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acarefully serene face toward them, then walked with a certain embarrassed dignity back to the fireside, where Otter stood utterly dismayed.
    â€œMadelys,” Aewyn said, his face burning, “is the only maid Mother will let come through my doors, and she has to come because the menservants aren’t to touch the dishes.”
    â€œDo you have to mind what she says?” Otter asked him. “Are we in trouble?”
    â€œNo.” He plumped down whence he had risen, signaling Otter to do the same. “Oh, I could be rid of her like that if I took my nurse back. I know Nurse would send her away. But I’m too old for Nurse telling me what to eat and when to eat and always scolding me about my clothes.” He missed Nurse. Sometimes he missed her keenly. But when she visited, as she did, she always hugged him like a baby, straightened his hair, and more particularly, would never let him sit on the floor with his half brother. The notion of pretending they were in Gran’s little house in Amefel just would never occur to Nurse, who had one notion of the way things should be and never left it. “Madelys is just a fool, is all. She really does want to be a nun, but you have to have a dowry for that, and being undercook’s third daughter, she has two sisters to marry first.” He gave a laugh. “If she doesn’t mend her ways, I’ll save up my market pennies for a year and give her one.”
    Otter didn’t seem to understand. He shot a troubled look toward the short hallway and the door.
    â€œIt’s a joke, goose.”
    Otter showed a shy smile, then. His country brother was sometimes slow to laugh at angry people, although he had a very quick wit in private. Aewyn fell onto his belly and shut the little book, which was done up in goatskin with a painted picture of the lodge in a little medallion. “It’s a silly little book. It was a present, really. Brother Siene used to be a copyist in the monastery—he was Bryalt—and he could read, besides. He made it for my father to give to my mother on her birthday: he can’t give her the lodge, which he would like to have done, because she’s Elwynim and he can’t give away Guelen land, but he could give it to me. He says he will, when I’m nineteen. And my mother gave me the book because I was always borrowing it.”
    â€œWill you live there when you can?”
    â€œAs often as I can. I’ll put fish in the brook. I’m tired of waiting to see one.”
    That, Otter clearly thought was worth laughing at. Aewyn laughed, himself, and rolled onto his back on the bearskin rug, looking up at the laquear ceiling. The beams were dark polished wood, with boars’ heads set wherethey met the walls. The center of the squares had sheaves of barley in some, and deer in others, with the crest of Guelessar in the centermost, in gold. He had never really seen these things for what they were, until Otter came: like the book, they were the accounting of the wealth of the kingdom, which was his to enjoy and spread about in charity, dispensing justice and making sure the wealth went where it ought, to men of peace. Otter had grown up otherwise, in a little farmhouse, over in Amefel, with his gran, who was a wisewoman, but a witch, really, as the Quinalt saw it, and who was not really Otter’s own grandmother. Otter had never ridden a horse, only practiced with a wooden sword, with Paisi, who was Gran’s real grandson. Paisi was peasant-born, and in Guelessar, Paisi, being a farmer, would not have known about swords, but he had learned a little. It was all very different where Otter had lived. There had been wars in Amefel. And even the farmers had learned to fight.
    The wind blew at the windows and fluttered the fire in the fireplace.
    â€œWhen the storm blows itself out,” Aewyn said, “we could go riding.” He had a second, glum thought. “If it weren’t holiday coming.