Carved wolves graced the stone facing of the hearth. Bookshelves lined the public rooms. More books lay piled on the stand next to the bed. The ones in the bedroom were mostly romances, stories of knights and warriors and queens, written in a Valespeech with archaic phrasing. In the public rooms were shelved biographies and treatises on politics, including A History of the High Country Clan and a first edition of Adra ana’Doria’s Rule and Rulers in the Modern Age. Raisa herself was just then plodding through it under the strict eye of the masters.

Hanalea or not, the suite had been occupied by a young girl, probably a princess. Perhaps she’d died, Raisa thought, and her parents had kept her room preserved as a shrine. That idea gave her delicious shivers.

Since the apartment was in one of the turrets, it was smaller than the rooms originally assigned to Raisa. But it felt spacious, since she had a view of the town and the mountains on three sides.

She’d dragged the bed into the space between the windows, and when it snowed, she felt like the fairy princess in the snow globe her father had brought her from Tamron years ago. On clear nights she pressed her face against the glass, pretending she was soaring in a winged ship among the stars.

Best of all, she’d discovered a sliding panel in one of the closets, which revealed a secret passageway. It snaked within the walls for what seemed like miles. The passageway led to a stairway, and the stairway led to the solarium on the roof, a glassed garden that was Raisa’s favorite place in all of Fellsmarch Castle, even though it had fallen into disrepair.

When Raisa pushed open the door to her rooms, she found her nurse Magret Gray waiting for her. Magret was a formidable woman, tall and broad, with a lap that could accommodate several small children.

Magret wasn’t really her nurse anymore, of course, but she still wielded an unwritten authority that came from changing royal diapers and scrubbing royal ears and even swatting royal behinds. Raisa’s bath was already steaming on its little burner, and fresh underdrawers were laid out on her bed.

“Your Highness!” Magret said, looking aghast. “You are a terrifying sight, to be sure. The Princess Mellony said you were worse off than she was, and I did not believe it. I do owe that young lady an apology.”

Right, Raisa thought. If there ever comes a day that I can’t get into more mischief than Mellony, I’ll cut my own throat.