To the training grounds, where it sounds like Madeline’s people are hard at practice.

The castle courtyard is a rush of activity, as busy as you’ve ever seen it. Attendants, servants, and guards from yours and your guests’ houses move to and fro, utilizing the courtyard’s centrality to get from place to place. The forge is nearby, as well as your castle’s bakery. You catch the scent of both on the breeze: metal, fire, and yeast, so pungent it overwhelms even the nearby horse droppings, which a frantic servant already rushes to clean.

Even with all the commotion, you hear the swordplay from the training grounds. Rioutous clangs, snaps, and shouts; whoops of admiration and appreciation; brays of despair. You catch a slurry of foreign words you are entirely sure are swears as you approach the courtyard archway that opens up into the training spaces. Right when you pass the threshold, two young, shirtless men wearing the tell-tale fur-and-leather trousers of the Rinvari people tumble out from around the wall, smacking each other with training swords. Seeing you they turn a shade whiter, bow awkwardly, and run off, chattering in a quick, far-off language.

“You the royal she’s here to court?” A small man, high as your waist, snuck up on you while you were eyeing the boys. He’s pale and green-eyed, with hair blacker than coal.

“I think so?” you say, a little dumbfounded. There’s a hundred Rinvari running around, clobbering each other with your stores’ best training equipment.

The man laughs, then waves for you to follow. “She’s been waiting for you. Ordered we set up our best, uh, wares, n’case you showed up.”

You see them before you have to ask: several kegs as tall as you, set up and pouring. It’s not just Rinvari gathered around their spouts, but your own men, too, and many from the other houses. It’s a practical rainbow around the tables: emerald and crimson and blue and purple and the cool-brown leather of the Rinvari. All talking and laughing, freed from the scurry around the rest of the castle.

“She’s there, Lord, at the end of the table there.” The man points to a woman, hard to pick out from the rest of the crowd for her lack of ‘royal’ designation. She’s tall and broad-shouldered, with long hay-yellow hair twisted into a braid. She’s laughing with a gaggle of men and women, and then sees you.

Charismatically making her exit, she approaches you, two drinks in hand. “I was hoping I’d get a look at you before the fete, Lord Dragoon.” She says your title like it’s a funny inside joke, and winks. “Wanna drink with me and the gang some?”