When the Spring Came Round Again

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 1,300 words of the epilogue. The King's cunning left hand, his young half-sister Clarice called the Clever, arrives at Newborough in another year's spring.

Clarice, whose modest rôle in this conclusion was sketched out two years ago, leaps off the page solid as anybody I know, the moment I meet her. Celebrated  widely as a beauty, because sparkling young princesses always must be, she is really more like a merry female Dick Crookback with the sharp corners carefully tucked away: small, vivid, sort of ill-assembled, and dangerously intoxicating over about a salon-sized radius. I'm afraid this will be the only chance I get to meet her, because Clarice is a diplomat, and much too good at it ever to get herself into anything like a folk-song or a fairy-story.

Now we will see how far the tale has come from the aftershock of the last chapter, to something like a real happy ending.