Living as I did in a world of servants and masters and politics, I was a stranger to real friendships. My relationship to my parents could not at all be described as a loving one. So too my relationship with Crispin was characterized by my distaste for him. My bonds with the others of my father’s court—with Sir Felix and Sir Roban, with Tor Alma and Tor Alcuin and Eusebia the Prior and all the rest—were only the attachments of student and teacher or of master and servant. Even my nascent feelings for Kyra—though I did not know or appreciate all of what that meant—were passed through the
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