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Ophele was never drinking wine again.

It might have surprised her husband to know it, but she was seldom ill.

Spring colds and flus came and went in Aldeburke without ever touching her, and she had slept in the forest in all but the most bitter cold without so much as a sniffle.

But she was unquestionably weak to wine, and by the time the duke realized how much she had swallowed, it was already on the way back up.

She had never been so sick in her life.

Throughout the many miserable hours that followed, she remembered being both mortified and terribly, terribly sorry for something.

She remembered clinging to a tree as she vomited, and someone holding her hair back, and then blackness, and then more vomiting, even though there couldn’t possibly be anything left in her body to eject.

The periods of blackness and vomiting went on for a very long time before it was just black.

When she finally swam back to consciousness, it was afternoon, and she was buried in a pile of furs and cloaks.

Why was she sleeping in the afternoon? For a dazed moment, she thought she was back in Aldeburke, napping in the long grass by the stream, but then the sun struck her naked, defenseless eyeballs like a hammer and she squeezed them shut, shutting her mouth against a swell of nausea.

Her mouth tasted disgusting.

Everything stank of wine.

She felt like she was sweating wine.

“Princess?”

The voice sliced into her brain like a rusty saw, but she slitted her eyes open.

The eclipse looming over her could only be one person.

“Do you still feel sick?”

The duke’s voice was softer than usual as he knelt beside her, pressing his cool fingers to her cheek.

And she couldn’t lie.

If he’d asked her to stand up, her head might have exploded.

“Yes,”

she whispered.

“Drink some of this.

It’s water,”

he added, when one of her eyes cracked open in alarm. “Slowly.”

He had to help her sit up.

And when she saw the camp around her, and all the knights with their backs politely turned, and the horses grazing on their pickets, she realized with a horrible shock that all that vomiting had not been a dream.

She had gotten drunk.

She had gotten so drunk, she was too sick to travel.

She had gotten drunk in front of the Knights of the Brede, and made them sit by the side of the road and wait for her to stop being drunk.

If she could have died right there, she would have.

“We stopped,”

she said faintly.

“We stopped?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m sorry,”

she said, so humiliated that she couldn’t look him in the face.

“Just drink,”

he said, propping her up with one arm and lifting a cup of water to her lips.

“Your body needs water.”

She drank, but the water seemed to be pouring down her cheeks as fast as she drank it.

She choked and turned her face away, clapping her hands to her mouth to keep the disgraceful noise in, the wail of misery that was strangling her.

This time, it was too much.

Burying herself in the pile of cloaks, she sobbed herself sick.

He hated her.

That look on his face, she could never, never forget it.

Even Lady Hurrell had never looked at her like that, as if she hated her enough to die.

And when Ophele thought of how he had touched her, and how nice he had been in the market, the sobs welled up and sliced her throat like razors, because for a little while she had really thought things might be different.

He had been gentle.

He had talked to her, listened to her, even teased her.

It had been almost…friendly between them.

More than friendly.

But she had been stupid.

How could he ever care for her after everything her father had done? After what her mother had done? Her family had destroyed his life.

Her father had been trying to have him killed since he was a boy.

Oh, this particular assassin might not have been sent by her father, but whoever had ordered it had done so in accordance with the Emperor’s will.

Ophele would never forget the sight of the assassin creeping through the shadows, and His Grace had gone to face him with nothing but a broken bed post.

How could he ever forgive her for that? The things her family had done to him could never be made right.

He was right not to trust her.

She was the child of his enemies, and a bastard, too.

Everyone knew that bastards were the seeds of treachery.

Ophele pretended to be asleep for the rest of the day, and the next morning, when the duke asked her if she was well enough to travel, she nodded without lifting her eyes from the ground.

How could she dare to even meet his eyes? How could she face any of them? She had disgraced herself before the Knights of the Brede.

There were actual songs sung about them.

She had sworn an oath to make them proud to serve her and then done the most shameful thing she had ever done in her life.

She spent the whole day looking blankly at the road ahead, so painfully aware of the silent wall at her back that it was all she could do to keep from bursting into tears again.

But she would not do that, she would not.

As soon as they stopped for the night, she went to bed, wishing that she would never wake up.

The first thing she saw the next morning were her books, a boxy lump in the supply wagon wrapped in oilskins.

Thank the stars, she had run into Rou.

Books were a familiar refuge.

She was a coward, hiding from her troubles in their pages, just as she had always done in Aldeburke.

She should say she was sorry, but that word was so hopelessly inadequate it would be an insult to the duke, and the bare thought of standing before the Knights of the Brede to apologize made her tongue wither in her mouth.

Day after day, she felt the duke’s icy presence at her back and all she could do was read and read until the letters danced before her eyes, so ashamed that every time they passed a large body of water, she honestly contemplated throwing herself into it.

“My lady.”

Sir Miche had begun bringing her supper to her, since the duke no longer wanted anything to do with her.

“Please eat.

You can empty the pot, if you like.”

“Thank you,”

she said, without lifting her eyes.

“It is the privilege of a knight to serve a lady,”

he said, angling his head to catch her eyes.

His beautiful face was filled with sympathy.

“Even if it is only rabbit stew and biscuit.

Though if you don’t like it, I’m sure I could find something in that stream.

Catfish, maybe.”

“No, this is fine.”

She took a bite.

“Are you sure? I bet I could catch a juicy toad or two.

Or maybe some pollywogs for tea.”

“No,”

she said again, though that almost won a smile.

He was a very kind man.

Surprisingly, it was The Will Immanent that offered her some solace.

It had many things to say about the concept of balance and order, and the struggle between divine order and the chaos of creation.

No one really wanted to believe in fate or destiny; what was the point of anything, if everything was preordained? Who wanted to think they were a puppet in someone else’s play? But there was no question that in the case of Remin Grimjaw, there was considerable imbalance, and a great debt owed.

This was a familiar thought.

She had been told all her life that she must pay for the crimes of her parents.

But maybe there was a way she could, beyond the simple function of providing His Grace with heirs.

Perhaps she could help him, or at least not hinder him.

It would be a beginning, anyway.

“Will you let me borrow that book when you’ve finished it, my lady?”

Seated by the fire one evening, she looked up in surprise.

The knights rarely spoke to her, except for Sir Miche.

But this time it was Sir Justenin looking down at her in a friendly sort of way, and lending him a book was the least she could do.

“Oh, yes,”

she said.

“You can have it now, if you like.”

Instead of accepting it and walking away, though, he waved a hand and crouched down beside her.

“I can wait.

Do you enjoy theology?”

“I haven’t read much,”

she said, a little nervously.

They called Sir Justenin the Coldest Knight, and he was famous for his defense of the fort at Iverlach three years before, a critical stronghold that he had held through a winter siege, though he and his men had been reduced to eating their boot leather before the end.

The maids at Aldeburke used to sing a song about it, The Snow Kept Falling Down.

“You picked a hard one,”

he said.

“I know the writer, Vigga Aubriolot.

Very dense writing.”

“It is, that’s why it might take me a while,”

she said apologetically.

“I have to stop reading to think about it sometimes, to make sure I understand.”

“That’s how it should be.

Important ideas should take some thinking.”

He leaned over to add a few branches to her fire, sending sparks into the sky.

“What’s one that you had to think about?”

“I liked the part about how the divine perfect made room in the universe for imperfect creation,”

she said, pointing to a passage in the chapter she was currently working through.

“Here.

Mr.

Aubriolot explains that that was the purpose of the earth and the heavens, that the earth is an imperfect place for imperfect beings.”

“He said something of the sort in his first thesis.

It seemed a rather self-evident contention,”

Sir Justenin observed.

“An excuse for bad behavior.”

“I guess so, but…but I didn’t take it that way,”

she offered.

“I thought they were doing us a kindness, so that we could have a place that we could be imperfect while we try to learn better.”

“I will have to pay attention to that chapter,”

he said, looking thoughtful.

And while they were on the subject of imperfect beings, Ophele nerved herself to say what she had been wanting to say for more than a week.

“Sir Justenin,”

she began, feeling color burn from her cheeks to her ears, “I have been wanting to say…not just to you, to all of you…I’m very sorry.

About what happened after Granholme.

And…everything else.”

Everything else, including the deaths of his parents, along with the rest of the duke’s House.

But he didn’t know that she knew that, and she didn’t know how she could even begin to apologize.

His eyebrows went up in surprise.

“No one blames you for that, my lady,”

he said firmly.

“His Grace said you weren’t used to wine, and wine is a dangerous remedy.

If anything, we failed you.

That man should never have gotten anywhere near you.

It would shock anyone, waking up to find an assassin in the room.”

Her father’s assassin.

“That’s very kind of you.”

She bobbed her head in a small bow.

“I won’t ever do such a thing again. I…”

Will do my part, when we get to the valley.

Will make you proud.

Will spend the rest of my life making up for what you have lost.

“I won’t be a disgrace to you,”

she finished, looking away.

It seemed like the most she could aspire to, at present.

* * *

He should have gotten her a maid.

Remin thought this at least half a dozen times per day.

It wasn’t because the princess needed the help.

On the contrary, now that she had books and simpler dresses that she could manage by herself, she was surprisingly self-sufficient.

She knew where to get her own food and drink, she ate from the common stew pot, she competently tended her own fire, and from sunup to sundown her nose was buried in a book.

She had even begun waking up on her own when the camp started moving, though she still stumbled around for the first half hour or so and, three times so far, walked into things.

A week out of Granholme, they were on the outer edge of the Empire and moving through rolling hills where wide swaths of forest were bursting into new leaves and flowers.

Fast-running streams, icy and swollen with snowmelt, ran along the sides of the road, and every day was warmer than the last.

They would pass through one more town before they came to the Brede, a little hamlet called Trema that was to Granholme what Granholme was to Celderline.

There would be no inn there.

The best they would find was a share of a cowshed.

He should have gotten her a maid, Remin thought again.

Maybe that was the real purpose of servants: to serve as a buffer to avoid any unnecessary intimacy in this kind of political marriage.

In the normal course of things, he and his wife would hardly have needed to communicate at all.

They could have lived separate lives in the same vast house, coming together only to discuss household business and conceive children, in brief encounters as passionless as the mating between a prized stud and a mare.

He should have gotten her a maid, and a horse of her own, and taught her to ride it, because maddeningly, his body burned for her.

He tried not to notice, but sometimes he thought she really might be a witch.

All it took was the breeze wafting her scent to him and he flashed back to their nights together, every sound, every sigh, every touch.

He touched her as little as possible and avoided her whenever they weren’t sharing a saddle, but no matter where she was, his eyes found her as if she were a lodestone.

It was worse than when he was a teenager.

At least he hadn’t known what he was missing back then.

“Rem, you’re being an idiot.”

Miche sat down at Remin’s fire one night, which was on the opposite side of the camp from his wife.

“Remember what I told you before you got married?”

“Shut up, Miche.”

Remin was eating his supper and not watching her.

Every night she sat down to take her hair out of its plait and painstakingly brushed it from root to tip until it gleamed, an almost hypnotic ritual, like she was casting some feminine magic.

She was just finishing, and turned to climb up onto the high wheel of the supply wagon to put away her brush.

She really was as nimble as a squirrel.

“I told you not to do anything you don’t want to hear about for the next fifty years.”

When Miche had something on his mind, nothing could shut him up.

Remin could have threatened him at spearpoint and he would have cheerfully impaled himself and delivered his remarks with his dying breath.

“When that girl finishes growing up, she’s never going to forgive you.”

“She’ll reach her majority this year, and she’s plenty old enough to marry.

She’s not a child.”

But watching the princess burrow into her usual nest of cloaks, she looked so vulnerable that Remin had to look away, his jaw clenching.

A trick.

“The sooner she understands her position, the better.”

“If you’re going to treat her like poison every day of your life, why did you marry her? If I’d known you were going to do that, I would have objected at your fucking wedding.”

“I asked for an Emperor’s daughter and I got one,”

Remin snapped.

“Don’t make it more than it is.”

“You’re making a big mistake.”

Miche met his eyes, flat and angry.

“I told you I’d tell you if you were.

She can’t help who her father is.

If you just gave her a chance—”

“Drop it, Miche,”

he said shortly, and walked away.

Remin was not prepared for this.

He had expected a spoiled, haughty noblewoman, sly and conniving, the Emperor with breasts.

It would have given him immense satisfaction to use the Emperor’s blood for his own ends, to defeat whatever machinations she might attempt and get heirs on her that would establish his House for all time.

There was no possible vengeance so complete or enduring.

But the princess refused to play her role.

He kept giving her opportunities to reveal her true colors, so he could catch her in some lie, some deception, but every time it failed to manifest.

Perversely, it only made him more determined to trap her.

It could only mean that she was more cunning than he had expected, more subtle, more patient.

It meant, when she inevitably betrayed him, that it would devastate him.

It was his own fault.

He had almost been taken in by her.

He had let her get too close, close enough to hurt him.

It would be a painful correction, but soon they would both get used to it and understand what lines should not be crossed, and then they would…

He didn’t know how to end that sentence.

At any rate, soon they would be back in the valley and working too hard to care.

The matter of the bandits was his biggest concern, but until they got back to Tresingale and saw how things stood, there wasn’t much he could do about it.

But as the Andelin drew near and they left Trema behind, he and his men often sat up late at night, planning everything that would have to be done.

“The surveyor sent a preliminary map,”

said Edemir, spreading a large piece of parchment in the space they had cleared between lamps.

He had collected the messages waiting for them at Trema’s small garrison.

“This is the proposed town site, and he’s even included the grade of the hills and their elevation.

Here’s the river, and here’s that hill you suggested for the manor, Rem.

It’ll be a steep climb for horses unless you circle the road around the back.”

“Daitians do a terracing thing to manage steep terrain,”

said Bram, who was the most well-traveled among them.

“If you don’t mind climbing a lot of stairs yourself.”

“Not if it means we’ll have a view of the town.

The city,”

Remin corrected.

Tresingale would be a city in his lifetime.

On the far side of the fire, he didn’t notice the princess turn slightly toward them, listening.

“The hill to the east would be good for a training yard.

And the barracks could go here.”

“With a view of the sheep,”

observed Tounot.

It was true that the hills Remin had designated as grazing land were immediately adjacent.

“What you do with your time off is your own business,”

he said, to a rumble of laughter.

“But I won’t force any of you to stay,”

he added, looking at the map.

Specifically, the blank space that lay beyond the borders of the town: the mountains to the north and east, the Talfel Plateau northwest, the moors to the west.

It was a lot of land.

“I told you I’d give you all lands and titles of your own.”

“What sort of bannerman leaves their lord sleeping in a croft?”

Tounot asked lightly.

“Which, if I recall correctly, was located about here.

Next to Tounot Boulevard.”

“Auber Avenue,”

Auber corrected.

“His Grace said everything had to be alliterative.”

This was true, though Remin had consumed a considerable amount of alcohol at the time.

“If that’s the main road going to the new bridge, it can only be Harnost Highway,”

said Miche loftily.

“Miche Marke is going to be on the bad side of town.

Where the brothels are,”

Tounot retorted.

“How dare you, sir.”

“There will be no bad side of Tresingale,”

Remin decreed, putting an end to the argument.

He was glad that they were all steadfast in their desire to stay.

Eventually they would have to go and begin settling those wider lands, or someone else would beat them to it.

But he wasn’t quite ready to give up his knights yet.

Each of them had a task, according to their own inclinations and aptitudes.

Juste, who had lived in an orphanage run by the Brothers of the Shepherd Star, had learned how to manage sheep, cows, and goats.

Auber was a farmer’s son, and several of his many siblings—including the older brother that had made the error of buying wedding rings without a single diamond to shine for the stars—would be arriving in autumn, to farm lands more vast than the niggling acres in Engleberg.

Huber knew horses, Tounot and Bram would manage the incoming settlers, and Edemir did the work of actually procuring the experts and materials they needed to accomplish everything else: the surveyor who was charting the lands around Tresingale, followed by the architects and planners who would decide what to do with it, and the builders to make it real.

Miche pronounced himself useless but willing to lend a hand wherever he was needed.

Already hundreds of people were converging on the valley at the duke’s invitation, and they were going to have to ride hard to beat the first shipments of supplies.

Remin had left behind a few trusted knights and a small force of soldiers, but the amount of work to be done was staggering.

Thoughts of bandits weighed on his mind, and he took some solace in the knowledge that he had left Genon Hengest and Jinmin of Oskerre behind to look after things.

Genon Hengest was a surgeon and veteran that had kept them alive through seven years of war, and Jinmin had once crushed a Vallethi soldier’s head in the palm of his hand like he was cracking a walnut.

The two men could be trusted to keep a grip on things.

“We’ll be arriving in Andelin in two weeks, if all goes well,”

he told the princess the next day as he lifted her into the saddle.

With practice, they had managed to find positions on the horse that allowed them to touch as little as possible.

She nodded.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had heard her speak.

“There won’t be much there,”

he said, wondering how much she had heard, or guessed, about what he was taking her into.

“There’s no manor house, like Aldeburke.

If we’re lucky, we’ll have the main house built by winter, but that’s just the central structure.

It won’t include things like libraries or ballrooms.”

The princess nodded again, solemn as ever.

“You won’t have time to be reading all day,”

he added.

It came out more harshly than he intended.

“It won’t be the life you knew before.

You’ll have to be useful.”

“I will,”

she said, almost inaudibly.

He kept telling her to speak up, but if anything, she was getting worse.

“I’ll work hard.”

For some reason, her meekness infuriated him.

Why wasn’t she angry? She was a princess, the daughter of the Emperor, she should expect to be treated like one.

She should demand better than a wattle-and-daub shepherd’s hut.

Even a serving girl would have balked.

A noblewoman should have raised hell.

“You don’t have much pride, for a princess.”

It just slipped out.

But he wanted something from her, a flicker of temper, of outrage, of hurt.

He had expected a spoiled, haughty princess and kept digging to find her, sure that she must be hidden under this shy, lovely fa?ade.

But she just looked away, her narrow shoulders drawing together.

Whatever her reply was, it was so soft, it was trodden under the heavy thud of his horse’s hooves.