Hiram stepped into the carriage, studying their new prisoner, who lurked curled up in the corner. He was fat and big, wearing a silk coat that hung loose on him as if made for a man even fatter still. Is this what you have become? he wanted to ask, recalling the slender, bid-boned youth that he had parted with, twenty years before. No matter what he heard of the elder prince, he would always recall Parlan Kaft the way he had been then, a faint stutter and a delicate touch.

"Are you going to torture me?" the husk asked, his thick and strange voice muffled by his own arms and the thick curtain of his straight black hair.

Hiram hesitated a moment before kneeling before him, gently parting the long, black locks for a better view of the prisoner's face.

The eyes that gazed back to him were grand and deep brown, the mournful eyes of a gazelle, bracing for torture or death.

Hiram stood, taking several steps backwards in shock. "Fetch the scribes", he said, raising his voice for the guard outside, "and inform the princess. This man is not Parlan Kaft."