In the second storey one great saloon ran all the length of the castle.  In it was a long table with eight legs that had carvings of roses rambling along its edges:  the table and its legs were all of one piece with the floor.  They would never have hollowed the great trunk in time had they not used fire.  The second storey was barely complete on the day that Rodriguez and Don Alderon and Morano came to the chains that guarded the park.  And the King of Shadow Valley would not permit his gift to be seen in anything less than its full magnificence, and had commanded that no man in the world might enter to see the work of his bowmen and craftsmen until it should frown at all comers a castle formidable as any in Spain.

And then they heaped up the mortar and rock to the top of the second storey, but above that they let the timbers show, except where they filled in plaster between the curving trunks:  and the ages blackened the timber in amongst the white plaster; but not a storm that blew in all the years that came, nor the moss of so many Springs, ever rotted away those beams that the forest had given and on which the bowmen had laboured so long ago.  But the castle weathered the ages and reached our days, worn, battered even, by its journey through the long and sometimes troubled years, but splendid with the traffic that it had with history in many gorgeous periods.  Here Valdar the Excellent came once in his youth.  And Charles the Magnificent stayed a night in this castle when on a pilgrimage to a holy place of the South.

It was here that Peter the Arrogant in his cups gave Africa, one Spring night, to his sister’s son.  What grandeurs this castle has seen!  What chronicles could be writ of it!  But not these chronicles, for they draw near their close, and they have yet to tell how the castle was built.  Others shall tell what banners flew from all four of its towers, adding a splendour to the wind, and for what cause they flew.  I have yet to tell of their building.

The second storey was roofed, and Castle Rodriguez still rose one layer day by day, with a hauling at pulleys and the work of a hundred men:  and all the while the park swept farther into the forest.

And the trees that grew up through the building were worked by the craftsmen in every chamber into which they grew:  and a great branch of the hugest of them made a little crooked stair in an upper storey.  On the floors they laid down skins of beasts that the bowmen slew in the forest; and on the walls there hung all manner of leather, tooled and dyed as they had the art to do in that far-away period in Spain.

When the third storey was finished they roofed the castle over, laying upon the huge rafters red tiles that they made of clay.  But the towers were not yet finished.

At this time the King of Shadow Valley sent a runner into Lowlight to shoot a blunt arrow with a message tied to it into Don Alderon’s garden, near to the door, at evening.