Afterward, as they dressed for Nascimonte's intimate dinner for fifty guests, she said, "Are you serious about making Hissune Coronal?"

"What?"

"I think that that surely was the meaning of what you were saying earlier—those riddles of yours, just as we arrived at the festival, do you recall?"

"I recall," Valentine said.

"If you prefer not to discuss—"

"No. No. I see no reason to hide this matter from you any longer."

"So you are serious!"

Valentine frowned. "I think he could be Coronal, yes. It's a thought that first crossed my mind when he was just a dirty little boy hustling for crowns and royals in the Labyrinth."

"But can an ordinary person become Coronal?"

"You, Carabella, who were a street-juggler, and are now consort to the Coronal, can ask that?"

"You fell in love with me and made a rash and unusual choice. Which has not been accepted, as you know, by everyone."

"Only by a few foolish lordlings! You're hailed by all the rest of the world as my true lady."

"Perhaps. But in my case the consort is not the Coronal. And the common people will never accept one of their own as Coronal. To them the Coronal is royal, sacred, almost divine. So I felt, when I was down there among them, in my former life."

"You are accepted. He will be accepted too."

"It seems so arbitrary—picking a boy out of nowhere, raising him to such a height. Why not Sleet?

Zalzan Kavol? Anyone at random?"

"Hissune has the capacity. That I know."

"I am no judge of that. But the idea that that ragged little boy will wear the crown seems terribly strange to me, too strange even to be something out of a dream."

"Does the Coronal always have to come from the same narrow clique on Castle Mount? That's how it's been; yes, for hundreds of years—thousands, perhaps. The Coronal always selected from one of the great families of the Mount: or even when he is not of one of those, and I could not just now tell you when we last went outside the Mount for the choice, he has been highborn, invariably, the son of princes and dukes. I think that was not how our system was originally designed, or else why are we forbidden to have hereditary monarchs? And now such vast problems are coming to the surface, Carabella, that we must turn away from the Mount for answers. We are too isolated up there. We understand less than nothing, I often think.

The world is in peril: it's time now for us to be reborn, to give the crown to someone truly from the outside world, someone not part of our little self-perpetuating aristocracy—someone with another perspective, who has seen the view from below—"

"He's so young, though!"

"Time will take care of that," said Valentine. "I know there are many who think I should already have become Pontifex, but I will go on disappointing them as long as I can. The boy must have his full training first. Nor will I pretend, as you know, any eagerness to hurry onward to the Labyrinth."