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where the sleepy village of Emmond lay nestled hard by Greening Wood. She raised her chin and smoothed down her dove-gray kirtle. Two sentries were watching her from atop the twin drum towers that rose from the top of the barbican. She recognized one as Beartha by his wispy beard. He slouched against a crenellation and grinned at her, revealing his stained and mostly missing teeth.
    Trying to exude as much disdain as possible, she began to descend the broad slate steps, raising her dress just enough that she wouldn’t trip and tumble head over heels down to the tower arch. Beartha would love that. If he called out to her, she swore to herself, she’d fetch an iron bar from the smithy and break his arm, but he stayed mercifully silent. The steps descended steeply to the arch that led into the barbican. Normally two more soldiers would guard this portal, but they were undermanned due to her father’s expedition. No matter. The fewer eyes that marked her passage, the better.
    It was hard to maintain her anger at the guard when she was this excited. She almost broke into a run once she was inside, ignoring the countless murder holes and the slits in the ceiling through which three separate portcullises could be dropped. The barbican was a formidable line of defense, a squat building whose entire purpose was to kill those who sought to assault the keep. The wall torches cast flickering shadows, and she heard laughter from the soldiers on the far side of the passage wall. Playing cards, no doubt. She couldn’t blame them—Kyferin Castle hadn’t been attacked since before she was born.
    She took the left turn in the corridor’s elbow and hurried back out into the sunlight. Below her spread the bailey itself, the vast yard enclosed within the curtain walls where the daily life of the castle played out for the servants, cooks, stable boys, farriers, smiths, Bythian slaves and everyone else that made the castle a vital and living entity. She loved the bailey; it pulsed with life, was filled with a tapestry of sounds and smells. Hessa always made a face when she was forced to descend from the keep to where the ‘commoners’ labored, but that was because she was a shallow prig who forgot that she was an Ennoian like the rest of them.
    Kethe strode over the last drawbridge that connected the barbican to the stone ramp and fairly skipped down to the dirt floor.
    It being late afternoon, half of the bailey was already in shadow, the great curtain wall rising up to cut into the sunlight, its base crowded with buildings that were built against it and around the open center. The cart of a bonded merchant was rolling in through the gatehouse, laden with fresh fish and no doubt come from the harbor city of Zoe through the Sun Portal in Ennoia. Trutwin the gardener and his three young helpers were standing by with wheelbarrows, waiting as the stable boys mucked out the stables, filling the air with the sickly sweet stench of manure. Four old Bythian men staggered past, their white hair slicked to their brows with sweat, bowed over under the piles of wood lashed to their backs and heading toward the massive woodpile stacked against the kitchen building’s wall. A young boy sprinted out of the bakery, hooting and juggling a hot cross bun, and Aythe chased him out the door before giving up and yelling after him. Kethe spun around the urchin as he almost collided with her, grinned, and then shrugged apologetically to the baker. Everywhere she looked people were busy: creating barrels, sharpening blades at the grinding stone, crossing from one doorway to the next. The bailey was the polar opposite of the tomb-like keep; here was life and action and excitement.
    Slipping through the crowd, smiling as different folk nodded respectfully to her, Kethe made for the chapel. It was beautifully convenient that the entrance to the smith lay through the most respectful destination for the Lord’s daughter, a quirk of the castle’s construction that