The Lady Ysolinde stood before them, strangely different from the slim, willowy maiden I had seen her. She looked almost imperial in her demeanor.
"You shall be rewarded for your ready obedience," she said; "the Prince will not forget your service. Take away that offal!"
She pointed to the dead rascals on the floor.
And the men, muttering something that sounded to me like "Yes, your
Highness !" hastened to obey.
"Did you say 'Yes, your Highness' ?" I asked one of them, who seemed, by his air of command, to be the superior among the archers.
"Aye," answered he, dryly, "it is a term usually applied to the Lady
Ysolinde, Princess of Plassenburg."
I was never more smitten dazed and dumb in my life. Ysolinde, the daughter of Master Gerard, the maid who had read my fate in the ink-pool, whom I had "made suffer," according to her own telling—she the Princess of Plassenburg '.
Ah, I had it now. Here at last was the explanation of the threadbare and inexplicable jest of Jorian and Boris, "The Prince hath a Princess, and she is oft upon her travels !"
But, after all, what a Wendish barking about so small an egg. I have heard an emperor proclaimed with less cackle.
Ysolinde, Princess of Plassenburg—yes, that made a difference. And I had taken her hand—I, the son of the Red Axe—I, the Hereditary Justicer of the Wolfmark. Well, after all, she had sought me, not I her. And then, the little Helene—what would she make of it? I longed greatly to find an opportunity to tell her. It might teach her in what manner to cut her cloth.