He could not remember any occasion since his restoration to the throne when he had been out of that castle without his bodyguard. Not even once.

Well, he was out of it now. Valentine looked off to his left, where the thirty-mile-high crag that was Castle Mount sloped away at a dizzying angle, and saw the pleasure-city of High Morpin gleaming below, a webwork of airy golden threads. Ride down there, spend a day at the games? Why not? He was free! Ride on beyond, if he chose, and stroll in the gardens of Tolingar Barrier, among the halatingas and tanigales and sithereels, and come back with a yellow alabandina flower in his cap as a cockade? Why not? The day was his. Ride to Furible in time for the feeding-time of the stone birds, ride to Stee and sip golden wine atop Thimin Tower, ride to Bombifale or Peritole or Banglecode—

His mount seemed equal to any such labor. It carried him hour after hour without fatigue. When he came to High Morpin he tethered it at Confalume Fountain, where shafts of tinted water slender as spears shot hundreds of feet into the air while maintaining, by some ancient magic, their rigid shapes, and on foot he strode along the streets of closely woven golden cable until he came to the place of the mirror slides, where he and Voriax had tested their skills so often when they were boys. But when he went out on the glittering slides no one took any notice of him, as though they felt it rude to stare at a Coronal doing the slides, or as though he were still somehow cloaked by that strange invisibility. That seemed odd, but he was not greatly troubled by it. When he was done with the slides he thought he might go on to the power tunnels or the juggernauts, but then it seemed just as pleasing to continue his journey, and a moment later he was upon his mount once more, and riding on to Bombifale. In that ancient and most lovely of cities, where curving walls of the deepest burnt-orange sandstone were topped with pale towers tapering to elegant points, they had come to him one day long ago when he had been on holiday alone, five of them, his friends, and found him in a tavern of vaulted onyx and polished alabaster, and when he greeted them with surprise and laughter they responded by kneeling to him and making the starburst sign and crying, "Valentine! Lord Valentine! Hail, Lord Valentine!" To which his first thought was that he was being mocked, for he was not the king but the king's younger brother, and he knew he never would be king, and did not want to be. And though he was a man who did not get angry easily, he grew angry then, that his friends should intrude on him with this cruel nonsense. But then he saw how pale their faces were, how strange their eyes, and his anger left him, and grief and fear entered his soul: and that was how he learned that Voriax his brother was dead and he had been named Coronal in his place. In Bombifale this day ten years later, it seemed to Valentine that every third man he met had the face of Voriax, black-bearded and hard-eyed and ruddy-faced, and that troubled him, so he left Bombifale quickly.