“Gone! He left the castle shortly after the uprising. He—I haven’t seen him since!” From the tone of Tempest’s voice, he seemed worried that the chamberlain had made off with the treasure.

“What did he look like?”

“A thin fellow, like a willow switch, with blond hair and no beard.”

The very messenger Orden had found slain. So the Duchess had sent the message to Sylvarresta using the man who’d hidden the forcibles, then told no one else about them. Captain Tempest might be a fine soldier, capable of defending the castle, but he was obviously dishonest. Knowledge of the treasure would have tempted him, and the Duchess had not wanted to let her king get betrayed again.

This news filled King Orden with sadness, a heaviness. Such a waste, that a fine king like Sylvarresta could suffer from such disloyalty. A whole nation compromised.

If a fine man like Sylvarresta was so little loved by his lords, Orden wondered, how can I trust my own vassals?

“Thank you, Captain Tempest,” King Orden said, in a tone of dismissal.

“Oh, and Captain,” Orden added, as Tempest hesitated in the doorway, strapping on his helm, “relief will come from Groverman and Dreis, as soon as they make arrangements. I sent a message asking for aid, and I told them of the treasure. The armies of the North will gather here!”

Tempest nodded, breathed a sigh of relief, departed. The matronly Days followed him out.

Orden sat for a long hour in the darkness, in a chair carved of dark walnut, finely wrought—too finely. The chiseled emblems of feasting men on its backboard dug into his flesh. One could not rest in these chairs.

So Orden stoked the fire in the fireplace, threw in a couple of shattered chairs for fuel, then lay on a bearskin, petting the Duke’s hunting hounds, who batted the floor with their tails, reveling in his affection.

His Days had been standing in a corner, forgotten. Now the man came and sat in one of the uncomfortable chairs. Gaborn’s Days remained in the corner.

Orden had not lain on the floor with a dog since he was a boy. He remembered the first time he’d come to Longmot with his father. He’d been nine years old, on his way home from his first big hunt, a hundred men in his retinue. It was in the fall, at Hostenfest, of course, where he’d met a young prince with long amber hair and narrow shoulders.

Sylvarresta. Prince Mendellas Orden’s first friend. His only true friend. Orden had had soldiers who schooled him in the arts of war, and he’d made alliances with fawning sons of minor nobles who might have liked him but who always seemed too much aware how their inherited stations forever separated them from a prince.