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We both watched as shirtless kynd sweated in the stamping room, pressing out pages that were then bound together with twine in great bundles.

“What are they making now?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There’s a priest up top, so probably boring god stuff. The Praxeter has the right to use the press the same as the king and the juggers. It’s always running. Oh! I should show you the library!”

And so she did.

Imagine a palace that any citizen can use, three stories tall.

Shelves and shelves of books, pots of scrolls, tables with all manner of folk, both rich and poor, reading, writing. I saw books in Old Keshite, in Axaene, in languages I’d never heard of. The titles had much to say about those who read them:

THE SLAVE RACES AND HOW BEST TO MASTER THEM

POEMS TO THE GOD OF PAIN

A HISTORY OF THE CYCLOPES AND THEIR SUBJUGATION

FORTIFICATIONS OF THE WESTERN CITIES

GERYAT ABASED AND THE SHARING OUT OF HER DAUGHTERS

THE BLACKGLASS HEART

And just when I was reaching my hand out to pick one of the smaller ones up, a real beauty with gold lettering on red leather titled THE MAKING OF A LOYAL WIFE, and I couldn’t wait to see what karkery lay therein, the princess said, “I’m bored. And hungry.”

So we went to a bakery and instead of discovering lost books and reading about the unlikely taming of wives, and the gates of unimagined cities, I watched a big, sticky brat stickily eat cake.

I resolved to get into that library, though I never did.

Of all the lost wonders of Erydon, this is the one I’m sorriest about.

30Beatings All Around

When we arrived home later that day, we found that a minor miracle had occurred. On entering the great hall on the ground floor, a blue-and-gold jingling shape rolled at us from under the table. It was none other than Hasp, back in his fool’s regalia, even holding his bauble—sort of a stick ending in a smaller Hasp’s head carved out of wood, but cleverly, so his jaw would move up and down and jingle when shaken.

“HASP-A-RASP!!” the Princess Renata squealed, clutching him up in a rib-squeezing mother bear’s hug, then shaking him. “I was so worried about you!” she said, shaking him a bit harder, harder I’d say than one should shake a sick fellow, even one that’s feeling better. He obliged her rough treatment with a ridiculous hargledee-bargledee noise that made the girl-monster laugh and put him down so she could clap her hands and jump. I remember moving my foot away so not to get it squashed when she landed—there was a lot to her. For all that she was a child here, in Holt, she’d have been big enough to get hired to bang heads together in a seaside bar. I wondered for the whatteenth time if I could take her in an unarmed bout. I had previously thought I could, but what if she rolled over on me while I was choking her from behind? I remembered how Malk had kept throwing us both down when we fought on that whaler, but he was a fit, lean fucker—if Her Burly Highness did the same to me, I’d might as well be a clay pot in a sack. I tried to chase the thought out of my head, but it kept coming back.

Some say we help bring things about by thinking of them; so maybe I had my own violent thoughts to blame for what happened next.

Before I knew what was happening, we found ourselves in the garden near the silvery pools with the greeny fish.

“Now we shall play Hoodman Blind!” the girl said.

At that, Drab reached into a trunk of Renata’s games and amusements he had wheeled into the garden and splonked out a bit of silk and a sort of bendy rod or stick, of the sort one might lay across the arse of a naughty child. As a former naughty child, I didn’t like the look of that stick at all.

“Oh, goodie, Hoodman Blind!” Hasp said in a funny, creaky voice that made it clear he hated this game but would cheerfully play it.

“Now I know you don’t love this game, Husper-bugger, but it is my favorite, and I don’t ask you to play it often. Besides which, you’re awfully clever at it.”

“It pleases me to challenge you, Your Highness, so I must needs be clever to evade one so skilled,” he said.

“What’s going on?” I asked him low and quick.

“You’ll see.”

“Is she going to whip us with that?”

“Of course she is.”