In the windowless ground-floor hall of the castle, among saddles and muskets and hunting, riding, fighting gear the two old companions-at-arms, Andre's father and Prince Mogeskar, embraced. Upstairs where windows looked out to the river and the rooms were furnished with the comforts of peace, the Princess Isabella greeted them. Reddish-fair, with a long, calm, comely face and grey-blue eyes – Autumn as a young girl – she was tall, taller than Andre. When he straightened from his bow to her he straightened farther than usual, but the difference remained at least an inch.

They were eighteen at table that night, guests, dependents, and the Mogeskars: Isabella, her father, and her two brothers. George, a cheerful fifteen-year-old, talked hunting with Andre; the older brother and heir, Brant, glanced at him a couple of times, listened to him once, and then turned his fair head away, satisfied: his sister would not stoop to this Kalinskar fellow. Andre set his teeth, and, in order not to look at Brant, looked at his mother, who was talking with the Princess Isabella. He saw them both glance at him, as if they had been speaking of him. In his mother's eyes he saw, as usual, pride and irony, in the girl's – what? Not scorn; not approval. She simply saw him. She saw him clearly.

It was exhilarating. He felt for the first time that esteem might be a motive quite as powerful as desire.

Late the next afternoon, leaving his father and his host to fight old battles, he went up to the roof of the castle and stood near the round tower to look out over the Molsen and the hills in the dying, windy, golden light. She came to him through the wind, across the stone. She spoke without greeting, as to a friend. "I've been wanting to talk with you."

Her beauty, like the golden weather, cheered his heart, made him both bold and calm. "And I with you, princess!"

"I think you're a generous man," she said. There was a pleasant husky tone, almost guttural, in her light voice. He bowed a little, and compliments pranced through his mind, but something prompted him to say only, "Why?"

"It's quite plain to see," she replied, impatient. "May I speak to you as one man to another?" "As one man – ?"

"Dom Andre, when I first met you yesterday, I thought, 'I have met a friend at last.' Was I right?"

Did she plead, or challenge? He was moved. He said, "You were right."

"Then may I ask you, my friend, not to try to marry me? I don't intend to marry." There was a long silence. "I shall do as you wish, princess." "And without arguing!" cried the girl, all at once alight, aflame. "Oh, I knew you were a friend! Please, Dom Andre, don't feel sad or foolish. I refused the others without even thinking about it. With you, I had to think. You see, if I refuse to marry, my father will send me to the convent. So I can't refuse to marry, I can only refuse each suitor. You see?" He did; though if she had given him time to think, he would have thought that she must in the end accept either marriage or the convent, being, after all, a girl. But she did not give him time to think. "So the suitors keep coming; and it's like Princess Ranya, in the tale, you know, with her three questions, and all the young men's heads stuck on poles around the palace. It is so cruel and wearisome>" She sighed, and leaning on the parapet beside Andre looked out over the golden world, smiling, inexplicable, comradely.

"I wish you'd ask me the three questions," he said, wistful.

"I have no questions. I have nothing to ask."

"Nothing to ask that I could give you, to be sure."

"Ah, you've already given me what I asked of you – not to ask me!"

He nodded. He would not seek her reasons; his rebuffed pride, and a sense of her vulnerability, forbade it. And so in her sweet perversity she gave them to him. "What I want, Dom Andre, is to be left alone. To live my life, my own life. At least till I've found out… The one thing I have questions to ask of, is myself. To live my own life, to find out my own way, am I too weak to do that? I was born in this castle, my people have been lords here for a long time, one gets used to it. Look at the walls, you can see why Moge has been attacked but never taken. Ah, one's life could be so splendid, God knows what might happen! Isn't it true, Dom Andre? One mustn't choose too soon. If I marry I know what will happen, what I'll do, what I'll be. And I don't want to know. I want nothing, except my freedom."

"I think," Andre said with a sense of discovery, "most women marry to get their freedom."

"Then they want less than I do. There's something inside me, in my heart, a brightness and a heaviness, how can I describe it? Something that exists and does not yet exist, which is mine to carry, and not mine to give up to any man."

Did she speak, Andre wondered, of her virginity or of her destiny? She was very strange, but it was a princely and a touching strangeness. In all she said, however arrogant and naive, she was most estimable; and though desire was forbidden, she had reached straight into him to his tenderness, the first woman who had ever done so. She stood there quite alone, within him, as she stood beside him and alone.

"Does your brother know your mind?"

"Brant? No. My father is gentle; Brant is not. When my father dies, Brant will force me to marry."

"Then you have no one . . ."

"I have you," she said smiling. "Which means that I have to send you away. But a friend is a friend, near or far."

"Near or far, call to me if you need a friend, princess. I will come." He spoke with a sudden dignity of passion, vowing to her, as a man when very young will vow himself entirely to the rarest and most imperilled thing he has beheld. She looked at him, shaken from her gentle, careless pride, and he took her hand, having earned the right. Beyond them the river ran red under the sunset. "I will," she said. "I was never grateful to a man before, Dom Andre."

He left her, full of exaltation; but when he got to his room he sat down, feeling suddenly very tired, and blinking often, as if on the point of tears.

That was their first meeting, in the wind and golden light on the top of the world, at nineteen. The Kalinskars went back home. Four years passed, in the second of which, 1640, began the civil struggle for succession known as the War of the Three Kings.

Like most petty noble families the Kalinskars sided with Duke Givan Sovenskar in his claim to the throne.

Andre took arms in his troops; by 1643, when they were fighting town by town down through the Molsen Province to Krasnoy, Andre was a field-captain. To him, while Sovenskar pushed on to the capital to be crowned, was entrusted the siege of the last stronghold of the Loyalists east of the river, the town and castle of Moge. So on a June day Andre lay, chin on folded arms, on the rough grass of a hilltop, gazing across a valley at the slate roofs of the town, the walls rising from a surf of chestnut leaves, the round tower, the shining river beyond.

"Captain, where do you want the culverins placed?"

The old prince was dead, and Brant Mogeskar had been killed in March, in the east. Had King Gulhelm sent troops across the river to the defense of his defenders, his rival might not be riding now to Krasnoy to be crowned; but no help had come, and the Mogeskars were besieged now in their own castle. Surrender they would not. Andre's lieutenant, who had arrived some days before him with the light troops, had requested a parley with George Mogeskar; but he had not even seen the prince. He had been received by the princess, he said, a handsome girl, but hard as iron. She had refused to parley: "Mogeskar does not bargain. If you lay siege we shall hold the castle. If you follow the Pretender we shall wait here for the King."

Andre lay gazing at the tawny walls. "Well, Soten, the problem's this: do we take the town first, or the castle?"