Chapter 30

Caspian didn’t leave my side for a second.

People tried to reach us all evening—a man in a velvet coat turned up three times in an hour exactly where we were about to walk. Almost none of them got close. Rhys and Corwin were always somehow in the way—never rudely, never seeming to try. Corwin in particular had taken to guarding me as though he meant to make up for the steps one evening at a time. Wherever Caspian and I went, he was a pace behind my left shoulder. Rhys was pulled away now and then by men who wanted to talk politics, and came back each time looking as if he had been chewing gravel.

“The Seelies aren’t here yet,” Caspian murmured, on one of our slow turns of the room. He had been telling me who everyone was, low, in my ear, the way he had read me the names of the sailors in the shipwreck book. “Isadora will come late. Her son will come later, so that everyone sees him come in.”

“The prince,” I said. “Is there anything I should know?”

“Believe ha