicated the palace was. The foundations—or some of them—might have been from the old palace from before the Girdish war. A wall here and there might go that far back. But since then, outbuildings had been constructed, added on to, and finally joined to the oldest parts, while the palace itself had grown, completely engulfing a few buildings and merging with others on the margins.