Kristen and Dahl Haas shared a bench inside a cozy cabin equipped with the blatant luxury of a huge glass window. Kristen often wondered where the forest people had stolen it. Snow fell outside. Big chunks hit the window, melted, slid downward as they perished. “Winter here is harder than it is in Vorgreberg.”

“Think so? How about during the Great Eastern Wars?”

“That was one bad winter.” She frowned. It had been more than one winter and had been unimaginably worse than this. Hunger, danger, fear, and sickness had been constant companions.

Haas leaned close, no longer discomfited by his affection for the girl who had been the wife of his king’s son and who was the mother of Bragi’s legitimate heir. Kristen had abandoned reticence long ago. She knew her father-in-law approved.

She said, “Sitting here like this, I don’t think this is such a bad life.”

“How much better the world if everyone were equally content.”

“You ought to be content. You’ve got me.”

“Somebody is getting a big head.”

Sherilee came for the fire and to watch the snow. The couple said nothing. Speaking to Sherilee gave her license to vent her unhappiness. She could be tiresome.

Sherilee was young, small, beautiful, almost porcelain in her perfection. She looked years younger than she was, which was only Kristen’s age. In his absence she had become pathologically enamored of King Bragi, based upon a brief, furtive liaison with a man older than her own father. In her dramatic way she had reconstructed her life around what she thought she had lost when the King had fallen.

Sherilee sighed dramatically.

Her performance drew no response. After further vain sallies, the tragic doll declared, “There must be something we can do to rescue him.”

Sherilee was one of a tiny number of people who knew King Bragi was alive and a prisoner.

Kristen sighed herself, then plunged into the game. “Michael Trebilcock and Aral Dantice got away with that once, when they rescued Nepanthe. It won’t work again. He’s being held by the Tervola, not some dinkle-brain queen of Argon.”

She played loosely with history but facts did not matter here. What did was the undeniable futility of any effort to free the King. To start, no one knew where he was being held. Unless, maybe, Michael Trebilcock or Aral Dantice knew. But Michael was out of touch and Aral no longer haunted Kavelin. Trebilcock might be dead. He had not been seen for months.

But Michael was his own man. He went his own way. And that worried everyone.

Since coming to Kavelin Michael Trebilcock had created his own hidden realm of dedicated friends and allies who disdained the small-minded politics of the Lesser Kingdoms. Those people believed in the welfare of the whole instead of that of the partisan.

Michael Trebilcock had remained faithful to Bragi while Bragi was king but Bragi was never fully confident of Trebilcock.

Sherilee asked, “Do you think Aral is in touch with Michael?”