The Kingdom at Five Years

Sophia's POV

Five years after Leonidas died, I stood at the east tower window at dawn and looked at the kingdom below and found that I no longer recognized it as the place I had arrived in.

This was not a dramatic observation. It arrived quietly, in the ordinary light of an ordinary morning, the city below beginning its daily movement, smoke rising from kitchen fires, the market preparing in the square beyond the castle walls. The kingdom, going about its life.

But a ...