"Where is he?"
Aaliyah looked up from the linen.
Rachel Farrar was standing in the doorway of the east corridor in a pale blue dress with Beatrice and two other girls behind her, and all four of them had clearly been up for some time getting ready to find somebody.
"Good morning, my lady."
"Good morning. Where is he?"
"His highness?"
"Yes."
"At the training grounds, my lady. He has been there since before the sun came up."
Rachel looked genuinely confused.
"Why?"
"Because that is where he goes," said Aaliyah. "Every morning."
"Every morning?"
"Every single one, my lady, for longer than you have been able to read."
Beatrice leaned in and whispered something. The girl on the end giggled.
"Can we go?" said Rachel.
Aaliyah looked at the four of them for a long moment, and folded the sheet in her hands in half, and then in half again.
"You may certainly try," she said.
---
There were two guards on the arena door and neither of them moved.
"I'm sorry, my lady."
"I only want to watch."
"I'm sorry, my lady. Nobody goes into the Old Master's training without his leave."
"I am the Lady Rachel Farrar."
"Yes, my lady."
"I am going to be queen."
The guard on the left, who was about fifty and had been standing on that door since before Rachel's mother was married, nodded politely.
"Yes, my lady. And on that day, if the Old Master still has breath in him, you'll still need his leave."
Rachel opened her mouth.
Then she shut it.
"Who is the Old Master?" whispered one of the girls.
"I don't know," Rachel whispered back. "But everybody says it like that."
---
Brunch was on the south terrace, which caught the morning sun, and the four parents had been sitting at it long enough that the plates had been cleared and replaced once.
Ealhelm was halfway through a story about his steward's teeth when four girls came up the terrace steps in a determined knot.
"Rachel?" said Jenna.
"They won't let us in."
"In where, darling?"
"The training grounds. There are two guards and they won't let us in because of the Old Master, and I said who I was, and they still won't."
Ealhelm put his cup down.
"You tried to get into the Old Master's arena?"
"I only wanted to watch."
"And the guards said no."
"Yes."
"Good for them," said Ealhelm.
He turned in his chair and looked at Xerxes, and something came into his face that Sito's father could evidently read from long practice.
"No." Said Xerxes.
"I haven't said anything."
"You were going to."
"I was going to say," said Ealhelm, "that I have been in this castle for a day and a half and everybody I talk to says the same thing. 'The prince in the arena. The prince and the Old Master.' Your own guards talk about it on the gate. And I have not seen it."
"You will see it at the tournament in the spring."
"Why not give an old friend an early showing, Xerxes."
"Eal."
"Come on." Ealhelm stood up. "Come on, you've got nothing on until noon, Amestris told me so. Get up. We're going."
Amestris lifted her cup and looked at her husband over the rim of it, and said absolutely nothing.
Xerxes sighed.
Then he stood up.
---
The guards on the door saw the King coming and snapped straight so hard that one of them nearly dropped his spear.
"My Crown."
"Open it."
They opened it.
The arena was loud. It was always loud at that hour — a hundred men in the middle of a morning session, blades and boots and shouting — and it did not get quieter when the King walked in.
It kept getting quieter until one by one the hundred worked out who had walked in, and then it went dead silent all at once.
The Old Master was at the far end of the ground with his hands folded on his cane.
He watched a king, a queen, a duke, a duchess and four girls in their good clothes cross over one hundred yards of dirt toward him, and he did not move until they arrived.
"Your Majesty."
"Master."
"You have brought guests."
"The Duke wanted to see."
"The Duke." The old man turned his head a fraction. "Your Grace."
"Master." Ealhelm bowed, properly, which was not a thing Ealhelm did for most people. "I apologize for the intrusion."
"You do not," said the Old Master. "But it is kind of you to say so."
He looked back at Xerxes.
"Your Majesty, you are aware that I have run this ground for longer than you have been alive and that in all that time no one has walked onto it without asking me first."
"I am aware."
"Your father never did it."
"I know."
"Your grandfather never did it."
"I know, Master."
The eyebrows came down.
"Well," said the Old Master. "At least you have brought people who will not faint. Stand by the rail and do not speak to my students." He turned away. "Boy!"
Sito came over at a run, saw who was standing at the rail, and stopped so abruptly he skidded.
"Father?"
"Continue your session," said Xerxes.
"Yes, Father." Sito looked past him. "Mother. Your Grace. Your Grace. Lady Rachel."
Rachel waved. It was a small wave. One of her friends made a noise.
"Boy," said the Old Master. "Five."
Sito's head turned.
"Five, Master?"
"Five. You did three yesterday and it bored me." The cane swept the line. "Valor. Hob. Ludo. Kellan. Raymond."
There was a sound out of the hundred.
"Raymond, Master?"
"Is there some difficulty, Master Machin?"
Raymond, who was fifteen and a head taller than any of the others and had been told he'd graduate soon, looked at the eight-year-old in the middle of the circle.
"No, Master."
"Then take your place."
---
Ealhelm leaned on the rail.
"Five?"
"Five," said Xerxes.
"He's eight, Xerxes."
"He is eight."
"Those are grown men for the most part. That one's the Machin boy, he's practically a knight already."
"Watch," said the King.
Sito started with his eyes shut.
That was the first thing that made Jenna Farrar put her hand over her mouth. He stood in the middle of the circle with both blades lowered and his eyes closed, and the five of them spread out around him, and he did not look at any of them.
"Begin," croaked the Old Master.
Kellan came first, because Kellan always came first. Sito's eyes opened as Kellan's foot left the ground and he was not where Kellan had aimed. He was a step to the left and a step back and Kellan's momentum carried him straight into the line of Ludo's approach, and the two of them had to break off or collide.
That bought Sito a second.
He spent it on Hob.
Hob got one strike away and Sito took it on the flat of his left blade, turned it, and went under the arm, and the practice sword touched Hob's ribs so lightly that Hob looked down at it as though he did not believe it.
"Hob, out," said the Old Master.
Valor and Raymond came together.
This was the part Ealhelm talked about for the rest of his life.
The two best men on that ground, coming from opposite sides at the same moment, and a eight-year-old between them.
Sito did not go to either of them. He dropped almost to the dirt, his right blade sweeping at Valor's shins, and as Valor jumped it his left hand opened and the sword left it.
It went at Raymond.
Raymond knocked it aside easily. It was a good block and he made it without thinking, and in the half second it cost him to make it there was a mithril knife in Sito's empty left hand that had not been there a moment before, and it went past Raymond's ear close enough to cut a hair off the braid.
Raymond froze.
By the time he moved again, the sword was back in Sito's left hand — he had caught it on its way down — and the knife was back in the belt at his hip, and Valor had landed from his jump directly into the tip of a practice blade that was waiting for him.
"Valor, out," said the Old Master. "Raymond, out."
Raymond put up both hands.
"Fair, Master."
Kellan and Ludo lasted another forty seconds between them. They did well. Sito put them both on the ground anyway.
---
Nobody at the rail said anything.
Ealhelm Farrar, who had fought in two border wars and held a dukedom for twenty years and seen, by his own account, most things a man could see, was standing with both hands flat on the rail and his mouth slightly open.
"That's not—" he said. "Xerxes, that's not a eight-year-old."
"He is eight."
"I have a eight-year-old. That is not what they look like."
He was not wrong, and it was the build that made it worse. A boy that age ought to be all elbows and knees. This one was not.
There was too much shoulder on him for the frame, and the forearms were the forearms of somebody half again his age, and when he moved there was nothing loose in it anywhere.
He had just gone through five grown men in about two minutes and he was barely breathing like a boy who had only walked up a single flight of stairs.
"What do you do with him," said Ealhelm quietly. "What do you do with that?"
"You train it," said Xerxes.
Jenna was holding on to her husband's arm.
The Queen had not moved at all. She was watching her son with exactly the same expression she used for reading correspondence.
"He has improved," she said.
"He has," said the King.
That was all either of them said about it.
---
Rachel was not looking at the fight.
She had watched the beginning of it, and then at some point in the middle she had stopped watching what he was doing and started watching his face — which did not change at all, the whole way through.
Not when the five of them came at him. Not when he threw the sword. Not when he put the Machin boy's braid in danger. It stayed calm and a little bit bored, as though he were doing something ordinary on an ordinary morning.
His dark hair had fallen over his eyes in the fight and he pushed it back with his wrist without letting go of the blade.
She scanned him up and down and her eyes took in all of him. The sweat made his muscles glisten and she felt her heart race as she stared.
When she finally peeled her eyes off of his muscles she found his piercing ice-blue eyes looking right at her. She felt her pulse quicken and couldn't look away.
"Rachel," whispered Beatrice.
"What."
"Rachel, your mouth."
Rachel shut her mouth.
---
The Old Master had them shown out after the throwing drill.
He did not say anything to them as they left. He waited until the gate had shut behind the King, and then turned to Sito, and his mustache moved.
"Hmph."
"Master?"
"You showed off."
"I didn't."
"You threw the sword at the Machin boy."
"That was the drill."
"The drill does not include throwing the sword, boy. The drill includes throwing the knife. You threw the sword so that you could throw the knife and so that a Duke of Epiria could see you do it."
Sito considered that.
"Maybe... a bit of that is true," he admitted.
"Hmph," said the Old Master again, and Sito was nearly certain it was the sound of somebody trying not to laugh.
---
He was told at noon, still wet from the bath, that he was to give the Lady Rachel a tour of the castle grounds.
"All of them?" he said to Alfred Cagle.
"As many as the Lady Rachel wishes to see, your highness."
"What if she wants to see all of them?"
Alfred smiled. "Then that," he said, "will be your afternoon."
---
She wanted to see all of them.
She came without her friends, which Sito thought was probably on purpose, and she had changed again, into something green.
He showed her the long gallery with the portraits in it and she looked at every one of them.
He showed her the east garden and she wanted to know what every single flower was. He did not know almost any of them, and she seemed to find that funny.
He showed her the kitchens.
"Myprince," said Damien, and then saw who was with him and went abruptly respectable. "My lady. Welcome."
"Is this where the food comes from?"
"It is where all the food comes from, my lady."
"All of it?"
"Every crumb," said Damien, and gave her a honey cake off a tray that had not been for her, and winked at Sito over her head.
Rachel ate it walking out and got honey on her fingers and did not know what to do with them. Sito gave her his handkerchief, and she looked at it as though he had handed her a jewel.
---
"You were very good this morning," she said, on the wall walk.
"Thanks."
"I didn't understand it."
"Most people don't."
"You threw your sword at that big one."
"Raymond."
"And then there was a knife. Where did the knife come from?"
He showed her. He pulled one out of the belt and threw it at a post in the courtyard below, and it went in, and then it was back in his belt, and Rachel gasped and grabbed his arm.
"How did it—"
"It's enchanted. It comes back."
"Where did you get it?"
"A general gave it to me."
"A general gave you that." She was still holding his arm. "Is it valuable?"
"Very."
"Oh," said Rachel, and looked at the knife the way she had looked at the handkerchief, and then at him, and then did not stop looking at him for a while.
---
He kept catching her doing it.
On the wall walk. On the stair down to the stables. Standing in the doorway of the armory, when she was supposed to be looking at the weapons.
He did not mind it, exactly. It was just strange. Nobody had looked at him like that before and he could not work out what it was for.
'She's eight,' he thought. 'It's just a eight-year-old thing.'
He was fairly sure that was right.
---
They ended at the treasury door, because that was where she had wanted to go all along.
"Is it in there?"
"The crown?"
"Yes."
"It's in there," said Sito. "But we can't go in."
"Not even you?"
"Not even me. It's got four guards and you need Father's seal."
Rachel stood looking at the door.
The two guards on it looked back at her with the patience of men who had been stared at by a great many people wanting to see the crown.
"I've practiced," said Rachel.
"Practiced what?"
"Walking in it." She did not look at him. "With a book on my head. Mother started me when I was five. So that when I have to wear it at the wedding I won't look at my feet."
She paused.
"I can do the whole length of the great hall at home without dropping it. I can do the stairs. I did it at supper once even though people said it was silly."
Sito looked at her.
She was still looking at the door. She did not seem to know that she had said anything unusual.
"That's three years," he said.
"Yes."
"Every day?"
"Most days." She shrugged. "Mother says a queen should never look down. And I should like to be good at it. If I'm going to be queen I should like to be very good at it."
Sito did not have anything to say to that.
So he said, "Do you want to see the view from the top of the east tower? You can see the whole city."
Rachel turned around, and her face lit up like somebody had opened the window blinds.
"Yes!" She said excitedly. Then in a quieter voice, "please."
---
He called Naeva before supper, because he had been told to.
"You called."
"You said before supper."
"I did not think you would." Naeva sounded pleased and was trying not to. "Well?"
"Well what?"
"The true thing. You were to tell me one true thing about Rachel Farrar that is not about her hair."
Sito sat on the windowsill with the crystal in his hand and looked down at the courtyard, where Beatrice and the other two were sitting on a bench in a row whispering about something and pointing at the stables.
"She practices walking with a book on her head," he said. "So that she won't look down when she's wearing the crown."
There was a pause.
"A book?"
"Yeah. Ever since she was five."
"Every day?"
"For the most part. She said her mother is the one who told her to do it."
Naeva was quiet for a long time.
"That is a very sad thing," she said at last.
"Yeah."
"That is not the true thing I wanted."
"I know. But it's the one I got."
"I wanted something bad." Naeva sounded genuinely annoyed.
"I wanted you to tell me she was rude to a servant or she laughed at somebody or she has a voice like a goose. And instead you tell me she has walked around for four years with a book on her head, and now I cannot be cross with her at all, and it is your fault."
"Sorry."
"Is she still staring at you?"
"How did you know she was staring at me?"
"Sito."
"She stares a bit," he admitted. "I don't know what for."
Naeva made the noise again, the one he did not trust.
"You do not know what for."
"No. I think it's a eight-year-old thing."
"You say that as if you are not eight."
"Well you do the same thing."
He could hear the fake smug smile in her voice. "We elves mature faster than human so no it's not the same thing."
Sito laughed.
"So you really do not know why she stares at you?"
"I truly have no clue. Why don't you tell me?"
"Oh," said Naeva. "Oh, you are just hopeless."
"What? What did I say?"
"Nothing,"