“And it’s exciting to be in a real castle,” she said. “Pass the mustard, please . . . A castle with knights and everything! It looks just the way I imagined!”

Shawonda nodded and jointed one of the little birds, a little more restrained as befitted a maiden in her mid-teens.

“It’s really interesting. But I don’t want to have a banquet and everything all the time, not yet at least,” she said.

Yseult blinked as she broke a piece of bread and buttered it.

What’s odd or special about a castle? And castles are where knights live. Well, and manors. It’s no more strange than finding a horse in a stable or a monk in an abbey.

“We don’t have banquets all the time,” she said instead. “Well, it’s a little different at Court, naturally they keep more state than anyone else and entertain more, and this is a royal castle. But normally we . . . ordinary Associate nobles and our retainers . . . just eat in Hall, you know.”

“What’s that mean?” Janie asked.

Yseult blinked again, forced to think how to explain something she’d taken for granted all her life.

“Well, in Hall . . . you’ve seen the Hall here?”

Shawonda nodded. “The great big building with the dais at one end and that marvelous huge fireplace and the stained-glass windows down one side and the tapestries? And the lovely coffered ceiling.”

Janie nodded. “Yes, we saw that when we came here. Mathilda . . . I mean, the High Queen . . . met us and gave a sort of speech, and there were a lot of people. But wouldn’t that be for banquets? It’s awful big for just a dining room.”

“You don’t have Halls?”

“Not like that,” Shawonda said. “I mean, the capitol building in Boise has a big place where they have meetings, and sometimes special dinners. If you have dinner in a Hall, isn’t that a banquet?”

“Well, no, it’s used for banquets too, but those are special occasions. Banquets are different, it’s mostly guests then, sometimes everyone’s a noble. But a Great Hall has to be big because all the Castle people eat there, except some of the extra troops if there’s a call-up, and it’s where you have dances and things, and music and performers and maybe mystery plays, and a lord may sit in judgment there for his manor court or the Court Baron, and you play games in winter or sew there at times in the summer if the solar gets too stuffy. A Hall will be a bit smaller in a manor house than a castle but it’s the same thing really.”

“Everybody in a Castle or a manor eats in the hall?” Janie said.