Near the Botanic Gardens, in Oggsfowrd--pardon me, I mean Oxford--Jake’s English teacher Mrs Fink stood looking mournfully at the waters of the river Isis. Tourists and natives alike had jumped into the water to find him. The police had come and gone. She had had to give statements, fill in forms, make a tearful phone call to Jake’s mother. The class had been rounded up and sent back home on the coach early. The incident would probably be on the national news that evening. And it wasn’t the only strange thing that had happened in the city that day. Just a few hundred yards away, a tunnel had collapsed on some other schoolchildren, and one of them was still missing. And, she had heard at the police station, on another road in Oxford that day a boy had been hit by a bus and was recovering in hospital.

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But she didn’t care about any of that really. All she cared about was what had happened to the boy who had hopped a fence and tried to run away from a school trip.

Meanwhile, far, far away, and yet much closer than you might think, Jake took a seat at the dining table of Epitropos, the Steward King of Larakia.

“So, what does being a Larakian prince involve?” said Jake.