all year round, and goats and lambs and pigs. Inside were medicinal gardens of strange herbs and aromatic plants from faraway lands, vegetable gardens that grew produce three times the size of anything in a city market (this, Nate could believe), and formal gardens full of rosebushes the size of carriages and plants that bloomed even in the dead of winter. Inside was a spring that never ran dry, and great kitchens where the fires never went out, and glass windows in every color a person could imagine. The tables were spread with delicacies from morning until night and if you were hungry you just ate, whatever and whenever you liked.
Nearly everybody had somebody inside, a daughter or son or cousin or sibling. People spoke of them the way Nate had heard people in other places speak of loved ones who had joined guilds or armies or taken berths on sailing ships: sometimes with pride, sometimes with loss, most often with a mix of the two. Some clearly preferred not to speak of the subject at all—or perhaps they had nothing to say. Nate doubted that many Highfall residents could read or write (most of the signs in Brakeside and Marketside had no words, only pictures) so letters home seemed unlikely. But even if they had no stories to tell of their own loved ones, they had a thousand stories about the palace’s highborn residents. Funny stories, embarrassing stories, stories told with a twist of rancorous loathing. There were stories of the fearsome Lord Elban who—depending on who you talked to—may or may not have been quite so fearsome before he’d lost his poor Lady Clorin, and there were stories of Lady Clorin herself, so kind and generous and beautiful. There were even stories of the courtiers, which reminded Nate of trickster tales he’d heard all over the continent, wherein the unscrupulous either earned their comeuppance or dished it out.
Most of the stories, though, were about the Children, as they were called, even though they were well into adulthood. Actual children sang songs about them as they played and crowded around puppeteers in the market to watch their favorites come alive on strings. In skipping chants they went up, up, up the tree and counted all the apples that fell, fell, fell. There were even dolls: Elban’s heir Gavin always in red, his sickly brother Theron in blue, and Gavin’s betrothed, Eleanor, in as much cheerful pink lace as the owner’s parents could afford. And—most popular of all, which thrilled Nate’s heart—the fourth, in drab gray with her mass of dark red ersatz hair, so striking in this land of milky blondes: Lord Gavin’s foster sister, with him since birth although she had no name and no family and a background that was a complete mystery. The love child of Clorin’s favorite maid, some said; a hostage from the Southern Kingdom, said others. Some even said she was just a common orphan from the city, brought in by a midwife. With her hair and eyes being what they were, this story was regarded as the most unlikely, but there were still those who clung to it, as proof that birth wasn’t everything, that luck could befall even the smallest and most humble child of Highfall, and that maybe Lord Elban even had a heart, somewhere inside that bloodless skin of his.
The children loved her. The people loved her. They called her the foundling, which Nate thought too ordinary a name for her, and too small. The first time he’d seen a doll in her likeness at a toy stall he’d been so filled with something like awe and something like shame that he’d had to walk away, quickly. The second time he’d seen one—clutched in the arms of a tiny child, and obviously well-loved—he hadn’t been able to tear his eyes from it. Was it a faithful likeness, he wondered? Was the doll’s berry-colored wig determined by the real shade of the girl’s hair, or by the ready availability of berries? Was the curved pink line of her smile real? Had they given her things to smile about in the palace? Was she a happy person? Nate had heard enough children’s stories to know they came with roles to fill: in the puppet shows, Lord Gavin was noble and heroic, his brother a bumbling clown, Lady Eleanor nearly angelic. The foundling was always cast as the friendly troublemaker who came out on top. He wanted to believe the picture the