He hadn’t expected to make their personal acquaintance. Wasn’t a big part of real life the difference between what you expected and what you got? Fighting a dozen guards would have been suicidally stupid. Hamnet took a certain dour satisfaction in noting how astonished Kormak Bersi seemed when the guards laid hold of him. His only crime had been to tell the truth as he saw it. To Sigvat, that was perfidious enough all by itself. The guards hustled Count Hamnet and Kormak out of the throne room. The last thing the Raumsdalian noble saw there was the courtier’s smirking face. “What’s going on here?” someone asked as the guards frog-marched the new prisoners through the corridors down which Hamnet had come on his own not long before. “They made the Emperor angry,” one of the guards answered. He didn’t seem to think he needed to say anything more. By all appearances, he was right. How many times had Hamnet walked past a stairway without wondering where it went? Now he found out with this one, and wished he hadn’t.
