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His wife did look as if she could fit in very small spaces.

Remin woke up early his first morning back in the Andelin, when the outlines of his furnishings were just visible in the morning gloom.

A cottage floor was an improvement over the side of the road, but he grimaced as he sat up, rubbing the back of his neck.

For a moment, he wondered if he’d overindulged the night before, but then he spotted the small shape in the middle of his bed.

The princess was a nester.

Even with the whole wide bed to stretch out in, she was curled up in the center, hugging a pillow and burrowed into the blankets so only the top of her head showed.

The Emperor’s daughter, sleeping in his bed at the far end of the empire. Alone.

This was what he had wanted.

There was a small washstand next to the hearth, and he took the opportunity to strip down and wash, then brushed his teeth.

He had long waged an internal debate between fashion and practicality;

he had been born the son of a duke, but he had grown up as something worse than a peasant; more like a particularly insidious species of vermin that the Emperor just couldn’t kill.

The affectations of nobility most often felt like a waste of time—for example, shaving—but people set store by appearances.

One of the reasons he had brought his wife to Tresingale was to begin civilizing the place.

Beginning with himself.

Grumbling inside, Remin shaved.

They needed a public bath.

There were such places in the capital, everything from practical and minimalist facilities for peasants to luxurious places where nobles met to socialize and connive while they were scrubbed, massaged, and beautified.

The princess was too polite to show it, but the stink from his men last night had singed his own nostrils, never mind what it must have done to her aristocratic little nose.

Maybe he’d bump the bathhouse up a few spaces on the list of priorities.

Genon had been nagging about personal hygiene for months anyway.

Tugging a fresh shirt and pair of leather breeches on, Remin went to wake the princess, who generally needed some time before she was sensible.

He had applauded himself for his restraint the night before, but as soon as she sat up, foggy-eyed and disheveled, with her chemise slipping off one slim bare shoulder, it all came roaring back.

“…time izzit?”

she mumbled, squinting into the middle distance.

“Almost dawn.”

Remin’s jaw tightened.

Why did she have to look like that? He refused to confuse himself or her any further.

They had a political marriage, and he knew he was already dangerously soft-hearted toward her, or her tears wouldn’t make him feel like he deserved nothing more than a hanging.

“Get up and get dressed.”

“Mmm.”

She covered her mouth with the back of her hand, yawning, and he turned away to build a fire so he wouldn’t forget himself.

The thing about traitors and spies was that one had to consider the work from their point of view.

Assassins were lightning bolts, but traitors and spies were chameleons, blending in, biding their time, wearing the face of a trusted friend, servant, or sweetheart.

He would rather face a hundred assassins than one spy.

He had never once felt guilty for killing an assassin.

Killing a spy who wore the face of a friend was something that haunted.

Remin was sure that traitors didn’t think about their treachery every moment of the day.

They couldn’t; no one could live that way.

Those moments of friendship, affection, and trust had to be real, part of a complex web of manipulation and—he was sure—cognitive dissonance from the traitor.

They would do whatever it took to get close and stay close, and then await their orders.

It might be days, weeks, or even years, but the order would come.

It had always come.

He knew how these things worked.

He was a fool if he let himself forget it.

“Usually we go to the cookhouse for something to eat in the morning,”

he said as he lit the kindling and slowly added larger branches to the blaze.

“Food isn’t allowed in the cottages to minimize vermin, though you’ll still hear field mice in the thatching.

Between Wen and Genon, we mostly keep them at bay, but I hope you’re not afraid—”

He glanced back to see if the temptress was dressed yet and stopped talking.

She was asleep.

Sitting up.

Her elbow on her knee and her chin propped on her hand, with her eyes closed and the curves of her breasts plainly showing at the neck of her chemise.

Through her parted lips, she was very softly snoring.

This sort of thing was why he had to lecture himself about assassins and spies.

Bending, he shook her shoulder, trying to keep the corner of his mouth from twitching.

This was not funny.

It was not cute.

“Wake up.”

She sucked in a breath and her eyes opened up wide.

“I’m awake.”

“Lies,”

he said, pulling her bodily out of bed.

He had seen her do that trick before, her eyes would slam shut again just as quickly.

“Get dressed.”

A few minutes later, the realization that there was nothing like a privy in the cottage and the Duchess of Andelin could hardly go in the bushes thoroughly woke them both up, and Remin once again regretted the lack of a maid.

It was time to consider more fixed sanitation facilities anyway.

“Don’t be sorry, it’s not your fault,”

he said gruffly, closing the door of the cottage behind them.

He genuinely didn’t mean to keep embarrassing her this way.

His decision to bring her to the valley had not been entirely spiteful.

Even a man like Miche didn’t know all the things that were needful for a woman’s comfort, and Remin had thought the Emperor’s daughter should face a little deprivation.

He had expected her to tell him—often, loudly, and at length—exactly what was lacking.

Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined the daughter of Emperor Bastin Agnephus would look at a woolly bed in a crofter’s cottage and tell him she could curl up smaller.

In every other way, though, she perfectly suited his purposes.

She looked like a shepherdess from a pretty pastoral painting in her green wool gown, even if she was a little red in the face, and the men outside were falling all over themselves to doff their caps and bow.

“Good morning, Your Grace.”

“Morning, m’lady.”

“Good morning,”

she said, looking a little startled, but nodded graciously and left them staring, with very foolish expressions.

This was the other reason he had brought her here, over the objections of the Duke of Ereguil.

After years of war and questionable female companionship, his men badly needed civilizing.

He wanted to give them the first opportunity to settle his lands.

He wanted the veterans of the Vallethi War to send for their wives, their children, their sweethearts and their extended families, and spread out across the valley for which they had bled.

They had earned it.

But right now, Tresingale was a rough and dangerous place, and someone had to be the first.

If the Duke of Andelin was willing to bring the Emperor’s sacred daughter to the valley, then surely it was safe to bring their own families.

It was going to be a little rough for the princess, though.

“Get out of me kitchen and stop nibblin’ at me cheese before I take a cleaver to ye!”

Wen the cook shouted as Remin entered the kitchen.

Where Genon was massive, Wen was just fat.

Enormously fat.

The fact that he could fit in tiny camp kitchens seemed to defy all natural laws of space and physics, and Remin’s personal theory was that Wen’s bulk was just more fungible than the average person’s.

He didn’t squeeze into tight spaces so much as ooze.

“Shiftless bastard, ye’ll do without bread today and see whether ye go filching my fine aged cheddar, ye skiving arse—”

At the far end of the galley-style kitchen, a boy vanished out the door, accompanied by the cook’s curses.

“Wen.

Wen. Wen!”

Remin raised his voice and fought the urge to cover the princess’s ears.

Taming Wen was going to be her version of crossing the Brede.

“Watch your tongue.”

The cook drew a breath as if he were about to treat His Grace to a similar diatribe, but then he spotted the princess.

His eyes narrowed.

“So,”

he said, inflating like a frog.

“It begins.”

“My wife,”

Remin warned.

“This is Princess Ophele, who is now your duchess.”

“I don’t care if she’s now me bloomin’ Empress.

I told ye, I won’t have women in me kitchen.

I’ll quit.”

Wen slapped a grubby wet towel onto the counter as if to punctuate the point.

“I will quit.

Next thing she’ll be asking for pudding and saying where’s the coriander and I won’t have it, I tell ye, I won’t have it.

I do good plain cooking me own way.”

“She’s not here to cook,”

Remin growled.

“I told you yesterday I would be bringing her by so you could pay your respects.”

“Oh aye, an honor,”

said the cook, glaring.

“Then what’s Her Highness got to do with me, eh?”

“Princess, sometimes you’ll come here to fetch lunch for the men.”

Though Remin was reconsidering the wisdom of this course.

“Wen will have it packed up in a basket.”

“Will I get lunch, too?”

she asked anxiously, so soft he wasn’t entirely sure he had heard her right.

“Of course you will,”

he said, insulted.

Did she think he planned to starve her? “Wen will have something fit for a lady, as thanks for saving him a walk.”

“In a pig’s—”

The cook began, but cut himself off at Remin’s warning glare.

The duke was willing to tolerate certain liberties from his men, as long as they did their work well, but his tolerance only went so far.

“The princess doesn’t need to hear your filth, Wen.”

“Then why’d ye bring her to me, then,”

the cook grumbled, but finally, grudgingly, bowed.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, m’lady.

Name’s Wen.

Just Wen.

Consider me hands your own, unless you ask for bleeding pudding.”

“Pleased to meet you,”

the princess said a little faintly, looking at him as if he were a bomb that might go off.

But she was trying; she had taken Remin’s advice about offering a few personal words to each person she met to heart.

“Thank you for supper.

Last night, I mean.

The bread was good.”

“Aye, aye, glad to hear it.

Ye’re not to come in me kitchen.”

Wen jabbed an enormous finger at her.

“Ye want something, ye stand in the doorway and wait ’til I stop chopping.

Princess or no princess, never talk to me when I’ve a knife in me hand, understand?”

She nodded silently, round-eyed.

Imagining this scene with the haughty princess he had expected to retrieve from Aldeburke had entertained Remin no end, but this was like watching someone shout at a kitten.

“Breakfast, Wen,”

he said flatly.

The sun hadn’t even cleared the horizon yet and everything was much more complicated than he expected.

* * *

“We’ll be at the south side of the wall,”

said Sir Miche later that morning, walking south beside Ophele along the lane to the wall.

The maids at Aldeburke had sighed over Sir Miche in the few days he was there, and loudly enough for even Ophele to hear about it; he was very, very beautiful, with long golden hair and light hazel eyes, seven or eight years older than the duke.

“You might have seen it on the way in, they finished almost a mile of wall while we were gone.

Eventually it’ll be the base for a new bridge over the Brede, they’ve already finished one caisson and are working on the footings.”

“What’s a caisson?”

“A wall that holds back the river, basically.”

Sir Miche nudged her around a mud puddle.

The road was almost all mud, but it was very picturesque otherwise, with the sun casting a golden light over green hills and the birds singing their morning songs.

“Not the sort of thing that a lot of ignorant soldiers can tackle, I assure you.

We’re just laborers for the experts.”

“What do you need me to do?”

she asked.

“Fetch and carry, though I beg your pardon for saying it.

Normally the sort of thing we’d have squires to do, or pages, but we’re short of both and it’s a waste to have a grown man doing such work.

Just having someone to haul water will save them coming off the wall or up out of the ditch for a drink.”

Ophele pondered this.

“That will really be helpful?”

“Every foot we can add to the wall matters.”

Sir Miche glanced down at her.

“Did Rem tell you about some of the…problems we have in the valley?”

“Wolf demons?”

“Oh, thank the stars.”

He heaved an exaggerated sigh of relief, hand over his heart, and made her giggle.

“Rem’s spreading the word about the beasties through the Empire now, to dissuade some of the settlers, but now all the scholars are curious and the only thing worse than a rabble of farmers is a passel of academics from the Tower.

But it’s no joke to us, I’m afraid.”

“Keeping the hungry things out,”

she guessed, and he nodded.

“We have a palisade coming down from the north, but stranglers don’t think much of a wooden fence.

It has to be stone, and stone takes time.

We’re lucky we’ve got the river on two sides.

That gives us nine miles of stone wall to build, about five and a half running north to south, and four miles east-west.

In a few months, hopefully we’ll join up with the north wall crew.

But don’t be scared,”

he added quickly.

“We’ve been in this valley for seven years, and contending with the beasties for almost half of that.

We know what we’re about.”

The only thing she could do was trust him when he said that.

But Ophele still looked over the hills to the distant mountains and the tangled forest at their feet, where the hungry things were, and wondered if she was afraid.

The wall itself was amazing.

She was used to the almost decorative walls of Aldeburke, fine white plaster and short enough that she could have climbed over them by herself, if she wanted to.

The stone wall cutting through stands of black pine had to be at least twenty feet tall, with the dark water of the Brede flowing behind it at the foot of a steep bank.

It was early enough that the work crews were still gathering, brawny stonemasons and mortarmen, an engineer named Guisse who was very eager to explain absolutely everything, and an ever-increasing number of laborers whose task was to dig and haul stone.

The wall was covered with wooden scaffolding, ladders, pulleys, and ropes, and several blacksmiths were on hand to repair and cast new metal parts as needed.

Before work began, Sir Miche gathered them all together.

“Most of you were introduced to Her Grace last night,”

he began, suddenly all business and looking from one man to the next as if he were memorizing faces.

“To show you how seriously His Grace is taking the construction of this wall, he has asked his lady to lend her own fair hands to help.

You will never in this life have such an honor again.

I trust you will be appropriately humbled.”

Deeply uncomfortable under the weight of so many eyes, Ophele wished she at least had a crown or something.

She felt a very poor specimen of the princess variety.

But at least Sir Miche didn’t expect her to make a speech.

He clapped his hands and sent them off to work, then bent down to mutter, “Don’t worry, they’re as scared of you as you are of them.”

That startled her into a laugh, and she quickly covered her mouth with her hand, giggling.

He grinned, dimples flickering in his cheeks.

“Come, I’ll show you where the well is.

We didn’t mean to dig one, actually, we just hit bedrock and up came the water.

Did Rem already warn you to stay away from the wall and the ditch?”

“Yes.”

All through breakfast.

“Then I won’t belabor the point.

But you’re to be careful, for the men’s sake if not your own, and if you’re not sure of anything, I’ll always be in shouting distance.

And don’t be climbing things,”

he added with a flicker of humor, reminding her that he had been there that day in Aldeburke, when the duke plucked her out of a fir tree.

A proper princess should be horrified by this.

It was squires’ work, the lowest kind of labor, so far beneath her that she should be unaware of its existence.

And it was also much harder than she expected.

Ophele had to stand nearly on tiptoe to push the windlass on the well, and after five buckets she was puffing and reminding herself that thirteen year-old boys did this work.

Boys that wanted to be knights, true, but still.

She was stronger than a thirteen year-old boy, surely.

There were nearly a hundred men working on just this section of the wall, and she could see the construction process in all its stages.

At the furthest end were the excavators, digging all the way down to the bedrock to give the wall an unshakable footing.

From there came the men with mortar and stone, building a thick shell of carefully cut and fitted blocks that would rise up twenty-some feet, with a hollow space in the middle to be filled with a thick, chalky powder and crushed stones.

Wagons creaked back and forth from the wall to the quarry to the west, oxen groaning as they trundled away, and Ophele was careful to stay out of their path as she set down the buckets where Sir Miche had told her and then waited to be told what else to do.

And waited.

And waited.

The men didn’t refuse to drink the water she had brought for them, but an hour passed before she realized that no one was going to ask the Duchess of Andelin to fetch a shovel for him.

She didn’t think they were being rude.

They said thank you every time they came for a dipper of water, drank nervously, bowed, and then hurried back to their work.

And she didn’t want to bother Sir Miche; he was working as hard as any of them, stripped to the waist and pitching in with a shovel at the far end of the trench.

“Is there anything else I can do?”

she asked the next man who came to drink, reminding herself to speak up, as the duke so often admonished her.

“Aye? That is, no, lady, I’m fine,”

he said, looking startled.

“Very grateful for your help. Thankee.”

And he was gone, as if a wolf demon were on his heels.

She sighed and moved to the shade of a nearby oak tree, sitting down on a high root to watch.

Remember your rank, the duke had admonished her as he left her with Sir Miche that morning.

Don’t let them order you about.

It looked as if that would not be the problem.

Sir Miche was right, what she was doing wasn’t useless; so many men went through water buckets remarkably fast, and when there were only two full buckets left, she went to refill the rest, picking her way down the hillside to the well, which stood on a paved platform overlooking the river, sheltered by tall trees.

Drop the bucket.

Crank the windlass.

She tried carrying two buckets at once up the hill, but a wooden bucket filled with water was surprisingly heavy, so she went back and forth eight times, puffing.

They would go through them faster as the day warmed, and her busy brain fastened on this problem, for lack of anything else to do.

There were three places where the men came down from the wall.

There were only two ways they came out of the deep part of the trench.

It was convenient for her to put all the buckets together in one place, but if it were about her convenience, she would have left the buckets by the well.

The stated objective, as defined by Sir Miche, was to reduce the amount of time the men spent off the scaffolding or out of the trench.

“Your buckets are there,”

she told the next man who came down from the wall, pointing to the three buckets she had placed in the shadow of a nearby lilac bush.

“Ah, thank you, lady,”

he said, and inwardly she breathed a sigh of relief.

It might have been a small thing, but she had worried he might scold her for changing something, or that there might have been a reason she had overlooked for the original placement of the buckets.

The diggers seemed to go through water faster, so she took away one of the masons’ buckets and moved it down by the trench, then hurried to fill the buckets for the blacksmiths.

She liked problems of this sort.

Someone on the wall dropped his trowel as she was passing, so she dared to approach the scaffolding, stretching on tiptoe to hand it back to him.

“Sorry, m’lady, thank you very much,”

he said, tugging his forelock.

He had an eyepatch over his right eye, a lanky man as brown as a bean and just as stringy.

“It’s no trouble,”

she said, as awkwardly as he, but then he gave her a crooked smile and she smiled back, and hurried away to gather her empty buckets with a lighter heart.

That was one man who hadn’t had to get off the wall.

Putting the filled buckets back in their new configuration, Ophele went to stand under her oak tree again, her large, watchful eyes open, taking everything in.