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ready whenever you are.”
    “Indeed,” Winna said.
     
    ~~* * * ~~
     
    Being “cleaned,” Seri learned, was a humiliating process all on its own. As she stood in the entryway to the stable, Winna dumped another bucket of water over her head and handed her soap. “Again,” the woman instructed her for the third time. “Wash your skin again. It still looks dirty.”
    Seri’s skin smarted after being scrubbed so many times. She handed the soap back to Winna, trying to keep the expression on her face pleasant. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but that is my natural color. Not dirt.” The strongest Athoni soap in the land wouldn’t change her sunbrowned skin to a milky night-pale like Winna’s.
    In response, the handmaid snorted inelegantly and tossed another bucket of water in Seri’s face. “If you want to remain covered in filth, so be it.”
    Gasping in shock at the cold, Seri crossed her arms over her chest for warmth and to hide her flesh from the too-interested soldiers that loitered nearby. Her thin, threadbare linen dress was clinging to her body like a second skin. She shoved a wet handful of hair out of her eyes and scowled at Winna. “I assure you that I bathe on a regular basis. This is…” She struggled to find a polite word. “…unnecessary.”
    And if that sour-faced girl tossed another bucket of water in her face, she’d throw her down in the mud, Athonite or no.
    “My lady values cleanliness,” Winna responded. “It would bring shame upon her name for you to trail filth through her apartments.”
    Before Seri could respond to such a ringing endorsement, Winna flicked a hand in Seri’s direction. “Follow me.” Without bothering to see if she was followed, the woman took off across the courtyard, her steps exacting and unerring.
    Mystified by Winna’s abrupt change, Seri wrapped her arms around her wet dress to conceal her body, trailing behind her. The handmaiden led her across the courtyard in precise, unhurried footsteps, through the large stone gates and up a narrow flight of stairs.
    The castle itself was a marvel to her farm-born eyes. She had heard the ancient stories of the builders, but never in her lifetime had the keep been inhabited. She’d never dreamed that she’d enter the halls on her own. They were breathtaking—cool marble soared overhead, and striations of varying color allowed the eye to float upward to the arching ceiling covered with colored frescoes. Beneath her bare feet, orderly squares of marble patterned across the floor, so different from the dirt floor of her small farmhouse.
    There were enormous windows set in the walls of the castle—she’d seen their beautiful, expensive glass from outside—but strangely enough, all the windows were hung with heavy fabric even in the sunny morning-time and not an ounce of natural light leaked in. Instead, wax candles dripped from nearby candelabras, filling the castle halls with shadow. It seemed an odd—and costly—choice, given the bright sun overhead. Perhaps the Athonites did not like the sunlight, she mused. They feared it would turn them as brown as herself.
    The grandeur took her breath away. It almost made her forget that the enemy—the Athoni Prince of the Blood—lived here and lorded over them.
    Winna led her down endless hallways filled with people—Athoni castle servants, if their plain dress and pale skin was any indication. It didn’t matter that they were servants—they still turned their noses up at her, a dripping-wet Vidari girl in their midst. She forced herself to keep her gaze on Winna’s arrow-straight back as the handmaid led her through the maze of prying eyes.
    Up two flights of sweeping stairs, they came to wait outside a large double door made of wood that was no doubt from the hill-country across the valley and imported long ago. Seri’s family’s land had very few trees on it and was nothing but rolling hills, like most of the Vidari territory.
    Winna knocked, and the door was