-Three-
EVE THE HALF KNIGHT

Eve was not born in the kingdom, but brought to it swaddled in the red cloth of a military councilman’s cloak, carried in her father’s armored arms. Despite her birthright, the kingdom would be the only home she would ever know. She learned to walk and speak in the deepest bowels of the royal fortress, humanity’s central node. The royal fortress, constructed on the eastern edge of the kingdom’s plateau, towered over all human civilization on the one side and the endless Evergrowth on the other. It was a fitting place for a half-breed to achieve maturity. The fortress dwarfed all other human structures in both size and height, housing all of the Kingdom’s governance and military operations. At its heights rose the quarters of the royals, the king and queen and, later, their sons. In the depths below ground lay the military barracks, the armory, and her father’s office. The ground level strata, the most penetrable of the structure, housed banquet halls and servant operations. That level was already in rare use by the time of Eve’s youth.

In times of stability and plenty, the whole towering mass of stone could be looked upon as a benevolent guardian of the streets and homes and fields within its shadow. In times of hardship that repute soured and the fortress became a loathsome tumor, hoarding taxes and tribute. At the time of Eve’s birth, times of plenty were a distant memory for elder nobles and only the most ancient of the peasants. The ongoing war, the ever present threat of the Evergrowth, that alone kept the masses from dismantling the fortress stone by stone in search of hidden sustenance and weaponry. Though the Evergrowth lurked below the kingdom’s plateau on all sides, it was well-known that the Goddess resided in the east.

War with the Goddess laid the foundation for not only Eve’s childhood home, but her whole life. War, her sole instrumentality decided for her since before even her conception.

Thus it was that she could swing a sword before her mane had even begun to peek out of her neck’s flesh. By the time the first dusky scarlet hairs emerged, she could effectively wield the entire royal armory. She favored the glaive, perhaps because of the distance it provided between herself and her father in battle.

The dulled training blade slammed down on her father’s shield with a resounding crack, but slid harmlessly off its curved surface. Such a show of strength, especially from a girl her age, might have intimidated a lesser opponent or maybe even broken a lesser shield. But it was an unwise tactic against her father, a seasoned war councilor bearing the scars of more ventures into the Evergrowth than most men alive. With a thrust of his shield he threw her blade off center and rushed down the reach of her polearm in the resulting opportunity. Their training battles always ended quickly once he managed to close the gap between them. Eve braced for the defeating thwack of his oak sword, against her chest if his mood was favorable, the side of her head if it was not.

This time though, with the reflex to clench closed her eyes and draw back, slipped through another reflex. Her tail shot suddenly over her shoulder, punching his face just as he raised his arm to strike. Stinger down, it did not pierce him, but the force of the unexpected impact threw him to the ground and the the budding thorns of the mace-like bulb bit shallowly into his jowl. Eve stared down petrified at her father’s face and the small trickling cuts that marked the spot where a nasty bruise would bloom by evening. She was not terrified that she had hurt him, she had inflicted worse with her glaive in lucky battles before, and those times it had only improved his mood. This time the blow came from a forbidden weapon. Her father beat her for the offense and extended their weapon training into the weary hours of night. Eve stayed in the barracks well past midnight, cleaning her armor and body after her father had finally relented for the night. As she scrubbed herself with cold water she resented the sensation of her tail, its bulk as constant and unsubtle as a fifth limb. When she was young the immature segmented string of carapace could be hidden under clothes and armor, but with age it had grown thick as her thighs, stronger than any man’s arm, and tipped with a stinger spine that only added deadly length with each passing year.

Her tail was the most obvious of the features that compelled her father to keep her secluded in the fortress’s innards. She was to be seen scarcely by the soldiers and officers and not at all by the common folk. By the time Eve could look down on her father standing, however, this had become a less strictly kept rule. Eulia said that the common folk had circulated rumors of their existence for most of their lives anyways, and besides for purposes of gossip, they cared less than their father’s had feared. Eulia said the common folk had priorities higher than the purity of blood in the high council’s children.

Eve did not entirely understand this, like most things Eulia told her, but she welcomed the new freedom that came when her father moved them from their home in the fortress to a smaller military office deeper in the kingdom. In those twilight years of his life, her father became particularly afeared of the eastern border. He added a new rule to his list of commandments; she was never to go near that eastern wall.

Perhaps because of her father’s advancing age, perhaps because of her expanding size, perhaps because of the general state of the Kingdom, and most likely because of all these things, she enjoyed new freedoms in the midcity. Her training became more self-directed, her sparrings more often with her fellow half-knights than with her father. He could no longer offer her much challenge. Most valued of all, she was allowed to walk the city streets, so long as she was armed (and now there were increasingly few times she wasn’t) and did not bring too much attention to herself. She and Eulia would take long meandering walks in the evenings and early mornings. It would be impossible to avoid stares, conspicuous as they were. Eulia might have had a chance at concealment by herself, covered in her cloth wraps as she had taken to doing, but Eve was not so ambiguous. A towering knight in iron-black armor trailing a tree trunk of a scorpion tail, she could pass no one without attracting at least a furtive glance.

Eulia, who was small even for a human, supplemented her martial prowess with a shrewd cunning, a mind that could not be kept ignorant. Eve wondered if her father had encouraged this trait or if he was simply unsuccessful in stifling her curiosities and impressive capacity for satisfying them.

On one late evening stroll, Eulia told her they would be brought before the princes soon. Eve’s father had mentioned nothing of this, but it was not typical of him to inform her of anything in advance.

“There are four of them, one for each of us.” The way she said it, as if contemplating the potential spoils of battle, earned a lusty smile from Eve. Any kind of formal ownership of the royal children was an absurd notion, even Eve knew that. But she could indulge a private pride that knights are disposed to feel for the sort of possession that comes from taking the duty of protection over a highborn ward. “The queen’s pregnant with another, I hear. If it’s a daughter there will be a feast.”

Feasts were something like a fairy tale for the young half-knights. Their fathers spoke of great ones before the war, enormous halls filled with abundant meat and mead, music, dancing women, grand celebrations for all the honorable soldiers to partake in. Feasts were the subject of fantasies, dreamt of but not realized. Something to motivate, even if the actual possibility of such an event grew more implausible every year. Eve would not trust her own hopes, but Eulia was the sharpest person she knew excepting her father, and even he might have fallen behind as she grew less young and he more old.

She eagerly solicited all the news Eulia had gained from her mysterious ‘informants’ and the pair fantasized about princes and feasts until interrupted by the approach of a peasant man. This surprised Eve. Most had the good sense to stay clear of passing soldiers, especially imposing knights such as herself. He crept into their path with equal parts caution and boldness. He was a man of advanced age, like all men in the kingdom. He conveyed his peaceable intent with folded hands and hunched posture, but even if were armed and hostile, he could have made no real threat to the pair of well-armored, well-trained, youthful knights. The man’s frail body stooped only barely taller than Eulia.

He held cupped hands forward. Begging, Eve realized. He offered them the formality of a request and explanation for his lowly desperation, but Eulia dropped a couple of gold pieces into his palm before he could finish. The pair of gleaming metal coins had once been worth a handsome sum, but there were few merchants left who would take them anymore. Most transactions followed the rule of barter now. Eve very rarely kept her own stash of gold on her anymore.

The man appeared understandably disappointed, but he offered them his deep gratitude before scurrying off down a side street. Through the window of a nearby home, a family of gaunt faces watched the exchange closely. Eve suddenly wanted their stroll to be over.

On their way back to the soldier housing, Eulia spared few words of explanation on the growing crisis of the Kingdom’s common folk. Eve understood this only dimly. She knew, of course, that save for the queen there were no children born on the plateau. And she knew that this meant decline and desperation, as her father had told her so many times. But she did not know any time before this one, so it was hard to grasp the real significance of it. And besides, her own food and firewood had never been insecure. Eulia’s eyes, the only uncovered portion of her face, appeared troubled and that troubled Eve. But Eulia refused to elaborate further on the topic.

Such were the concerns that weighed on Eve’s minds many nights in bed, when she had no training to distract her. Sometimes she would wake without cause except for her mind’s brooding storm of unanswered questions and anxieties. That, and the occasional inexplicable feeling of being watched. Her room possessed only one door, barred from the inside, and a single dark window. Even if someone was peeking in on her sleep, they could hardly pose a threat. Her glaive rested always within arms reach, too heavy for most humans to wield even if they could somehow manage to get their hands on it before her. Yet the feeling unsettled her. On nights when she was awoken by it, she rarely returned to sleep.

It was on such a night that the uncanny feeling awoke her while she faced the window in bed. Her eyes snapped open just in time to catch a single glimpse of the source. A face, barely illuminated by moonlight, floated in the darkness, watching her. Sooner than she could sit up and reach for her weapon it vanished, sunk into the dark night beyond the glass.

The vision had appeared for such a fleeting moment and so immediately out of sleep that it could easily have been regarded as the substance of dream and dismissed. Yet the features of that face lingered, always haunting her unoccupied mind. The memory became clearest in front of the mirror, when she could stare into her own face and wonder. She poured over the features she could draw out from memory. The flat nose that melted into the cheeks on the sides, the wide thin-lipped mouth, the eerie flash of reflective eyes. She could remember these qualities so vividly in part for the psychic significance of the event, but also because she saw them again when she gazed at herself in the pane of polished silver. The face in the window undeniably mirrored her own.

She dared not speak aloud what this intimated, but she could not stop herself from thinking it. The face, in addition to bearing a resemblance, was also that of a woman. She could not help but wonder, to fear and yearn about questions her father had never answered.

***

Only meeting the princes could distract her from the haunting face. Eulia’s prediction has turned out correct, and her father informed her that she would be meeting the Kingdom’s sovereign heirs with only three days' notice. It would be a momentous meeting and he expected to present her with the highest prestige. The next three days were filled with meticulous grooming. She was to trim her hair, bathe with fine oils possessed only by men as powerful as her father and saved only for occasions such as this, polish her armor, practice her knightly posture and how she would address the royals, and of course endlessly rehearse her bow. She only barely managed to refuse his insistence that she shave her mane. She knew it would only grow back as ugly stubble. He would have done it himself if she were younger and smaller, but he no longer had that kind of power over her.

It was an unpleasant few days of preparation, but come their visit to the fortress she felt like the hero of a story book, the gold accents of her armor gleaming in radiant sunlight. She and her father lead the procession up into the highest hall of the royal court, followed by the other three high councilors and their half-knight children: Eulia, Chiton, and Gregor. Besides them, a few other higher ranking officers accompanied, and in the royal hall a handful of nobles stood along the walls to observe. But the small crowd underwhelmed Eve’s expectations.She knew there were far less able people in the Kingdom than there once had been, but such a paltry gathering still seemed ill-fitting for a Kingdom of such size and grandeur.

Although the audience was scarce, the princes offered plenty of excitement. She’d only ever seen the eldest prince once before, when she was a young child and he was only an infant in the queen’s arms. It was the first and only time she had seen a baby. The sight had stuck with her. Now, the eldest was no longer a baby. Prince Rowan, miraculously born only a few years after her, now perched on the cusp of maturity. He stood in front of his father, King Valus, a man whose size rivaled even Eve’s own. The prince had not inherited his stature and resembled much more closely his mother’s slight figure and delicate features. The way his father loomed over him, enormous hands gripping his thin shoulders, emphasized the contrast. Prince Rowan wore fine robes of the royal red, a brighter shade than that of Eve’s hair, dotted with tasteful emerald embellishments, symbolic of his semi-divine heritage. Maybe it was only that Eve knew so few others near her own age, but his beauty struck her. He possessed the storybook beauty of a princess, the fragile delicacy of a flower.

Beside Rowan the other princes stood with their mother, Queen Esther. The queen alone sat in a small throne, slumped against the backrest. She appeared older than the king, though Eve knew she was not and she pitied the woman whose sickly complexion and sagging shoulders cried for rest, yet whose heavily pregnant belly foreboded little chance of it.

Prince Oleander clung to her arm, distinguished by his silky black locks, the exact same as hers. Huddled was the third born, Aster, and the youngest, Cedar, barely old enough to stand at a ceremony such as this. Their preciousness was emphasized chiefly by their youth, an extremely rare sight in the kingdom.

Rowan wore the properly serene face of a royal, but the others were perhaps too young to have learned such ceremonial self-mastery. They looked up, and it was a good ways up, at Eve with barely contained terror. Oleander’s fingers tightened around his mother’s hand and for one of the only times in her life Eve felt a little embarrassed by her intimidating appearance.

She and Eulia stood before their fathers, mirroring the royal family in the middle of the hall. Though all four half-knights would be sworn to protect any and all children of the king, it was she and Eulia’s honor to swear allegiance to the Princes directly in this ceremony. Eulia matched with Prince Oleander and Eve, the natural leader of their cohort, matched with Prince Rowan.

When the time came for her part, she stepped forward and bowed to the royal family. Then before Rowan she knelt. Her iron-clad knee knocked against the polished stone floor with a satisfying crack. Her father had told her that a royal administrator would announce the oath, but the family stood alone. It was the king himself who spoke.

“You, the four half-blooded born of the wilds, have been raised and trained by the kingdom of man. Today we observe the desperate measure of your birth come to fruition. You will swear your loyalty to the royal family and attain the position of high knights of the kingdom. Your duty, from this day forth to the time of your expiration, shall be the protection of the children of Valus, sole heirs of the kingdom, humanity’s final hope. There is no more crucial task than their prosperity. You will submit your life to it.”

The king did not speak as well as a servant trained for the task, he could not conceal the effort of memory behind the words, but his baritone voice conveyed well the enormous gravity of the oath. Eve, who wore iron armor, was well-used to weight. This event served only as a formality, she had taken this oath as early as her father had given her a weapon. The only novelty here was the presence of the secluded princes. All her life she had known them only as figments, the cynosure of her and her comrades' lives. Now they stood before her, the future of the kingdom made flesh and blood, four young boys and a hopeful daughter in the womb of the queen. She knew her bowed eyes should not stray from her boot, but she could not resist the slight raise of her gaze to the eldest prince’s legs before her. Scrawny calves ended in bare feet, a custom of the highest born children, for they did not tread anywhere unclean.

“Should you stray from this path you shall lose the knighthood, all your honor and the honor of your fathers, and your life. Stay this path and you shall be rewarded as heroes in the coming era of rebirth. Now stand.”

They stood.

Eve and the king shared mutual surveyance over the heads of most others in attendance. Eve had seen the king many times before, but usually from afar and mostly in her youth living in the fortress. Now the ceremony granted her an opportunity to view the legend up close. A man of spent youth, like her father and most men in the kingdom, yet he retained a striking ferocity in his focused gaze. The legendary hero of the foray in the primordial valley, the very man who cut the Goddess’s womb from her slumbering body. Like grand feasts and his sons, the king seemed more the thing of fantasy than reality. Yet, his head did not rise above Eve’s own and his clenched fists did not rival hers in size. The notion occurred to her that just as she could now easily best her father, she might also be capable of defeating even the ultimate hero of humanity’s first era. Aware of the danger of such thoughts, she banished the notion as soon as snuck into her mind.

It was Prince Rowan who spoke next. Funny that she had not expected him to participate beyond his presence. From the slight shift of expression in the king’s face, perhaps he had not expected it either. No one stopped the boy, however. “Kneel, please.” He said.

Eve knelt again. Eulia, Chiton, and Gregor also knelt, but the prince stepped to Eve alone. In this position, she on her knee and him standing, they were level with each other. He stepped close enough to introduce an air of privacy between them, even in the vast hall and the small crowd.

“Your hand and eyes,” he requested with princely authority, and then in a hasty edition that betrayed his nerves, “please.”

She placed her gauntlet on his outstretched hand, which disappeared under her palm. Besides his scruffy, mahogany hair, he bore little resemblance to his father. His features reflected his maternal heritage in a boyish iteration. The verdant dark of his large eyes belonged to neither parent, however, and perhaps to no other mortal at all.

“As firstborn prince I personally ask you to affirm for your undying loyalty as my vassal. One day I will rely on your protection and I request the security of knowing you will not waver.” Eve could not speak so eloquently, her raising having neglected all areas of learning beside martial training. She only dimly understood the meaning of half his words. Yet when she met his eyes, she received his message loud and clear. Eve was not perceptive of social intricacies, that was always Eulia’s territory. It must have been the importance of the moment or a rare instance of some magic that allowed her to understand his intended meaning. Be my vassal alone, was his message, swear loyalty not to mankind, not to the kingdom, the royal family, or the king, swear it to me alone. Though he presented himself to the hall with all the serene grace of a true royal, he offered Eve alone a peak beneath the surface. Surely she imagined it, for such subtle motions could not be felt through the thickness of her gauntlets, but in the moment it seemed certain the arm she held trembled. Trembled like the tender stalk of a sprout newly burst from the soil, exposed to the gales of a world so much bigger than itself. Save me, he seemed to say.

“I swear this oath to the Kingdom,” Eve said, exactly as instructed.

The memory of Prince Rowan’s face in that ceremony would haunt her for years, just as the mysterious face in the window did. At times the two would mingle in her dreams, wide mouth and verdant eyes, traces of motherhood from both. Eve was not curious. She did not go searching for mysteries, but in the twilight years of her girlhood they presented themselves. Despite her best efforts, they insisted to be dwelt on.

Within the year following the half-blood knight’s oath, her father passed. He left his project as complete as it could be within his lifetime. It was a quiet passing in sleep, the kind that might have been due to any number of morbidities common to the elderly. With the ever swelling volume of death in the kingdom, no one cared enough to divine a particular cause. His body was given as honorable a cremation as dwindling royal resources could allow. Grief, like the weight of her armor, took its toll but was barely noticed. Such was the way of a kingdom rich in death and poor in life.

Once Eulia asked her an odd question. They sat on the parapet of the eastern border wall overlooking the vast verdant dark. Eve had long stopped heeding many of her father’s rules, even before his death.

Eulia’s claws traced intricacies of her dagger’s handle but her face looked toward the fathomless valleys below. “If the kingdom falls apart… who will we be?”

“You mean the end of the first era? If we do our duty right, we’ll be heroes in the rebirth. You know that.”

“Right.” Eulia said, already absent from the conversation.

Eve bristled at the oft-felt feeling that Eulia did not fully respect her intellect. She said nothing however because she was not sure of it herself.

Soon after her father’s passing, she again began to wake in the middle of the night to feelings of being watched. She could have dismissed these interruptions as simply one of the many symptoms that accompany grief, except that one night she woke not only to the lingering trace of some phantom presence, but also to the very real snap of the window latch. Eve was at the window, glaive in hand, before she had even processed what she’d heard. No other face accompanied her own in the glass pane, but the inner latch was half broken, a sure sign of attempted entry from the outside.

Eve slept in the day for weeks after that. At night she stuffed a training dummy under her covers and waited on the roof near enough to her window to be hidden, but close enough to watch. It was on a moonless night that she finally put one mystery to rest. Perhaps the face at the window returned on the full moon for concealment, but Eve’s dark armored form also benefited from the lightless night. So thick was the dark that she very nearly missed her chance. Few folk remained in the midcity now and so few lanterns lit the streets. The spider web of lights that once marked the kingdom plateau out from the dark of the Evergrowth had dwindled to a measly scattering of flames huddled in the eastern city, around the royal fortress. There were only just enough stubborn residents left to provide a few glowing windows and street torches. Against these Eve caught a streak of shadow, someone moving very fast. The path was difficult to follow but Eve had the advantage of knowing the destination. Somewhere in the black and gray-black blocks of the military office she spied motion, and that was all she needed.

The bottle she flung trailed a flaming arch an impressive distance and shattered squarely in the street below her window. Its liquor contents washed a fiery tide over the cobblestones. Caught in the sudden flood of amber light, the body already slinking away on the rooftop froze. Eve stood baffled by the revelation. Had she caught the wrong lurker? The creature was not a woman, but a beast. Eve moved with urgency, but she was neither quick or stealthy in her clanking armor. Once seen, the beast ceased to flee however. When she arrived at the flaming puddle in the street below, the monster waited for her perched on the roof overhang. Most of it was an enormous lion, an animal body larger than her. But the face that peered down, except for the reflective flash of its eyes, was human. A woman’s face, the same she’d glimpsed once before, framed in a mane of dusky scarlett. It lay with its paws, broad as oars, folded neatly with claws sheathed. But the tail curved menacingly over its head, stinger forward, undercut any impression of friendliness.

“You should not have done that. Now that you’ve seen me, you know how this must end.”

Its human voice and face made an uncanny mismatch with its quadrupedal feline body. Eve knew of the infinite menagerie of beasts and monsters lurking in the depths of the endless Evergrowth, she’d even encountered some of them in the rare training forays her father had taken her on. But never had she seen a monster of this size and strangeness, and although the power of speech was not something humanity explicitly claimed as exclusive to them, Eve had never before encountered any challenge to her assumption that it was.

“You shouldn’t be creeping around our land if you didn’t want to be seen.” Eve growled.

The monster stood, ready to lunge at any moment. “You have more of him than I had once hoped.”

“What are you doing here?” Eve thrust her glaive up, putting the lengthy blade between her and the beast. Should she make an attack, she would skewer her from below.

“Checking in on loose ends.”

Eve tired of the monster’s vagueness. “Are you my mother?” She flung out the question burning her mind, and like the bottle, its arc ended in flames. At this the monster smiled and revealed another inhuman detail of her face. Eve had always thought her own teeth a bit pointed but they were practically herbivorous compared to the gleaming armory between this monster’s jaws. “Such concepts extend only so far beyond your borders. You are of my blood, yes. But I hardly even nursed you. ‘Mother’ is a bit intimate for our relationship, isn’t it?”

“Then why have you come? This isn’t the first time.”

“I really wish you had left me to my business, I had not yet decided how to handle this before you stuck your snout in.”

“And now?”

“You’ve seen me and you know what I am to you. The way things are in the forest now, that’s a risk for me. At least understand that. This is not personal.” Her claws unsheathed, long black ferocious hooks.

“You want to kill me?”

“Naturally. You are a disastrous gamble I made long ago. Perhaps I should have corrected it sooner. But we both know you would do the same, if you could.” With a dagger-toothed sneer, she asked, “Do you fancy yourself a true knight of man?”

She did not wait for an answer. Eve had underestimated her speed, and thrust her weapon two late. The power of her paws slammed into Eve’s shoulders and threw her onto her back. Eve had never faced an opponent whose strength outclassed her own.

It was thanks only to her superior martial training that she had the reflexes to dodge the stinger that stabbed at her head and cracked the cobblestone beside it. She had the good sense to grab it to prevent a second strike, and delivered a powerful retaliatory kick to the monster’s stomach. In return, a swipe of hook claws split open her cheek. Eve’s right hand relinquished her glaive, it was useless in this position. With it she snatched at the throat beneath that mane. The thick hair provided some defense, but not enough. Only Eve wore the benefit of human forging.

The monster must have felt the crushing power of Eve’s grip, more than enough to collapse a larynx, and retreated off her. Eve regained her footing and snapped into position with her glaive ready. The monster struck with her tail again, its sword-length lanced forward with blinding speed but Eve was ready this time. She deflected its course to the side with her polearm and brought the blade down in a decisive strike. The monster dodged quickly enough to avoid having its brains spilled onto the street, but not quick enough to avoid the nasty cut that opened up across her brow.

Both combatants now separated a step, taking a moment to reassess the other. Eve looked at the face that mirrored her own in more ways than just the rich gushes of blood that streamed into and darkened their manes. Up close like this in the fading firelight Eve saw where they were not exactly the same. A replica devoid of all the traces of her father, but nonetheless strikingly similar. No doubt could be left in her mind.

“I don’t want to have to kill my mother.”

“Arrogance!” The perfect humanness of her voice slipped into a bestial roar.

“But you struck first.” Eve let her glaive fly forward with her own quickness. The strike missed, but not by much. As the last of the first bottle fire starved, Eve drew another from her belt and cast it at the feet of the monster. Wet flames erupted between them, spilling the scent of scorched fur. Claiming the offensive, Eve took full advantage of the distraction and sent her blade through the dancing flames. Another near dodge from the Monster, but her backstroke managed a shallow wound to the shoulder.

The monster, seared by fire and half blinded by blood, recalculated its posture. No longer confident, she crouched low to the ground. Her tail made another strike that landed on Eve’s breastplate, just above the heart. It did not piece the metal, but the force of it knocked Eve back a half-step. It was all the opportunity needed. The monster turned and fled.

Pursuit was not a possibility, the creature moved over the rooftops with inhuman speed. She would likely be clear of the kingdom before Eve could gather her comrades. Not that she even wanted to. There would be no more face in her window after that. With her father gone, there was no one who would press her on where she’d earned the wounds on her cheek, except maybe Eulia, but she had ways of knowing without asking. Eve would let the encounter live on only as a private memory.

Attempted filicide is a powerful memory, however. Its influence would be felt when Eve and her fellow half-knights became the sole military force of the kingdom, and when the king was found murdered and the princes stolen, and for a long time after that.