Valdis is beautiful - and a comfortably-appointed home, where one day he and Candice will raise their children - but above all the estate is designed and built to work. It revolves around classrooms and practise fields, this library and the smaller ones that act as satellites around the castle, the private studies that he locks everyone else out of. It's exhausting. It's wonderful. And he is proud of it, because he did this.

"Mine are all the titles prefaced with 'military'," he says, speaking of work. While this is a fascinating way of putting it, it is also a confirmation. "It's Elenia, though, yes." He's been compiling a family history (partly from memory, partly from research), and he doesn't mention it for so very many reasons. (First of all 'it's irrelevant', which saves him from having to look at any of the others.)

"A lot of that deals with the rise of the knighthoods, and that'd bring us all the way back to where academia and war occasionally go hand in hand - or at least take the odd intellectual to the front lines. Cannon-fodder don't make very good sorcerers."