There was another day when the fresh liveliness of spring had coated the nearby fields with teeny pink brodiaea buds and dewdrops, and the king's party had settled into the vast, empty wild for the afternoon. Arik's tent was propped up, but the weather was so kind that no one was within. Several hearths glowed as men roasted wild mushrooms and silver canter-fish, which existed in such plentiful numbers in a nearby stream that no nets were needed to catch them. Men could plunge their hands into the cool, bubbling brook and pluck fish out with ease, and many said this was because it was the moon in which the fish were blinded by strawberries.

Rowan was fiddling with a sword one of the king's men had lent him; it was foreign and made of a metal that none could recognize, and since he'd held it, his attention could not be taken away. Fyrrah and Jorn were debating whether Hanya and Yorunn were actually the same goddess at different stages of life or whether they were separate beings, and Fell was playing a word game with some of Arik's raiders, each person attempting to say something that was both an insult but also poetic.

Arik was again adoring Halvar and telling the child all sorts of things about himself that the king could not possibly know.

"You are aware. You see the lesson before anyone else and are quick to adjust. You are flexible. You always find a way."

Mira sighed. "Why do you say things like this to him?"

The king laughed, his eyes growing narrow with feigned irritation. "So he believes them."

Mira frowned, not wanting to criticize the king but also not seeing the point in his actions.

The king's eyes shone with the prideful glee of someone who knows something others do not. This was an expression Arik took on often when he was about to explain something. "If the boy believes that he is clever, he will be. He will look for other paths where lesser men would give up. He will say to himself: I am clever. I can figure this out. And he will keep trying and, eventually, succeed." Arik seemed quite proud of his explanation, though Mira thought it utter foolishness.

She said, "An ugly person could call themselves beautiful all they wanted, their face would not change."

The king's boisterous laugh was so loud she could feel it thrumming in her chest.

"You are a clever girl, my dear, but this is perhaps the most foolish thing I've heard you say. There is great power in what a person is called. An ugly person called beautiful will change their posture, their expression… without knowing it, they will become more beautiful. And a beautiful person called ugly will become this if they believe it."

Mira smirked and shook her head. "This is not how the world works."

"Take you, my lady. You were told your whole childhood that you were above others. Highborn. Special. You believed this, and so even when kept as soten, you were different—was it not so? Did Fell give you gruelling work? Were you forced to do anything you did not wish?"

"That is Fell's doing. It has nothing to do with me."

"Let us think a little more about it. You were called Soten, still even after you were Norsen, and you did not correct people. Fell has told me this. It bothered him, and it bothers me, more than you could know, my lady. To me, this says you have been called soten for so long that you have accepted it in your mind. That you have begun to believe this is what you are. A liberated person who thinks themself a servant will end up serving again. You are free and powerful, my lady. You can direct your own life. I would hate for you to forget it."

Even though she didn't for a moment take the king's odd belief seriously, Mira liked being called powerful, and she liked that the king was doing what he believed would help Halvar most when he was grown. Her skepticism must have been visible on her face because the king leaned in and lowered his voice.

"I will tell you a secret, my lady. It will prove my point, but you must not repeat it."

The king looked even younger than normal, his wolfish eyes wide and shining with childish enthusiasm. He giggled the way the Norsern did when they were about to do something they knew they shouldn't, and Mira, feeling her curiosity piqued, moved closer to listen to his hushed words.

"Fell's name. It was I who gave it to him. Before, when he was a young man—I am not exaggerating when I say, he was the most bitter, the most brooding—the angriest person I had ever seen." Arik laughed. "It was absurd. He was always frowning, always grumbling. The air around him was dark and heavy. People could feel his anger floating near him and avoided him like he had some terrible catching disease.

I told him, 'enough of this, you have mourned, and now it is time to have a life. You are young; enjoy it.' He refused. He said that people hated him, that they chose to walk a longer route to avoid coming near him. They knew him as the child who murdered his father. He said he was a curse upon any who looked at him. I said to him, 'No longer will you be Fell Yarlsson, the tainted, the haunted. You will be Fell Sulertag.’ I knew he liked music, but he did not know this yet. He was too deep in his anger to find pleasure in any part of life. He thought me foolish. But slowly, as I introduced him to others, and I told a small lie about his childhood—about him always singing and always humming—people began to treat him different. They called him by his new name. They played music around him. They taught him to treat himself different. He is now, without a doubt, Fell Sulertag. A more perfect name does not exist for him. Do you not think?"

Mira glanced over to where Fell was lounging on the verdant spring grass. He had a wineskin in hand and a big grin on his face. As he chatted with one of the king's men—a drummer—his bent knee swayed back and forth to the tune being played far off in the distance by another one of the king's men. Nothing about the scene felt angry or bitter or like horrible things had happened in the years prior. He was beautiful and light—not the boy Arik described at all… he was a man who moved easily through the world, a man who laughed and enjoyed music and was merry. Sulertag was the perfect fit.

When Mira looked back to the king, his eyebrows were raised, a smug smile on his face. "Do you doubt me still?"

When she could think of nothing to say, the king turned back to little Halvar with a fiendish grin.

"You notice things others do not," he told the child. "Your intuition is strong. You always know when someone is lying. You always know when someone is lying. You always know this. Yes, you do."