Disguised in laborers’ rags, the three men pitchforked a wagonload of turnips into a massive storage facility guarded by Acacian soldiers. They added to the mountain of vegetables already collected there. Sitting in the back of the wagon as they jolted away, Barad explained that those stores were for the empire. Such was the way it always had been; such was the way the queen wished it to continue. They walked among the rows of kale and greens, of sugar hearts and blood beets. They saw children thin as waifs, met young men strong about the shoulders, older men slowed with the weight of work, and even older ones stooped by a lifetime of carrying such burdens. As their group rode past the corner of one field, a small girl looked up at them from a muddy trench. Just what she was engaged in was unclear, but it was not play. She was coated in muck, her legs sunk up to the ankles in the stuff, a bucket in one hand and a hooked tool in the other. Barad thought to pause and question her, but changed his mind just before he spoke. She set large, lovely brown eyes on him, framed by a cascade of unkempt curls. She was a small beauty, and he deemed her message one best delivered through her eyes. How would the years treat her? Her eyes asked this silently, so he did not need to speak out loud. He kept the group moving.

None of these sights were unusual to farmhands, but it was not the world most royals ever looked upon. Both Grae and his younger brother took in the scenes with their blue eyes. The younger was nearly a twin of his brother. A little slimmer of build perhaps, but the real difference between them was in his acceptance of deference to his elder. Clearly, the time the two of them spent secluded in the far north of their country—as their older brother and father both died in battle—had made them close. As Grae had said at the last meeting of the Kindred, his brother did seem to share his view of the world.

Throughout it all, Barad studied the young king’s face, trying to see the mind behind his words, beneath that handsome visage. He had done this many times in the past few weeks—when he led the Aushenian down into an abandoned Kidnaban mine and asked him to imagine the labor required to dig such a massive wound, as they skirted the wasteland of pig farms along the Tabith Way, even when they toured the slums of Alecia. On first hearing of the latter, the king had asked, “There are slums in Alecia?”