Charlie didn’t know much about anything, or so he was often reminded by those closest to him. But it was impossible for him not to know whenever something was amiss inside the palace.

He knew it from the moment he woke up. There was a strange frenetic energy in the air. The servants, from their postures to their manner of speaking, had become stiffer. And his older sister, whose daily occupation was correcting his every move, hadn’t chastised him for waking up late. In fact, Caroline had stayed in her room all morning. When he asked his servants about her, they told him that the only thing they knew was that she had covertly called for some handmaids early in the morning.

The second thing he figured out was that the secret was being withheld from him in particular. His parents each had their own way of warning him. His mother had been quiet and vague. During breakfast, he had caught her eye and she said, “Charlie, it’s best if you play in your room today.” And that was all. Perhaps she meant to be firmer, but she had just given birth recently to his younger brother and she was still recovering.

His father, unfortunately, had heard her, and his approach was the exact opposite: “Charlie, if the guards catch you anywhere near the throne room, you are going back into solitary confinement.”

Charlie nodded quickly. A few months ago, he had been put into solitary confinement for attacking the Duke of Brackith with a wooden stick. He had tried to justify himself – he was roleplaying as a Divine Paladin, and it was the duty of Divine Paladins to eradicate the heretics – but his father, embarrassed and furious, had locked him in his room for a week. It would’ve been longer, but Caroline had convinced their father that a servant boy had put him up to it.

However, his father had just made two mistakes in warning him. One was that he had specified the throne room. That most likely meant that an important visitor had arrived for an audience. Furthermore, Charlie’s best chance of finding out the identity of the visitor would be by steering clear of the throne room; the guards would be many and vigilant.

The second mistake was the severity of the punishment. His father, despite his glares and furrowed brows, was rare to punish. It had been a shock to him and his other family members when he had been placed in confinement for attacking the duke. Of course, that had to do with the duke’s identity – it was his Uncle Ghislain, who happened to be known as Prince Ghislain, the Duke of Brackith.

Whoever this guest was, he was of such import that his father didn’t want to risk upsetting him. It was unfair, Charlie thought, that they would tempt me so much. His curiosity needed to be sated. So, after breakfast, he called Dagfinn into his room.

Dagfinn was thirteen, two years older than Charlie and the servant closest to him in age. He was tall and thin and there seemed to be no end to his growth spurt. Normally, his face was usually contorted into an expression of solemnity and alertness, but the moment he entered the room his serious expression disappeared, and his posture slackened.

“Your Highness, I know what you want to ask, but I can’t possibly tell you,” he said with a wide grin, and without asking he sat down on Charlie’s bed.

“Stop fucking around,” Charlie said with an equally wide grin. He had picked up swearing recently, and the only person he could swear around was Dagfinn. “Father’s really agitated. He threatened to put me back into solitary confinement if he caught me snooping around.”

“Oh yeah? So, you’re going to get in trouble and blame it on me again?”

“That was my sister’s fault,” Charlie protested. Dagfinn was the servant that Caroline had blamed for the duke incident. In the end, Charlie had been released from his solitary confinement at the expense of Dagfinn being unable to sit properly for a week. His sister still didn’t approve of him hanging around Dagfinn, but she wasn’t half-wrong for blaming him. They had been roleplaying together, but it was Dagfinn’s idea to find a heretic to punish.

Charlie had chosen the target though. It wasn’t that he particularly hated his uncle. It was just that people like his uncle irritated him for some reason. The best way he could explain it was that their eyes didn’t move with their mouths. He usually saw it in visitors and servants; as they spoke, their eyes seemed to look up at something far above him. Uncle Ghislain’s eyes, though, seemed to dart to the side when he spoke with him, and Charlie supposed that was the reason he had chosen his uncle to attack.

Dagfinn was a notable exception. He was the only one outside of his family who ever looked at him when he was speaking.

“I really am sorry,” Charlie apologized again.

“I know, I’m just messing with you. I don’t hold grudges, promise,” Dagfinn said. “But I really can’t tell you who’s coming today.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because I don’t know either. All they said was that someone important was coming.”

“They’re being real secretive about it…” Charlie frowned for a second, but then his smile returned. “Then, we just have to find out for ourselves.”

There was only one permitted entrance into the Royal Palace – through the front gate and down the single path. The path itself was straight with rows of shrubbery and flowers acting as borders, but it would take a horse-drawn carriage at least half an hour to reach the front doors of the palace.

His father had once explained to him that this long straight pathway was by intricate design. “Grandeur is not an aesthetic choice. It’s an intimidation tactic. When the visitor passes through and gapes at the sheer grandeur of everything around him, he is reminded of the enormity of what he is about to do. He might reconsider his ill intentions or develop misgivings about his task. It’s possible that this pathway has helped me obtain better negotiations or even saved our lives several times,” he said. Charlie only nodded, which made his father furrow his brow and say, “There’s still so much for you to know.”

What Charlie now understood was that this pathway made carriages a necessity. He had never given it much thought, but he realized that no duke or king in his right mind was going to walk for almost an hour to reach the palace. Therefore, to get a good look at the visitor, he would have to draw him out of the carriage.

He and Dagfinn strategically positioned themselves halfway along the path in the shadow of a yew tree and waited. It was a little past noon when the carriage entered their sights, but they heard them coming before they saw them.

“Is it really true that all the furniture is made of silver?” The coachman, a sallow, weasely man (which, in Charlie’s experience, was how all coachmen looked), walked alongside a soldier and gawked at everything he saw.

The soldier grunted.

“What do I have to do to get your job?” the coachman continued with a laugh.

They were now in position. “Go!” Charlie whispered in Dagfinn’s ear.

“Damn it, this better fucking –” And then Dagfinn was off. “Whoaaaaa, watch out, guys!”

The plan was simple. They had grabbed a cart and filled it with as many gardening tools as they could get a hold of. All Dagfinn had to do was emerge in front of the men and spill all the tools. If they caused enough of a disturbance, the visitor would reveal himself to examine the cause. The only thing Charlie had not considered was that Dagfinn, who was so skilled at pretending to be diligent but always secretly shirked his work and cut corners, would be such a terrible actor.

“Oh noooooo, it’s going to spill!” Dagfinn swerved the cart to and fro, but it refused to tip over. They had loaded the cart with too many tools and now it was too heavy to tip. Finally, he indiscreetly kicked the cart on its side, and it toppled over. “No! All the gardening tools I needed to return to the shed! I’ll be in trouble if I don’t bring it back soon!”

The coachman and the guard had watched the entire scene with bewilderment.

“Oh man, I’m going to be in so much trouble!” Dagfinn threw Charlie a look of panic, but he ducked behind the tree. “They’re going to, uh, hit me! On my ass! Again!” He covered his face with his hands and pretended to cry.

The coachman walked over. “Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay. I’ll help. Just don’t be so loud or you’ll wake up –”

A throat cleared. “What’s going on?” The voice was deep, booming. “Are we at the palace?” The carriage door opened, and the man stepped out.

The man was huge, but most of his bulk came from his impressive iron plate armor which bore the royal emblem on the chest plate. An equally impressive longsword hung by his side, the hilt embossed with strange runic patterns. He wore a helmet, but after a moment, he lifted the visor, exposing a broad face and light brown hair. He was younger than expected, but there were deep lines and wrinkles on his brow and under his eyes.

Charlie immediately knew who this man was, the mysteries of the day solved with a single twist of the key. His sister, who claimed to care so little of superficial beauty (which was often a claim made by the inherently beautiful), had somehow learned of the man’s arrival and was preparing for it, and his parents, who were already irritated enough with his roleplaying antics, were worried that meeting this man would spur him to more daring actions.

They were right. Charlie ran out from the shadow of the tree, and although he knew it was improper for a prince to do such a thing, he gave a low bow to the man.

“Sir Roel, the 58th Divine Paladin! We thank you for honoring us with your presence!”

Roel looked at him in confusion. “Oh, hi.”