"Six," said Damien.
"Six what?"
"Six dukes. Six duchesses. Six households, every one of them with a cook who thinks he could do my job, and a steward who will tell me the Duke does not eat onions, and I will have been cooking with onions for that man for fifteen years every visit."
Damien had flour up to both elbows and a look in his eye that Sito hadn't seen since the Hollow in Greymarch. "Every seat in the great hall, every night, for five nights, my prince. Everyseat."
"I can help."
"You can always help, it is the one thing in this castle I can rely on." Damien shoved a basket of carrots down the table at him. "Julienne. Thin as you can. And if your mother's woman comes to fetch you, you were never here."
Sito had done about half the basket when Aaliyah came to fetch him.
"He was never here," said Damien, without looking up.
"He is standing in front of me, Damien."
"He was neverhere."
"He is the Prince of Epiria and he is wanted in the courtyard in a clean coat in a quarter of an hour, and he smells of onions." Aaliyah held out a hand. "Knife down, my sweet. The kingdom is arriving."
---
It arrived all afternoon.
Sito stood between his mother and father on the steps of the great courtyard and watched it come up the hill road one household at a time — carriages and riders and baggage carts and liveried men on foot, and banners he had only ever seen painted in books.
"Trotter," said Amestris quietly, as a green-and-gold party came through the gate. "The Duke has a bad knee and will pretend he does not. Do not look at it."
"Yes, Mother."
"Bekker. Blue. The Duchess is Ashinan by birth and will speak to you in their tongue to see if you answer, so answer."
"Yes, Mother."
"Coldren. Grey." A pause. "Be courteous."
Sito looked at her. She did not explain.
The Farrars came in the middle of the afternoon, and Ealhelm was out of the carriage before it had stopped, bowing correctly to the King in front of the guards and then winking at Sito behind his hand. Jenna waved and smiled sweetly.
Rachel got down last, in a pale gold dress that had clearly been planned for this exact moment for several weeks, and gave him a curtsy so perfect that one of the Trotter footmen dropped a trunk.
The Brewers came last.
Duke Odoacer Brewer was a heavy, red-faced man with small eyes and a voice that reached the back of the courtyard without trying, and his face really did look like a boiled ham.
Beside him walked a big, broad-shouldered boy of about eleven with the same small eyes, scowling at the castle as if it had done something to him.
"Your Majesty. Your Majesty. Your Highness." Odoacer bowed to each of them in turn. "My son, Edric."
Edric bowed.
He came up from the bow and looked straight at Sito, and his scowl got visibly worse when he noticed Sito was taller than him.
---
Rachel found him in the east garden an hour before supper, and she was not alone.
"There you are."
"Lady Rachel."
"I've been looking everywhere. Somebody said you'd be in the kitchens and I went to the kitchens and a very large man shouted at me."
"That's Damien."
"He's very rude."
"He's feeding the whole kingdom tonight," said Sito. "He's allowed."
Rachel decided this was acceptable, and turned, and gestured behind her with enormous importance, like a woman introducing a string of prize horses.
There were six of them.
"These are my friends," said Rachel. "They all wanted to meet you."
"You already know Beatrice."
"Hello, Beatrice."
"Hello, your highness," said Beatrice, and went bright red, and looked at the ground, and then at Rachel, and then very hard at a rosebush.
"And this is Isolde."
A tall, fierce-looking girl with a dark braid came forward before Rachel had finished saying her name.
"Isolde Machin," she said. "Raymond's sister."
"Oh Raymond's—"
"He fought you when you were seven and you beat him, and he came home and would not speak to anybody for a week," said Isolde, all in one breath. "And then he spent the next two years talking about you at every single supper, 'the prince did this, the prince did that', until my mother told him to stop. So I've been hearing about you longer than anyone here. Including Rachel."
"Isolde," said Rachel, in a warning voice.
"What? It's true."
"You don't have to say it."
"Why not? It's *true*."
"This is Maud," said Rachel, slightly louder than necessary.
Maud Trotter was small and sharp-faced, with red hair and freckles and the expression of somebody who had been waiting all afternoon to be funny.
"Your highness." She curtsied, and it was nearly as good as Rachel's, and she clearly knew it. "Is it true you've never worn the crown?"
"It's true."
"Never?"
"It's not mine yet."
"How strange." Maud looked sideways at Rachel. "Rachel's practiced, you know. For years. Walking around with a great heavy book on her head, all the way down the gallery at Farrar. Haven't you, Rachel?"
Rachel's ears went pink.
"That's private, Maud."
"It's not private, everyone at Farrar knows, the stable boys do impressions of it."
"Maud."
"I'm only saying it's very dedicated," said Maud innocently, and smiled at Sito in a way that made it plain she thought she'd won something.
The boys were further back.
"Edric Brewer," said Rachel, in a flatter voice.
"We've met," said Edric.
He had pulled himself up to his full height and his shoulders were back and his chin was up, and he was still about half a head shorter than a boy two years younger than him. Sito watched him notice that. It did not improve his mood.
"You're tall," said Edric.
"Everyone keeps telling me."
"For nine."
"For nine," Sito agreed.
"I'm eleven."
"I know. Your father said."
Edric's jaw worked, and he seemed to be searching for something else to say that would put him back on top of the conversation.
"I train," he said. "With a sword. My father got a man from Coldren. He says I'm the best he's had in years."
"That's good."
"Do you train?"
Sito thought about thirty men lying on the stone of the arena, and Marcus on the road outside Greymarch telling eleven guards 'the boy was in the wagon'.
"A bit," he said.
"With who?"
"There's an old man who shouts at me."
Edric looked satisfied with that. The boy behind him did not.
"Aldous Coldren," said the boy behind him, before Rachel could introduce him.
He was thin and pale and very neat, with grey eyes and a grey coat, and he bowed exactly as low as protocol required and not a hair further.
"Lord Aldous."
"Your highness." Aldous straightened. "An old man who shouts at you."
"Yes."
"In the arena. The one they're dressing for tomorrow."
"That's the one."
"They say the Old Master trains in that arena," said Aldous. "They say he only takes a hundred and they're all awakened."
"They are."
"Then how do you train with him," said Aldous quietly, "before you've had your Rite?"
Nobody else seemed to notice the question. Edric had started telling Isolde about his man from Coldren. Maud was whispering something to Beatrice.
Sito looked at Aldous Coldren, and Aldous looked back, perfectly polite, perfectly patient.
"He makes an exception," said Sito. "I'm the prince."
"Of course," said Aldous. "Forgive me."
He stepped back into the group, and did not ask anything else, and Sito found that he was watching him out of the corner of his eye for the rest of the afternoon.
The last one was the smallest.
"And this is Piers," said Rachel. "He's only eight."
"I'm nearly nine," said Piers Bekker indignantly. He was round-faced and freckled, with a cowlick that stuck straight up from the crown of his head no matter what anybody did to it, and he was looking at Sito with an expression of total, uncomplicated delight. "Is it true you went to Vradia?"
"It's true."
"Like actually went? To the elves?"
"Actually went."
"Did you see one?"
"I saw about a thousand."
Piers let out a breath like a kettle.
"What were they like?"
"Tall," said Sito. "And a little rude sometimes, but not on purpose. And they don't have a word for tree."
"They don't have a word for—"
"They've got a word for every kind of tree. They just don't have one for all of them together. You ask what the word for tree is and they look at you confused."
Piers stared at him as though he had just been told the secret of the universe.
"That's the best thing anyone's ever told me," he said.
Sito noticed, then, that all three of the boys were standing straighter than they had been when they came into the garden.
Edric had his chest out. Aldous had squared his narrow shoulders without seeming to know he'd done it. Even Piers had drawn himself up to his full height, which put the top of his cowlick roughly level with Sito's collarbone, and was holding it there with visible effort.
---
After that it became very loud very quickly.
Isolde wanted to know how many times he'd beaten Raymond, and Maud wanted to know if the elves had crowns.
Beatrice wanted to know nothing, out loud, but kept edging closer to him on the garden bench until Rachel sat down firmly in the space between them.
Edric wanted everyone to know about his man from Coldren. Piers wanted to know absolutely everything about Vradia, in order, starting at the border.
Rachel wanted to be sitting next to him, and managed it, and made a point of saying 'my betrothed' twice in five minutes, the second time in Isolde's direction.
"He's only betrothed," said Isolde.
"He's my betrothed."
"I'm just his friend. You're not allowed to be jealous of friends."
"I'm not jealous—"
"You're doing a face."
"I am not doing a face!"
Sito sat on the bench in the east garden in the middle of all of it and understood, somewhere around the fourth argument about who was sitting where, that he had never done this before.
Not once. Not in this life.
He had the Old Master and the hundred, who were grown men. He had Willem and Ramsey on the gate. He had Damien and Yoko in the kitchen and Aunt Lia upstairs and a crystal in his coat that talked to a girl in a tree hundreds of miles away.
He had never sat on a bench with a group of others his age and been argued over.
It was loud and silly and nobody was saying anything that mattered, and he liked it far more than he had any intention of telling any of them.
---
The eve-of-tournament supper was in the great hall, and it was the largest room full of people Sito had ever sat in.
Six ducal households along the lower tables. The Masters of Epiria, all eight of them, up near the dais.
Marcus looking handsome and talking with his hands, Duncan smiling at nothing, Ragnar eating as though somebody might take it from him, Leo looking at Marcus as though Marcus had done something to him personally.
The Royal Knights, in their green armor, stood ready along the east wall.
The children had been put together at a table below the dais, which was plainly somebody's idea of a kindness to give their parents some peace and quiet.
Rachel was on Sito's left. Isolde had fought her way onto his right. Edric had ended up directly opposite, which he did not seem pleased about, and was spending most of his supper trying to reach things on Sito's side of the table in a way that required him to stand up.
Up at the ducal tables, Duke Odoacer Brewer was watching his son.
He watched Edric stand up to reach the salt. He watched Edric sit back down, directly across from the prince, with the Farrar girl sitting at the prince's elbow. He watched Rachel lean over and say something to the prince and laugh.
His face had gone a shade darker than boiled ham.
He leaned toward the man next to him and said something behind his hand. The man next to him was Lanfranc Coldren, and Coldren nodded slowly.
Xerxes Meridius, at the high table, lifted his eyes from his plate.
He looked at Odoacer Brewer.
That was all he did. It went on for about a second. It was not a glare. It was not anything anyone could have described afterward as hostile. It was simply the full and undivided attention of the King of Epiria, turned for one second onto one man in a full hall, and then taken away again.
The King went back to his supper.
He did not look at the Duke of Brewer again for the rest of the evening. He did not address a single word to him. When Odoacer rose, later, to toast the tournament, Xerxes lifted his cup with everyone else and looked at the far wall while he drank.
Odoacer sat down very slowly.
He did not eat anything else.
Three tables away, Ealhelm Farrar picked up his own cup, caught the King's eye across the hall, and raised it about half an inch.
Xerxes did not acknowledge it. But he did not look away quite as fast as he had from Brewer.
---
"What was that?" said Sito, under the noise.
"What was what?" said Rachel.
"Your father just did something with his cup. To mine."
Rachel looked up at the dais, and then over at her father, who was now laughing loudly at something Jenna had said, and shrugged.
"He does that," she said. "They're very old friends. They have all sorts of stupid things."
---
He went to find Raymond and Valor after supper.
The knights' quarters were in the old north range.
They housed long whitewashed rooms with iron bunks down both walls, and the whole place smelled of oil and leather and nerves.
Men were polishing things that were already polished. Somebody in the corner was praying under his breath.
Raymond was sitting on the edge of his bunk going over a gauntlet with a cloth for what was clearly not the first time.
Sito sat back for a while and watched him go over the same spots multiple times before he approached.
"My Prince."
"You're polishing it again."
"I am polishing it once."
"You've polished it about nine times. It's shiny, Raymond. It's been shiny since I first came in."
"It needs to be perfect." Raymond set the gauntlet down with great care. "My father will be in the stands. My mother will be in the stands. My sister will be in the stands, which is worse than both of them together. Has Isolde found you yet?"
"She has."
Raymond closed his eyes.
"I apologize," he said, "in advance, and in full, for everything she is going to do this week."
"She's all right."
"She is not all right. She has been telling people at home since she was six that she knows you personally when she has never met you."
"Well, she has now."
"That," said Raymond, "is exactly what I was afraid of."
Valor was flat on his back on the next bunk with his hands behind his head and his boots on the blanket, looking completely at peace.
"Don't listen to any of his ramblings," said Valor. "He's been like this since Thursday."
"You're not nervous?"
"I'm the quickest man in this room. What've I got to be nervous about?" Valor opened one eye. "Come to give us advice, have you?"
"No."
"Yes you have. You've got the look."
Sito considered this.
"The Bekker knight in the first round," he said. "Tall, with the red plume. I watched him warm up this afternoon. He drops his left shoulder before every overhead. Every single time."
Valor sat up.
"Every time?"
"Every time I saw."
"Right." Valor looked at Raymond. "You hear that?"
"I heard it."
"Nine years old," said Valor, lying back down with enormous satisfaction, "and he's scouting our draw for us. The Old Master would have a fit."
"The Old Master would have told you already," said Sito, "if you'd asked him."
"The Old Master," said Raymond, picking the gauntlet back up, "would have told us to work it out for ourselves, and then hit us with a stick when we didn't."
"That's true," Valor agreed. "That's very true."
Sito sat on the end of Valor's bunk for a while and let them argue about the draw, and outside in the dark the arena stood lit with a hundred lanterns for the morning.