The treaty was read out in the great hall on the first day of the month, in front of everybody, in the flat voice of a clerk who had read it eleven times already and had stopped hearing it.
Isabelle stood where she had been put, two steps below and to the right of her father, and listened to herself being spent.
Carrow would withdraw from the two river forts. Ardwyn would open the western road. Carrow would return the bells they had taken out of the abbey at Loft, which everyone in the hall cared about far more than they cared about the forts. There would be no reparation on either side, which meant nine thousand dead men had cost nothing.
And Isabelle, eldest daughter of Aldric of Ardwyn, would go to Carrow before midsummer and be married to their prince, and any child of that marriage would have a claim on both crowns, which was the actual treaty. The rest was decoration.
"Is she content?" said the Carrow envoy, at the end, not to her.
"She is content," said her father.
Afterwards there was wine, and men being enormously friendly with each other, and Isabelle stood by the window with a cup she was not drinking and let people tell her how happy they were.
Her sister found her there.
Cerys was fourteen and had a way of arriving beside a person without appearing to have walked. She stood at Isabelle's elbow and looked out at the same nothing.
"They keep saying the word content," Cerys said.
"They do."
"You look like you're about to be sick on the ambassador."
"I am about to be sick on the ambassador."
Cerys considered this. "Would it break the treaty?"
"It would improve it."
They stood there. Down in the yard a boy was walking two horses in a circle, and beyond the wall the country went off green and grey towards a border that had, for ten years, been a place where people died in the spring.
"Isabelle," Cerys said. "If you don't go."
"Don't."
"If you don't go, I go. Don't pretend you haven't worked that out, because you work everything out, it's the only thing you're good at."
"I've worked it out."
"Then that's all right." Cerys drank some of Isabelle's wine, quickly, the way you do a thing you are not allowed. "Because I'd be terrible at it. I'd start a new war by Tuesday."
Isabelle laughed, and was surprised by it, and then was almost undone by it, and put the cup down on the sill.
"You'd be fine," she said.
"I would not be fine. I would be a catastrophe with a crown on." Cerys leaned into her side, briefly, the way she had done since she could walk. "Anyway. Six weeks."
"Six weeks."
"Are you still not sleeping?"
Isabelle looked at the boy and the two horses going round.
"I sleep," she said.