A nuisance became a trap
The king’s order began with a small, recurring problem: tennis balls were rolling into an open sewer grate. Sealing the opening stopped them from disappearing into the drain, but it also closed a route that could serve as an escape passage. The same piece of infrastructure had two very different uses—one ordinary, one potentially lifesaving.
The cost of solving the immediate problem
When assassins attacked the castle, the king tried to flee through the drain and found the route blocked by his own command. The danger was not that the sewer had suddenly changed; it was that a decision made to prevent a minor inconvenience had removed an option he later needed.
That is what gives the episode its sting. A grate can look like a simple fix for lost balls, while the passage beneath it remains part of a building’s larger network of ways in and out. The king’s attempt to escape turned that overlooked connection into the consequence of his earlier order.
