“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Sleep was tugging at him, and for once he was glad he had stopped dreaming. He didn’t want to see that deadly blue eye again. He didn’t want to feel that ancient, unforgotten cold.

He was knocking, knocking so loud the entire castle must hear it, but still the heavy door remained shut, a solid rectangle of dark wood. He pounded until his knuckles were sore, but still no one answered him.

“Father!” His voice was high and quavering because he was close to tears, but knew that if he let them flow he would be mocked—princes do not weep. “Father, are you there? Why won’t you answer?”

Just when he was about to turn away, as he had so many other times, the door silently swung open, then stopped, exposing a black gap of barely a hand’s breadth. He stared. His heart seemed to be thumping as loud as his knuckles had against the ancient wood, as though someone was still knocking. Somehow he knew that his father stood on just the other side, waiting and listening. His father had finally opened the door. He was waiting for his son.

But he’s dead, Morgan realized, and his stomach clenched in sudden terror. The door began to swing inward again, the dark gap growing larger but revealing nothing but blackness beyond. No, my father’s dead. He’s been dead for years—I don’t want to see him that way—!

He sat up, damp with sweat, tangled in a blanket atop a vaguely familiar bed with a warm, slender body stretched next to him. The pounding continued.

“Your Highness!” someone called from the other side of the door, and he recognized the voice of Melkin, his squire. “Please, your Highness, open up! I have a message for you!”

“God’s bloody Tree!” Morgan cursed, trying to still his speeding heart. What good was strong drink if it didn’t keep away bad dreams? Especially that one, the old one that had plagued him so long. The worst one. “In the name of the Aedon, go away!” he shouted, then groaned and rolled on his side. He tried to pull the covers over his head, but the young Rimmerswoman beside him complained at being stifled and tugged them off her face. This ordinary sound and movement pushed back the darkness tangling the prince’s thoughts.

What was the girl’s name again? Svana. The swan. Not a bad name for her, actually. Her hair had been so fair it was almost white, her limbs long and graceful. At least, that was what he had thought when he had been drunk. He wasn’t so certain he wanted to look too closely in the harsh daylight.

The rapping at the door resumed. “Highness, please, don’t go back to sleep! The king and queen have summoned you!”

Morgan groaned. His jaw still throbbed from the blow he had suffered on the tower roof, and his brains felt so foul from too much wine the night before that he would have welcomed his own beheading in Market Square. Instead, he was to be hauled out of his warm sickbed—although in all honesty he had to admit that he was the one who had deliberately made himself sick with drink—to be scolded, doubtless in front of the whole court, for the disaster of Hjeldin’s Tower.

“I said go away, Melkin. Come back when the sun is higher. Tell them I climbed a mountain and flew away.” Oh, sweet Usires, but it would be wonderful to be able to float away on the warm wind. “What time is it?”

“Nearly twelve of the clock, Highness.”

“Then come back when the sun is lower instead.” He unsquinted his eyes for a moment. Even with the windows shuttered, the light leaking past the edges tortured him. “Below the horizon would be best.”

“But Highness! The king and queen . . . !”

“The king and queen can wait. It’ll give them more time to think of things to scold me for. They’ll thank me, you’ll see.”

“But Prince Morgan . . .”

“Go piss in your ear, Melkin.”

Just as he was settling back into the sticky clutches of sleep, the door to the room banged open. Startled, Morgan rolled onto his side, but when he peered through slitted eyes at the doorway, instead of his squire’s lanky form he was surprised to see what looked like one of the mountain trolls standing there waving something at him.

“Get up, Highness!” the stumpy figure announced. “I have good news for you.”

Squinting against the hateful light, he saw at last that it was no troll but only Mistress Buttercup, the extremely short, largely round proprietress of the house. He groaned again. “Good news?”

“Your debt is paid, Prince Morgan.” She shook the sack in her hand, which clinked substantively. “The Lord Chamberlain has sent gold on your behalf, at the orders of the king and queen.”

“What?” He pulled himself up to a sitting position, which required him to remove Svana’s elbow from his chest. “Then why are you waking me?”

“Because this substantial sum was given to me on the understanding that there would be no more coming. Which means that as of this moment, you are detaining my little frost-princess there without pecuniary return to me, and occupying one of my expensive beds as well.” She put her hands on her hips, grinning broadly. “Neither did your benefactors pay for breakfast, so get on with you, Your Highness. Up you go and out.”

“But you’ve been paid!” Which made no sense. Why would his grandparents do such a thing when they were angry with him? “Why are you brawling and shouting at my door when the sun is barely in the sky?”

“Barely touching noon, you mean. Up, up, young princeling, or I will have to get the Ox brothers to help you out of bed.” She waddled to the side of the bed and poked at him with the spoon she often carried. “Your family has paid your debt, for which I give all thanks to a merciful God—and so should you, because you had all but bought this place if it had waited any longer—but it was with the understanding I reject your custom from here forward. Consider your custom rejected, Highness, but of course with my many thanks for your patronage.” Buttercup smiled. Through the throbbing of his head, Morgan thought she looked a bit spiteful. “Up with you. Or have you suddenly become shy?”

He pulled on his breeks slowly and then went looking for the rest of his clothes, trying to make sense of what had just happened, while Mistress Buttercup helped him out by pointing with her spoon. “Over there, I think I detect a sleeve. Under Svana, yes. And your shoes, I see them peeking from under the bed like a pair of frightened puppies. Ah, and there is your jerkin, noble Highness, hanging from the window shutter. How did it get there?”

Dressed at last, and with a trailing ceremonial procession made up of Buttercup, the two thick-headed Ox brothers, and pale Svana still wrapped in the coverlet they had shared, he let his squire Melkin lead him out the door and into the hideous, scalding light of the sun.

“On behalf of my girls and my purse, Prince Morgan, I thank you!” called Buttercup. “I cannot say come again, because I have law from the High Throne itself saying I may not, so I will not. But I can say, ‘Good journey!’”

“Good journey? It is scarcely a moment’s walk back to the Hayholt,” Morgan grumbled to Melkin. “What in the name of all the saints is going on today?”

“I couldn’t guess, Your Highness,” Melkin said, but Morgan thought his squire looked a bit shifty around the eyes. He couldn’t consider it too deeply, though, because it took all his concentration simply to wade through the blazing sunshine.

Miriamele thought that summoning Morgan to the throne room was a bit much, but she had promised to let Simon do what he thought best.

The queen was among the few that had good memories of the lofty chamber. As a small child she had watched her grandfather enthroned here beneath the centuried banners, dispensing justice from the Dragonbone Chair. Later she had watched her father playing the same role in this same hall, although the good days had not lasted long that time. The hall had always reminded her of a great cave, the banners of the king’s subject countries and peoples hanging down like dripstones, and at the center of the mock-cavern, the dragon itself. Of course, this dragon was only bones, a skeleton throne the color of yellow ocher which neither she nor Simon wanted to use.