“Can you believe it?” he asked his wife.

Miriamele was smiling, but it was the smile she wore when her days holding court ran long, when she was worried and tired. “Believe what?”

“This.” People in the crowd were actually calling out his name, familiar as old friends. He could never quite make her understand how strange it seemed to him. His wife had been looked at all her life, praised and scorned by folk she had never met, her clothes and appearance and even her facial expressions discussed by strangers as comfortably as if she were a member of their household. “All right, me. They all came out to see me—a kitchen boy. Because someone else decided I’m a king, so they all said, ‘Well, that’s all right then. Hooray for King Simon!’”

Like Rinan, he thought, and the memory of the boy’s pale, slack face came back to him, as it had for days. The harper hadn’t seen someone who had once been a confused, frightened youth like himself, he’d seen only a grown man. He’d only seen the king. And he’d done what his king had told him to do. Now that boy is dead, Simon thought, buried with two dozen more men in a field by the side of the Frostmarch Road. Because he believed—

“You hear cheers only for the king?” Miriamele asked him.

“I didn’t mean it that way, dear one,” he told her. “I meant because you’re used to this.” He looked at the children leaning perilously out of the upper windows as they left Market Square and entered Main Row, took a deep breath, and did his best to stop thinking about the harper. “I’m not. I never will be. What do they see?”

“They see the king—and the queen. They see us and they know that things are as they should be, that God is still watching over them.” She looked out across the field of faces. “They see that the seasons will come and go as they should, that the rain will fall and the crops will grow. They see that someone is here to protect them from the evil things they fear.”

“You don’t sound as if you believe any of that.”

“Oh, Simon, what does it matter?” Miri looked at him, but only for a moment, then turned back to the crowds, her queenly smile once more in place. “It’s all a pageant, like St. Tunath’s Day. We pretend to take care of them and they pretend to love us.”

“But they do love us,” Simon said. “Don’t they?”

“As long as the seasons turn and the rain falls and the barley sprouts, yes. Not that you and I have much to do with any of that. And if we go to war and their brothers and sons die, they’ll blame us.”

He looked at her face, her wise, familiar, beloved face. “You’re frightened by what happened on the road—aren’t you? And that White Hand fellow’s message?”

“Of course I’m frightened, and you should be too. Because you were almost killed, Simon. Because we thought we had pushed those pale-skinned things back into the mountains for good. And now it’s going to start all over again. The war with the Norns almost killed us when we were young and strong, and we are neither of those things now.”

“I was frightened for you as well,” he said, not certain what he was defending, but still feeling a need. “I heard your voice just before they charged. I didn’t know where you were!”

Miri reached across to touch his hand but said nothing more for a while.

They rode through the widest streets and into St. Sutrin’s Square. Here the crowds were making festival in front of the great church; they cheered loudly as the royal procession made its way past. Musicians were playing and those who had room to dance were dancing. Simon and Miriamele stopped to exchange greetings with Archbishop Gervis and the mayor of Erchester, Thomas Oystercatcher, a fat, shrewd man who made sure everyone saw him bow to the king and queen—but not too low—and be acknowledged in turn. The merchants and city government of Erchester always fiercely protected their independence, even on a day of celebration. After his bows, the mayor straightened and waved his cap to the crowd as though he were the one being celebrated.

“Squeezing every last drop out of the teat, Lord Mayor?” the queen asked him, but quietly, so that only the mayor, the king, and the archbishop heard her.

The tall buildings on either side of Main Row now blocked the sun, and the returning royal party rode down a long corridor of shadow, horses’ hooves squelching in the mud. The soldiers in front of them had taken off their helmets to show their faces as they waved to the crowds on either side, many of them friends and loved ones who had not seen them since the beginning of winter.

“Look at them all,” Miriamele said. For a moment Simon thought she was talking about the unhelmeted soldiers, but then realized she meant the cheering residents of Erchester. Main Row had opened up into the wide thoroughfare just before the Nearulagh Gate and the entrance to the Hayholt. “Half of them have never known anything else but peace. Or you and I as their monarchs.”

“But surely that is good.” His own mood had been sorrowful all day, but his wife’s thoughts seemed even darker, grim enough to worry him. “That’s what we worked for. To give them peace and help keep them fed. That’s good, Miri.”

“It has been. Perhaps it won’t be from now on.”

He pursed his lips and kept silent. Simon had learned early in his marriage that there were times when he could only make things worse. She’s never forgotten what her father did to these people and this land, he thought. She’s never forgotten her father at all, more’s the pity.

For a moment he thought of King Elias back in his brief heyday, riding through this same gate on the way to his coronation, beneath these same wonderful, detailed carvings of Prester John’s century-old victory over Adrivis, the last imperator of Nabban. The decline of the ancient southern empire had begun long before, but after John’s victory, Nabban, once the master of the world, had become merely a part of John’s own empire—a domain stretching from the islands in the warm southern ocean to the freezing northlands of Rimmersgard. And when John had died at last in great old age, and Miriamele’s father, the king’s handsome, brave son Elias had taken the throne in peaceful succession, it had briefly seemed a great empire in truth, an empire of peace and plenty—and permanence.

But only a scant year later Erchester had become a haunted place, with men and women scuttling like beetles from one place of dubious shelter to another, houses collapsed under the weight of snow and neglect, and strange shadows walking the empty streets by night. The Hayholt and its proud towers had become something even more frightening, a warren of whispered secrets and heart-rending screams that could not be ignored but were never investigated, as the castle’s dwindling population hid behind locked doors after sundown.

In the end, Miriamele had been forced to kill her own father. It was to save him as much as to stop him, and had quite possibly saved them all, but she never spoke of it, and Simon tried never to mention it.

But it will never be that way again—we won’t let it. Miri must know that. Yes, bad things will still happen—that’s the lot of mortal man—but Miri and I, we are meant to be the happily-afterward.

The king found himself unconvincing.

•   •   •

If Erchester was a broil of banners and cheering throngs, the royal company found a slightly more reserved greeting in the castle itself, although the courtiers and servants were clearly delighted to see their monarchs returned. Simon, Miriamele, and the other nobles dismounted in the Outer Bailey and most of the troops dispersed from there to the barracks, although the royal guard still surrounded the king and queen. Simon did his best to look pleased and grateful as functionary after functionary came forward to greet the royal couple and welcome them home.