. . and I breathe it like the air, now. The smell of the guns is become to me like water to a fish: a thing I take for granted. At first it was simply something that I did not notice any more. Now it is a part of my life I cannot live without. There is power in pulling a trigger: power over the world, in that split moment of sound and fury. Alice had recovered from her ordeal within days, and already she was capitalizing on it when she visited Chalcaster. She was the abducted princess, to hear her tell it. She had been wrested from her chamber in dead of night by a band of swarthy Denlanders and hied away with into the forests. They had been plotting to use her noble blood and gentle birth to destroy the monarchy, although Alice was never specific about how this might be accomplished. Before their evil plots could be enacted, however, her rescuer and his gallant few crashed out of the woods and saved her. Only the identity of that rescuer remained unspoken, with the heavy implication that it was some agent of the King desirous of remaining anonymous.
