"Better clean straw in a hayloft, than the bugs in a noble's bed," he told the dwarves in the dining hall later, where Hammond's men had marshalled the castle's kitchen staff to prepare a mid-day meal of oatmeal, ale, and late-season apples held over from the winter's supplies. When he pointed out that his history with the Duke and his men was as dubious as with any of them—and that, they agreed, was bad enough, for all they now claimed willing to let their own bygones be bygones—well, that had answered them well enough to do.

"So what will you be looking to do next?" he asked after, considering the group now slouched about the dining hall's broad hearth. Only Beith and Quert had risked taking places on the bench across the worn plank table from where he sat, at the end of it facing the hearth. The rest had chosen to settle themselves for a kind of picnic on that low platform of warm bricks, both for seating better suited to their short legs, and to take advantage of the heat to finish drying damp hair and boots.

"It'll be whatever our lady wants next," said Gort, leaning back to look up at him.

"Aye," said Beith. "That's where we'll begin, at least."

"And end! That's what Muir says!" Nion put in. "You know he'll want to stick close with the princess—"

"Queen, now!" Duir poked him in the ribs, and the stout dwarf turned to shove him back.

"No' before she's crowned!" he said. "Rightful heir, but she's only crown princess until there's a coronation!"

"She's queen for us, now," said Coll.

"An' we've made her so for all, by this day's work! Duir said. "So no splitting hairs about it!"

"Says the man wi' hardly any to split!"

"Give over, you two," Gort ordered. "Aye, she's queen for us now, as have felt her power and seen her blessed by the Hart, but Nion's right, it's princess she remains to the rest, until she's crowned."

"And it'll be as she wishes, first," Beith said. "I expect Muir will choose to stick close, to keep her strong as we may, in her powers, and that—" glancing at Quert, "well, that'll keep you here, Quert, with your father."

"Aye," said Quert. "Though I might ask, in any case. Y'know there was a library here, once—an' as he and I once spoke, if there might be any chance of my learnin' to read in it, there might be some chance of tracing others of our people, in other lands or times."

"That dream!" Gort sighed and folded his arms. "Eh, well, you might do worse." He gathered up the bowls within reach, and heaved himself to his feet, to set them on the table. "While you and I, Beith, I think we must set about finding out what's become of our land around the mines." He set his hands on the table's edge and continued, directly to Eric.

"No question the queen's men had seized it all, when we made our way out of our new workings, and all that we saw of our villages as we crept past in the night, was wreckage and smoking ruin. Thing is, we never heard anything to say they'd done more with 'em since, past mounting guards to keep people away."

"In that being," said Beith to Eric, "the rest of our dream: that when we look closely at those ruins, we may find any hope at all, that not all the rest of us perished."

"Y'think that's possible?" Eric asked.

"We lived there in our hundreds, once," Beith said. "Near a thousand dwarves I knew of, with mines and tunnels all through those mountains, and our own legends of deeper workings and lost citadels within the stone. Even having seen the evidence, there's no holding off hope that we may not be the last of our kind."

"So you're aiming to go have that look."

"Gort and I, yes, and likely Duir and Coll as well, unless we think they're better left here, to guard the princess." Beith considered the pair, thoughtful. "Then I can't think of anyone better to leave than Nion, to be officious on behalf of all, with anyone else who may matter."

"Well, there is also the matter of our being rewarded for what we've done," said Nion. "I say we still need to talk about that!"

Beith cast him a dirty look. "Ooo, if you're thinkin' of that matter of 'your weight in gold', my lad, you'll have no agreement there." He pushed away his cup and swung round, to slip down from the bench. "Not from me, or Gort here, and certainly not from Muir, or Quert either, so count yourself outnumbered already." He pointed a finger at the other, as Nion stiffened. "Our first reward for what we've done is the freeing of our land and that chance to reclaim who we are, and while I have no doubt Her Highness will see that we're rewarded in some fashion, the beginnings of our honour will be to see that it doesn't extend to a silly price set by a girl we had strung up by the heels when she offered it!"

"Well, that could be an interesting fight." Eric leaned on the table, arms folded, and gave Nion a glance. "You could get your wish yet, no matter what these say."

"What?" Beith swung round to study him. "Has she made some issue of paying you whatever mad price you agreed to, then?"

"She gave it a good try," he said, and gave the dwarf a sassy smile. An' tell you she managed it, an' I'd no choice, facing her? I don't think so.

"Heh," said Gort. "Well, it'd be in her interests, wouldn't it, Beith?" He leaned on the end of the table and wagged a thumb at Eric. "Get him paid off, an' she can be quit of him, can't she?"

Now there, Eric realized, was a thought. Had that been where Her Highness' insistence on seeing her debt paid had come from? At the end of the day, she was royalty. What certainty then, might he have, that even as a child, she wouldn't have been taught to pursue the fairest argument towards any purpose, however far that might be from her only motive? It wouldn't have been his first thought, that she'd any such gift for subterfuge, but pride had him pushed back and talking, before he could think that one through.

"She's already quit of me!" he said. "On my side of it!—an' has been since we got to Hammond's, and as I told her, owed me nothin' for that, after all the ways that everything about it went wrong."

The whole group pulled up straighter at that, and Beith stared at him outright. "Did you indeed! And just how, may I ask, did she take it?"

"We yelled at each other a little, and as I see it now, I'm a free man."

"Did she say so?"

"No' exactly," he said, and let his gaze slip.

"Then what, exactly, did she say?" When he looked back, Beith's dark eyes drilled into his, and he was reminded in the moment, of his father. "You'll not have me believe either that she'll have cried done with you, or you with her."

"She didn't," he said. "She said not to imagine her done with me, before we parted company—but as I fancy she's about to become the busiest young woman in the country, I'm not about to hold my breath waiting on imaginings. Hers, or mine."

Beith only waited, his expression bleak, and he pushed on, with a small knot tightening in his insides. "The fact of it is, Beith, there's nothing whatever she owes me at this point, and no sensible use for her to make of me, in anything that lies before her now."

"You think so?"

"I know so," he said, as flat as he could. "She's back where she belongs, now, an' my part in bringing her here is done. Done a good week ago, if I'm honest about it."

"You'd see no point in sticking close a while, then?"

"To do what?"

"Perhaps no more than ease her mind," Beith replied. "You may say she's back where she belongs, Huntsman, but it's been a long time since the people she'll be with are any she's known."

"She knows the Duke and Lord William well enough, and Sir Thomas, I think."

"It's you and we she's closer to now, Huntsman, on the strength of a fortnight's freedom, and whether either of you would put so many words to it, you've been most of life and safety to her in that time."

"Aye," he said, looking down again. "Nothing much of a life and no safety to speak of!" He turned again to meet the other's gaze. "Don't be stupid with me, Beith. I can't think of anyone we've met in the time, who's been able to take any hand in the care of her, and hasn't made a better job of it than I have."

"You're still the one she's kept looking to hand her across the rough patches." The dwarf sighed and ran a finger along the grain in the worn plank table. "I'd say she faces a rougher patch now, than any yet. But if you don't see it, I'll not argue the case. I'll only ask what better you have to do."

"I don't know yet," he said. "Go home, perhaps."

Which, indeed, now seemed to be a thought he could bear. The croft cottage that had once been his parents' and later his own and Sara's together, if it still stood, might now be no worse than a place he'd not been since before this last winter.

"As damned a fool as ever," Gort muttered.

"That's your opinion, an' you're welcome to it!" he said, "But speaking of fools, I think you lot need to be careful. However kindly our new queen regards you, I shouldn't trust that as time goes on, she or any other will have any clue what to do with you, either, past dressin' you up as fine courtiers, an' callin' you collected to amuse her.

"I've seen that be the fate of other little folk, in my travels as a soldier—and no, Quert, I'm not thinkin' of your kind, only the small ones among men—and forgive me, but I can't think it fitting for any of you."

Well, that, they had assured him, would not happen, until the Duke's secretary had tracked them down shortly after the noon bells rang. This was to advise that as a first step in repaying them for their service that morning, there had been a party of seamstresses summoned in from the town, and commissioned, with reference to their old clothes still drying, to begin measuring and recutting new suits for them from the finest that could be gathered from about the castle. Court clothes, fit for the coronation now to be held the next day. The country's Archbishop having arrived from his seat a day's ride to the south, with a party of monks and other religious, it had been decided within the hour after his arrival, that by noon the next day, they should see the princess crowned in the great chapel beside the hall above. Therefore, it would be appreciated if they might present themselves in the Duke's quarters by the None bell, to have a first fitting of their new clothes. They had all looked a bit askance at that, and sworn at him for laughing.

Not long after, when old Muir arrived in the dining hall among the passengers from the last of the Duke's supply trains, he climbed to his feet and made off with a wave and a smile brighter than his mood. The ancient dwarf's faith in his blind view of things had been one of his two better reasons for avoiding the entire party after their arrival at Hammond's two days previous, bearing Snow White's body. After a hellish day and night climbing down a mountainside, with Muir's insistence that her murder could not be dinning relentless in his ears, when there could be no doubt in his mind that it was, and his own misery at it more than he could stand, he had had no stomach for any more of it, once they'd done bearing her to her Duke as promised. Then later, after the wonder of her rising—still in no way sufficiently explained, to his mind—well, as he'd guessed, Muir's radiant certainty that Tabor must now be destined to enter upon a new Golden Age was every bit as trying as he might have feared.

What chilled him, now, was how completely the rest of the band seemed to share it. Well beyond his son Quert's devout "Yes, father," to every prophetic utterance the old man laid forth, the rest of them also seemed to take it as unquestioned now, that all the ills of the kingdom must fall before the power bound in Snow White's nature, as heir to it.

None of it altered the fact, so far as he could see, that however tough and spirited she might be, she was still little more than a girl, and not a very big one, at that.


Restless, he made his way back up through the gallery to the great hall, to see if Anna or her companions had found their way there yet. Finding none he recognized among the gathering of layfolk and religious come in the Archbishop's train, who seemed to have taken over the care of the wounded there, he would have retreated further to the passage between hall and great chapel, but that now was swarming with more monks, apparently leading an attack with ladders, brooms, and buckets, upon the chapel proper.

"D'ye think all that can be cleared in a day?" he asked a small, monkish scribe directing assault parties with billhooks in to one side and the other, to cut down the dead vines that wrapped the columns lining the central aisle, and veiled the high windows.

"Oh, aye," said the other. "We'll be scrubbing the floor by torchlight, but God willing, the worst of this will be cleared before sunset." He caught Eric's arm, and pulled him aside, to make way for the manoeuvring of two men with a tall ladder.

"It's a relief, on the whole," he continued, as a party of women with baskets followed them. "When we set out from the abbey yesterday morning, we'd no way of knowing whether any part of this would be to celebrate a new monarch, or only do what we might to minister to any survivors of the battle promised. That and hope the fact of our coming would not lead to our own condemnation as traitors."

"Still, it's a big job to be takin' on, in a short time," Eric said. "I'd have thought it would take a good month or two, just to get everybody together for it."

"Ah, well, it would," said the scribe. "But both the princess an' Lord Hammond would have the thing done as soon as may be, and as circumstances have already brought most of those lords together, who will owe her fealty as queen, there's a lot to be said for having the matter settled swift and simple." He looked up at Eric, then, brown eyes bright in a narrow brown face. "It'll be easier for her to know her loyal subjects under these conditions, as those who've risked the most to follow her banner—and fact is, it has been too long since this land had any ruler with any heart for it."

"Aye," he said, and fell silent.

"Also as well to let greater celebration wait until we've more to celebrate," the other had continued, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Say until Michaelmas, or perhaps Her Highness' birthday, which as I recall, is three weeks before then. By then we shall have seen the summer through, and God willing have a good harvest in, and time to marshall such aid for those in worst plight in this kingdom, as shall allow all to face next winter with less dread."

"Her birthday—how old is she, then?"

"Eighteen, coming on nineteen."

"Only that?" No wonder he'd never remembered her. She'd have been no more than eight, and he already well on to a rowdy sixteen, his parents' grief and most of a year on the road to making his fortune as a soldier, by the time she'd been locked up.

The monk folded his arms. "Eh, it's old enough to rule in her own right, and four or five years past being of age to marry. That'll no doubt be the next matter to plan for her."

"An' after that no doubt her children, an' the rest of her life altogether." He had stared down at his companion, that knot re-tying itself in his stomach, and knowing his expression had gone grim, stepped back. "Well, enough! I'll be off out of your way now."

There was no harm in hoping for better, he considered, but to invest so much in so little as the accession of one young girl to a throne, could not be right. Even accounting her blessed by the White Hart and with all the powers of Fairyland marshalled in her favour, it was still the lords and common folk of this world that she must make her way among. He could wonder, for a moment, if she might at the end of it wish never to have found her way to such a freedom.

No serious thought, there, though, past the moment. He might draw on that comfort of knowing that however dubious his own aid had been, and however dubious his princess might perhaps find herself, regarding her fate, she would at least be more comfortable now, and never so alone again.


The rest of that long afternoon he kept moving, not sure whether it was in search of anything definite, or in flight from something that wasn't.

He saw William at a distance once or twice with the other archers, engaged in the business of retrieving arrows from the beach. At least once, when it had seemed the young man was looking for someone he wasn't finding among his father's men, he made himself scarce for a walk round the outer walls, on the off chance of his being the one sought.

Twice more he passed by the great hall, where he spoke with one or two of Anna's companions, and learned she had ended by remaining with Snow White, helping both to reclaim the queen's apartments for herself and the other women, and preparing for the coronation in the morning. He ended by spending an hour or two among them, helping the less desperately injured make their way about, and as his sense of the place improved, guiding new-come family members in search of missing fathers, sons, and husbands.

By later afternoon, his own discomfort was taking him out more often to sit in the sun on the stairs leading down into the forecourt, to consider again that still-open main gate. With the air clearer now, and fewer armsmen visible, things were falling more into peacetime order. Except for the trebuchet still rolled out by the foot of that stairway, and the carts he now saw bearing away shrouded bodies in the direction of the village—no doubt towards its last small church, to wait on the digging of graves for them—it might only have seemed the usual mess of comings and goings that one might see in any great castle on the heels of any great event. Busy, dirty, and ungodly noisy. The same might also now be said of the garrison end of the second courtyard, which was now taking on the order of a military camp, as it had done in Hammond's forecourt. Nothing that different to any other such fortress.

Until sunset, he might yet make off to the village, but what would be the point in doing? Little enough, it seemed. After most of a fortnight's absence, even if his former landlord might still have kept his room—or more than half remember him, being nearly as hopeless a drunkard as he himself had been—there was no great appeal either in returning there, or risking himself as a boarder at the only tavern nearby that offered rooms. Given he would need the change from most of a gold upon hiring any of those rooms, he'd be ill advised to close his eyes once he took possession of it. And even if he trusted the family croft were still standing, there could be no thought of trekking on there tonight. He might manage it in a half day's walk tomorrow, but it would have to be in daylight, these days. Tonight, as he'd thought already, his safest and warmest bet probably would be to camp out in the loft above the stables.

"Hi! You there! Huntsman!" He looked round to find a short, stocky man with a shiny bald head waving at him from the top of the stairs, and pushed himself to his feet as the stranger trotted down the steps towards him. "Thought it might be you. It is Eric, isn't it?"

"Aye," he said, and the other grinned.

"Thought so!" He thrust out a hand. "I'm Alf Coyle. When my old girl put me onto your being by, I thought best look you out. Have ye found a place for the night, yet?"

Eric smiled and shook the hand offered. "I was thinking, could do worse than the hayloft over the stable."

"Or better!" Alf Coyle beamed and clapped him on the arm. "You just come along with me, then. Between you being a relative of sorts to the wife, and me wanting to know what the hell happened after you got hauled through my bath-house by yon Finn and his bullies the week before last, not above half sober and givin' 'em hell all the way, I think we can find a bed in a warm corner for ye."

"Makin' me more of an honest man in the doing," Eric said. He laughed and let Coyle draw him round. "When the Duke's man caught up with me earlier, I told him I'd made my own arrangements for the night. Then I said your good lady was a relative of sorts, and let him draw his own conclusions."

Coyle chuckled "Then that works out all round. Mind you, I do want to know, this last fortnight, what you know of what's been goin' on."

"Well, I can't promise you the whole story before bedtime, Alf, but I can at least tell you how it started."


He had made a good beginning of it over supper and a pint of ale with the inquisitive Coyle, in a corner of the servants' dining hall. They had been joined by Goody Coyle once the laundry closed at Vespers, and sat on while she and her laundresses had got their dinner, and he had told them about encountering the troll. About it nearly being the end of him, until Snow White had run in between them and screamed at it, and then, it seemed, stared it down with such certainty it would not hurt her, that it recoiled and shambled away.

A memory to smile at, into his pillow: a queen might do worse than start her reign with a such a story told of her.

He had in fact got nearly through his account of their stay with the fen village women, when his mention of having his injuries treated there had minded the goodwife to check her own handiwork on him. When that not over-gentle inspection had made him wince more sharply than she liked, and showed that the gash in his side had been bleeding again, she had ordered an end to his evening. She had hustled both men off to the couple's quarters on the second floor of the tower that rose beside the laundry, and ended nearly enough by helping him to bed herself, in this cosy, canvas-curtained alcove off their main room. Or at least, once she'd got the fire going and given her husband her own brisk account of the day's doings, she'd ordered Coyle to do it, while she set off in search of an extra towel or two, a last bucket of warm water from the laundry, and apparently also Anna. Or anyone else she might find, it seemed, up for the task of setting stitches in his side.

"She's a terror when she gets going," Coyle observed, when the door shut behind her, "but I love her dear." He had then shaken his head, smiling, and gone to the cupboard beside the hearth. Poured out a gill of something from a stoneware jug pulled from its depths, downed it, and poured another which he returned and offered to Eric: a shot of some of the rawest apple brandy he'd ever drunk. "My best advice is to get this inside you. If my old girl happens not to find this woman with the medicines she's looking for, it'll help you sleep without them. Or if she does, it should help take the edge off anything they do to you after."