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strings.
    “I would like…I would ask…could you watch over him? See that he comes to no harm?”
    “Mesnera, if you think your son still needs a nursemaid, then you would be advised to keep him at your side. And if you think he needs the protection of an armin, then hire one. I don’t follow that profession anymore.”
    Elisebet’s eyes darted back and forth and she leaned closer as if fearing spies even here in her own chambers. “Saveze, my son has enemies—I dare not name them. The sudden hiring of an armin just now and at his age would be tantamount to an accusation. Many things can happen during a hunt.”
    Barbara’s patience with her had long since worn thin, but it had not yet shredded entirely. And it would take more than shredded patience to push her past hard counsel into naked rudeness. Respect was due to the princess’s rank, if not her sense. “You do your son no favor by teaching him to fear his cousin. Some day—God forbid it be soon—one of them will sit the throne and Alpennia will be better served on that day if they are friends, not rivals.”
    “On that day all I ask is that he still be alive.”
    Barbara sighed. The threat might be illusory, but her fear was real. What harm could there be in easing it? “I’ll keep my eye on him, but I can’t promise more than that.” She was embarrassed that Elisebet caught up her hand and kissed it in gratitude.
    Lake Feniz was a small lapis jewel, caught up in a fold of rising ground on the skirts of the mountains. There had been a time when adventurous souls had tried to scratch a living on its shores, leaving a small cluster of cottages where the narrow road—barely more than a track—came in from the valley below. But the stony fields had long since been abandoned back to trees where they would grow, and patchy meadows where they would not. In the summer, the cottages were taken up by herdsmen bringing goats up from the valleys. And with the returning forests had come red deer and cunning wild boars and smaller game, picking their way through the ruined stone walls and feasting in the bones of abandoned orchards. They had brought a new crop to the land: a scattering of hunting lodges ringing the shore. In the autumn, when the goats had been sent back down, the goatherds’ sisters and daughters moved into the village to tend to the cooking and cleaning for those who rode out from Rotenek for the pleasure of the hunt.
    The baron had purchased one of those lodges. It was useful to have a private space to entertain those whose attention he wished to have to himself for a spell. The property had passed on to Margerit, but on the advice of LeFevre, her estate manager, she had found a buyer. Hunting was not in her style and the place produced no other benefit. Count Mainek had purchased it and now he, too, used it as bait to gather up the rising, the bold, the quiet decision-makers, those who might be of use now or in the future.
    The expedition to which Barbara had been invited was Efriturik’s party only in name, for he had no property of his own yet. It was awkward for him, having no title to give him status beyond being Annek’s son. But title-lands didn’t fall from trees and though there were several dormant titles held under the crown, it was a more delicate matter to negotiate fixing one of them to Efriturik’s person.
    Barbara wondered sometimes what he truly thought of the whole affair. It had been his Austrian foreignness rather than his youth that the succession council had found hard to swallow. And now he seemed to have staked all on the hope of becoming Alpennian by the time the matter would be considered again. It had been one thing for Annek to return to the Atilliet surname. Had it been his choice or hers that he had traded Friedrich von Maunberg for Efriturik Atilliet? Had the attractions of being a younger son in his brother’s shadow back home been so few, or were those of someday becoming Prince of Alpennia so great?
    It was