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excitement and strangeness of Tent City worked their spell on Linnet, she found herself unexpectedly touched by another magic.
    Partly because she didn’t want to admit that Dysart might know more than she did, she began to read and to learn the rhyming histories of Hoad by heart. Reciting couplets she had learned the night before, she smiled across the tent at the third Prince, triumphant because she was just as clever as he was and could be part of the wide world whenever she wanted. Though she was Linnet of Hagen, a county that seemed closer to the sky than to the rivers, plains, and beaches of the rest of Hoad, she too could invoke the Kingand the Hero, those vast spirits made tangible in Dysart’s father and the warrior Carlyon. The Hero was particularly glorious at present because single-handedly he had killed ten soldiers of the Dannorad, avenging the massacre of every single man, woman, and child in the remote Hoadish village of Senlac.
    Without quite meaning to, Linnet became a Dysart watcher and saw how a mischievous wind, which no one else seemed to be able to feel, followed the Prince like a playful dog, fluttering his papers, tumbling the world a little whenever he walked by. The left side of his face didn’t quite match up with the right. It was not just his differently colored eyes that gave him this unbalanced look; he had an odd smile in which the right side of his mouth curled up more than the left, yet when he wrote or turned pages he used his left hand. He was so lopsided, Linnet found it easy to understand why he was only brought out on occasions when royal children were traditionally displayed like banners. Yet, during their studies, whenever Dysart recited the tales of Hoad or talked about Diamond, the King’s city, or quoted old aphorisms about the King and the Hero, he seemed to pull himself into a different shape and to become somehow… not handsome, exactly, but remarkable.
    “What’s so wonderful about Diamond, anyway?” Linnet asked him one afternoon. “It’s not the only city in the world.”
    “It’s the King’s city,” he answered, interrupting her just as she was about to talk about Hagen’s Rous Barnet, her own city. “Diamond’s the shape of the King.”
    “And your father just happens to be King,” Linnet criedderisively. “I suppose you think that makes you great too!”
    Dysart stared down into the pages of his book as if he could see indecipherable words swimming like fish behind the lines of ordinary print. When he spoke again it was in an odd, uncertain voice—as if he were trying out a new idea as much on himself as on her.
    “No,” he said. “Kings have sons, but Princes don’t have fathers.”
    “You can’t have sons without fathers!” argued Linnet.
    “But what if the King hates us all?” Dysart said doubtfully. “Betony says he does, because a long time ago, before my father’s father and brothers died, before he ever dreamed he’d be King, he was married to a woman from the Second Ring of Diamond… she wasn’t noble or rich, but he loved her. When he became King, he had to give her up because the Queen of Hoad has to be noble.”
    “Did your father have to be King, then?” Linnet asked. “If he loved the first one best? He could have stepped back.”
    Dysart was silent; then he gave a long sigh.
    “More than anything, everyone wants to be King,” he replied, “but you have to be next in line. My father was the next in line, whether he wanted to be or not, and when the time came, he…” Dysart paused. For once he didn’t smile. “Anyhow, the time came, and being the chosen one, he
did
want it,” he added. “I think when it came to him, he wanted it so badly that wanting altered him. He gave up his first life. He gave up being one man and turned into another. He turned into a King.”
    Earlier they had been given the task of writing a poem thirty syllables long, in the approved style. Dysart had written:
    The man in the crown

Rides by.