Half of the hobgoblin army was poised on the border ready to move. The elves and the Zimlakan cavalry were in motion. The king was playing idiot for his captors. It was time to turn my attention to Princess Aricia.

I had checked on her a few times to make sure she was in good health. She had a core of dedicated attendants, most of whom worked to mitigate the worst of what her mother imposed on the girl. Aricia was lovely from a human perspective and looked like good healthy meat with not too much fat from mine. She was already showing the signs of becoming a mature woman capable of carrying a litter, though human litters were only one to two newborns at a time. Humans call them babies or infants rather than kittens.

Humans, like most of the bipedal two-footed races, were badly flawed. They took far too long to raise their litters, twelve to fourteen years for females and fourteen to sixteen for males. Years, not months! It was barely believable that they were able to survive as a race with raising times that long. Human females died years younger than males because of their long gestation times and even longer raising times for their litters, poor things. So many died in childbirth or wore out and expired from the long labor of raising their litters, one after another.

Princess Aricia was big for her age, though that seems to be a Nordweg royal family trait. Aricia shared the same red hair and green eyes as her father and her brother. She was already as tall as Cat. She would be much taller when she was done growing. I knew my boy would not enjoy having his younger sister be his bigger sister. Poor Cat.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Aricia. She was a quiet and soft-spoken girl of few words. When she had anything to say, she chose her words with both economy and care. She had no one her own age to talk to. Her principal dressing maid, a young woman of maybe 18 named Gilda, was the person she spoke to the most. When no one was watching them, the two would trade short snippets of speech at such a low volume that it was impossible to hear what they were saying.

Aricia was brave. She feared her mother, yet she also stood up for herself on matters she cared about. One was the sanctity of her bedroom. Her mother invaded Aricia's apartments once or twice a day. The princess had barred Griselda from entering her bedroom, on the premise that she could not dry it out if her mother's blizzard affliction soaked the carpets and furnishings. Griselda could only see her daughter in the outer sitting room. The kid put her foot down with her snowed-upon mother and made it stick.

With the storm cloud following her mother and the haunting spells spooking the staff, the Princess, Aricia stayed close to her quarters. She refused to dine with her mother while the snow kept falling and would not dine with the Magus without her mother as a chaperone, so she ate by herself for now.

The princess had one of the magic-repelling pendants and wore it everywhere except when she was bathing. Aricia’s principal attendant, a woman named Dame Mildred, would check every morning that Aricia had it around her neck, reminding her that it was protection for anyone casting spells on her. Mildred was a lady of the Osterian gentry who came to Nordweg in the retinue of Griselda sixteen years ago. While she cared about Aricia, she was Griselda’s creature. With Dame Mildred, I saw that what Griselda desired for Aricia took priority over anything Aricia might want for herself.

Other than keeping track of Stephano, Aricia, and the growing misery of Griselda, I had one matter to finish up with the scrying stone as far as the palace in Tammerhof was concerned. That matter was the renewed torment and undermining of Magus Keleher. It was apparent that he had discovered the enchantment on his eating knife, which I found on the clothes-press in his bedroom. I did not undo the enchantment of the man's undergarments or eating knife.

What I did do was destroy his ability to sleep. I would need to watch carefully to be sure it didn't make him more dangerous to those around him than he already was. I was hoping that the lack of sleep would do to him what it did to most people: ruin his mental acuity. Keleher was an observant and clever man. Anything that would decrease his mental abilities would be to our advantage when it came time to face him in Tammerhof.

It took two days to cast the spells through the crystal ball to enchant all of Keleher’s clothes, wash basin, toothbrush, shaving brush and razor, furniture, pillows, blankets, and mattress with spells to keep him awake. It was overkill because, frankly, nothing exceeds like excess.

I used the same simple spell that artificer mages used to make anti-fatigue amulets. Such amulets were a common item sold to students by young artificer mages without permanent employment. The spell to cast the enchantment used very little magic, making items enchanted as anti-fatigue amulets easy to make. Selling them to students would keep a human contract mage housed and fed while the universities, seminaries, ashrams, and convent schools were in session.

While I devoted myself to the harassment of Magus Keleher, Duke Valgard took my boy to the Hof's armory. Once there, he found the shirt of fine chainmail made out of dwarven ring alloy that he wore as a boy. The recipe for dwarven ring alloy is a secret the dwarves have kept to themselves for hundreds of years. The alloy is very light yet three times as strong as tempered steel. The shirt fit Cat so the old Duke gave it to him. It is light and thin enough that Cat can wear it over his chemise and all of his doublets will hide it from sight.

Duke Valgard made a list of nobles he trusted for us to visit on our flying carpet. Our traveling party added the Duke Valgard and Duchess Dora, which would increase our credibility with the disgruntled nobles and senior royal officials Griselda had displaced from their government posts. If Count de Teep did not know his wife of many years was languishing in the palace dungeon, then we would tell him.

We left for the County of Teep two days after Cat updated Lord Rumpal of our progress at Hoheit. This pause gave Valgard's son, Earl Galland, enough time to travel from the western passes into Valltol to Hoheit. Galland would take care of the Duchy of Valltol while the Duke and Duchess traveled with us. The duke brought two carefully-packed crates of Valltol wine with us on the carpet.

(continued in installment 80)