With King Yorick VI away repelling another Andal host, Runestone held several highborn captives taken in the fighting. Curious despite every warning, his daughter Princess Arya slipped beneath the castle after dark and entered the chamber of a young Andal knight, the son of one of the invading warlords. Without his steel and seven-pointed badge, he looked little different from any Vale-born boy her age. She studied him through the bars, troubled more than afraid.

“Why did you come here?” she asked quietly. “You have lands beyond the sea, yet your people burn ours and call it holy. What do you want from our home?”