The feast taught Gryne that a royal palace could contain too many rules for any one person to know and still expect everyone to pretend they had known them since birth.
He learned three before the first course. A guest did not sit until the king sat. A ward sat where his lord's household placed him, even if the chair made his feet hang an inch above the paving. And the little silver fork was for pears, although no pears had appeared and no one could explain why it had been set beside his plate.
Lagrange knew about the fork. Gryne discovered this only after using it on a piece of fish.
"You could have warned me," Gryne whispered.
"You looked confident."
"I was testing it."
"And now the fork knows its limits."
Renita heard them and hid a smile behind her cup. Shadwick did not turn from the lord speaking beside him, but one corner of his mouth tightened. Gryne suspected the whole family had agreed to let Arsip defeat him in minor ways before it tried anything serious.
The great courtyard had been remade for Prince Oliver's return. Blue and gold cloth hung between the pillars. Braziers pushed heat into the autumn dark, though the wind stole most of it before it reached the tables. Musicians played above the western colonnade, and servants moved through the crowd carrying dishes whose sauces had names longer than the roads from Stanfall.
Gryne had imagined the court as a single creature. Master Alex had corrected him. A court was a forest, the old scholar said. From a distance, trees blurred into one green mass. Inside, every trunk had its own bark, rot, shade, and thorns.
The lesson did not make the forest easier. It only taught Gryne to distrust the first shape he saw.
The loud lords were simplest. They leaned toward whoever held the highest title nearby and turned their heads while speaking to measure who else might hear. Their laughter arrived half a breath after the laughter of the more powerful man. One grey-bearded lord praised peace, then asked a merchant twice whether grain could reach Forestclaw before winter. Another called Thriumang cowardly and kept checking the empty chair at the king's left.
The quiet lords divided into those who were thinking and those who were collecting. Gryne could not always tell them apart. Master Alex would have told him to leave a blank counter beside the question.
He did.
King Northern sat at the center of the long table. He looked older than the painted likeness in Stanfall's solar. Paint had kept the white in his hair neat and made the lines around his eyes appear dignified. In the courtyard, those lines looked tired. Beside him sat Prince Oliver, lean and white-haired, receiving welcome after welcome without seeming to forget any speaker's name.
The chair on Northern's other side remained empty.
Everyone avoided looking at it so carefully that the avoidance became a second person seated there.
Gryne looked once. Ellyrion Wickham had ridden north to the Shyuri River before Oliver reached the capital. No message had returned. Gryne knew only the public facts, and even those felt dangerous to arrange into an answer.
He reached for his water. The sleeve of his best coat caught the rim, and Lagrange stopped the cup before it tipped.
"No one saw," Lagrange murmured.
Three people at the next table had seen.
"You are a poor liar."
"I am an excellent brother. The duties overlap badly."
Gryne looked at him. Lagrange had said brother without noticing. Or perhaps he had noticed and chosen not to repair it. Gryne lowered his eyes to the plate before his face could reveal how much the word had done.
Halfway through the feast, Shadwick set down his cup.
Gryne's stomach tightened.
He had known this moment was coming. Knowing had not helped. For six days he had rehearsed the walk, the bow, and the answers a king might require. None of the rehearsal included the honey cake in his hand.
Renita took it from him. "Go."
"There is honey on my cuff."
"Then perhaps His Majesty will know you eat."
Shadwick rose. Conversation softened near them as neighboring tables recognized a great lord moving toward the king. Gryne followed with his hands at his sides and the sensation that every fork in the courtyard had become an eye.
At the foot of the long table, he bowed.
The paving stone beneath him had a pale crack shaped like a river fork. He fixed his gaze above it, because staring at a king's boots seemed wrong and staring at a king's face felt worse.
"Gryne Frucast," Northern said.
The king's voice was gentler than Gryne expected. That unsettled him more than sternness would have.
Shadwick spoke without ornament. He named Gryne's years in the yard, Sir Cadillac's judgment, Master Alex's reports, the winter road attack, and the duties Gryne had accepted at Stanfall. He did not call Gryne exceptional. He did not call him brave. He offered facts as if the facts deserved a hearing without decoration.
"I would have him knighted, with your leave," Shadwick finished.
The courtyard quieted by degrees. Gryne could feel the silence crossing the tables toward him.
Northern studied him. "Why do you want the title?"
That was not one of the questions Shadwick had prepared him to answer.
Gryne glanced at his guardian. Shadwick's face gave him nothing except permission to answer for himself.
"Because I have done the training," Gryne said.
A few men smiled. Northern did not.
"Training earns consideration. It does not answer me."
Gryne's thumb found the seam of one finger. He forced it still.
The clever answers arrived first. Honor. Service. His father's example. Each sounded like a sentence borrowed from a man in a song. The true answer was less noble and much more embarrassing.
"Because when Lord Shadwick sends men into danger, they listen differently to a knight. I am tired of being useful only when no one has time to remember my age."
No one smiled then.
Gryne heard his own words after they left him and wished he could pull back the last sentence. It sounded angry. It was angry. He had told the king the truth in front of half the kingdom and discovered that honesty could feel exactly like making a mistake.
Northern leaned back slightly. His gaze moved once to Shadwick, then returned to Gryne.
"I will consider it," he said.
The answer gave away nothing. The court received it as nearly yes. Gryne heard the change in breathing and the first cautious return of conversation.
He bowed again. On the walk back, he counted seven steps before realizing he had begun counting and lost the number at nine because there were only eight.
Renita returned his honey cake.
"You did well," she said.
"He did not say yes."
"He did not say no."
"Those are different from yes."
"Very. Eat before the court interprets that too."
Gryne took a bite large enough to prevent an answer.
An old lord standing near the musicians watched him return. He was narrow as a walking staff and held himself straighter than men half his age. When Gryne met his eyes, the old man did not smile or look away. He gave one slow nod, the kind Shadwick used when a difficult answer had at least been honestly reached.
Gryne nodded back before remembering that wards probably did not exchange judgments with great lords across royal courtyards.
"Who is he?" Gryne whispered.
Renita followed his gaze. "Someone who has buried two sons."
That was not a name, but it explained the man's face more completely than a name would have. Gryne looked again. The lord had turned toward the empty chair at Northern's side.
For one ugly moment, Gryne imagined Shadwick's chair empty at Stanfall. His appetite vanished. He wrapped the remaining cake in a napkin and put it into his pocket, where the honey immediately began damaging his best coat.
After formal seating dissolved, the forest rearranged itself beneath the colonnades. Men who had argued across the tables now stood shoulder to shoulder for anyone watching from a distance. Men who had toasted each other drifted apart before private conversation could begin.
Gryne carried water and the remaining half of his cake. He saw Oliver near a pillar, pretending to drink wine while observing the royal guards. The prince had not looked at his brother's chair since sitting down. That might mean grief, discipline, fear, or nothing. Gryne kept four blank counters.
When Oliver noticed him, Gryne expected dismissal. Instead, the prince spoke to him as though a boy beside a pillar had a right to occupy the same conversation as a prince.
They discussed the untouched wine, Lord Silvius's fisherman story, and whether roads changed the people who traveled them. Gryne nearly invented an answer to the last question, then remembered Master Alex.
"I don't know you from before," he admitted. "That makes the question unfair."
Oliver considered this rather than rewarding it. Gryne liked him for that.
He told the prince about the two young guards who had watched him during the first toast. Oliver did not demand a conclusion. He asked what Gryne had seen. Gryne gave him only that. One guard had looked away when Oliver's attention moved toward him. The darker one had not. Sir Sobaron had spoken to them afterward, and they had changed positions.
"Why tell me?" Oliver asked.
"Because if I were watched, I would want to know. And because you thanked me when I said you were pretending to drink. Most adults say they weren't."
The prince almost smiled.
Gryne bowed when Lagrange came to collect him. He spoiled it by sloshing water onto his own hand.
Back at the Strode table, the talk had bent entirely toward the north. Men spoke of the bodies at the Shyuri and the Thriumang banners. They called the killings an insult, a challenge, and an act of war. Beneath the sharp words, Gryne heard the same softer note repeating.
Fear.
One lord said Merigold must answer before weakness invited another attack. His fingers shook when he lifted his cup. Another insisted the army could reach Forestclaw in ten days, then asked whether the western harvest could provision it. The court was not pretending fear did not exist. It was changing fear into anger because anger gave men somewhere to point.
Gryne had never known adults could lie to themselves together.
The discovery did not make him feel clever. It made the courtyard lonelier.
"Are they all afraid?" he asked Renita when Shadwick was drawn into another conversation.
She did not pretend to misunderstand. "Most of them."
"Then why does no one say it?"
"Because a frightened farmer may ask his neighbor for help. A frightened lord worries his neighbor will count the size of the fear."
"That is stupid."
"Yes. It is also how half the wars in the songs begin."
Gryne waited for her to soften the answer. She did not.
"Is Lord Shadwick afraid?"
Renita watched her husband across the courtyard. "Of losing people. Never of admitting that he might."
Shadwick looked toward them then, as if the attention had reached him. Renita raised her cup. He answered with the slightest inclination of his head.
Gryne touched the honey-soaked pocket of his coat and thought that fear did not make men foolish by itself. Hiding it required so much work that little sense remained for anything else.
That night he lay in a guest chamber high above Arsip. The city continued beyond the shutters: wagon wheels, a distant bell, someone shouting in a street too far below for the words to survive. Stanfall went quiet differently. At home, Gryne knew which door moved in the wind and which guard coughed on the second watch. Arsip produced sounds without owners.
He replayed the king's question. He thought of seven better answers, all of them arriving uselessly late. Then he remembered Northern's tired face, the empty chair, and the frightened lords borrowing anger from one another.
Gryne did not know whether he wanted to become like any of them.
He wanted the title. That part remained true. He wanted men to listen before danger made his age irrelevant. Yet knighthood now looked less like entry into a company of finished men and more like permission to join a forest where most people were hiding something, often from themselves.
The thought made him want Stanfall with an ache so sudden he turned toward the wall.
Shadwick slept in the chamber beyond the connecting door. Gryne could not hear him, but the knowledge of his presence fixed the room. Shadwick had asked the king because he promised he would. He had not improved the truth or made the request into a performance. In a court full of men choosing faces, Shadwick had brought only his own.
Gryne held to that until the unknown sounds of Arsip became merely sounds and sleep found him.