Kai is wandering the palace. He’s not a prisoner here, he’s an honored inhabitant, but some days that doesn’t feel so different from being a prisoner. There’s a whole world outside of the palace, and he sees it on hunting trips or not at all. At least the fact that Kai’s father is starting to get irritated by Kai’s lack of success on the hunting trips means that there have been more of them, of late.

The palace, though, Kai does know, so it holds little enough interest for him. Instead he spends a lot of time gazing out the window, and when he sees the unusual shape — a bird, it has to be — he moves a little towards it, curious. “Hey there,” he says to it, in the manner of a man speaking to a plant, or his dogs, or anything that he doesn’t expect to hear speak back.