Chapter 6: The Gate

He was still there in the morning.

He was there the morning after that, and the one after that.

By the end of the first week, he had a tent.

It was canvas, Redoak red, with the oak leaf painted on the flap.

By the end of the second week, he had a brazier, a camp bed and a folding chair, and the reporters had found him.

They came up from the valley station every day in hired cars.

They photographed him in the snow at sunrise.

They photographed him reading by lantern light, his breath smoking, his eyes on my window.

The capital papers reached Highmoor three days late, but they reached it.

The princess's steward left them on the long table at breakfast, and nobody pretended not to read them.

THE KNIGHT AT THE GATE, said one.

REDOAK HEIR KEEPS FROZEN VIGIL FOR LOST BRIDE, said another.

The most romantic thing this paper has ever seen, said a society columnist, who had spent six years calling me "the patient Miss Ashdale."

There was a cartoon on page four.

It showed a small gray wolf in a cage, with a big black wolf eating a sheep behind her.

A handsome red wolf wept outside the bars.

"That's not even a good likeness," Prue said over my shoulder. "You're much prettier as a wolf. I assume."

"You've never seen me as a wolf."

"I'm assuming generously."

I worked.

That was the thing nobody wrote about.

The princess gave me a long room off the west cloister that everyone called the annex.

It held the treaty papers, the truce letters and three years of border records in tall oak cabinets.

Every morning I sat at the window desk and translated.

A dispute over a bridge toll at Coldwater.

A demand for the return of forty stolen sheep, which turned out on the third letter to be thirty-one sheep and a goat.

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