The Norwegian royal court treated him for years as a private matter. The son of Crown Princess Mette-Marit, born before she entered the royal family, had no title, no duties and no place in the line of succession. Which is exactly why, when things went wrong, the court had no mechanism to defend him and no way to distance itself from him.

Marius Borg went into custody in February, before the trial began, with around thirty criminal counts against him. In June he received four years in prison. What followed is the part of the story that rarely gets told: where exactly a man who has lived his whole life in a palace, while formally not part of the dynasty, serves that measure.

The answer is Skaugum, the crown princess's residence. He is held there with an electronic bracelet. His defence asked for that to be replaced with a stricter measure short of custody - restriction of movement and a ban from certain places, Oslo included. Formally, that sounds like a compromise. In practice, it means leaving the estate.

The Borgarting appeals court refused the request with a formulation that leaves no room for interpretation: there is a high probability that he would commit new criminal offences if released under such conditions. The measure imposed by the Oslo district court stands.

It is worth pausing here on one detail many outlets skip over. Marius Borg is not a prince. He has no title, no allowance, no ceremonial role. And despite that, the whole story is being run as a royal one - because the address of his detention is royal. Can an institution distance itself from a man it raised under its own roof? The Norwegian court has spent six months trying to answer that question with silence.

Meanwhile, the family has other things on its shoulders. Princess Ingrid Alexandra returned from Sydney to Norway because of her mother's worsening pulmonary fibrosis. Prince Sverre Magnus is moving to Portugal, where he will study business administration on a programme that will take him through Portugal, France and Germany.

Scandinavian monarchies have spent decades selling an image of normality - royal families who ride bicycles, send their children to state schools, look like neighbours. This story shows the price of that image: when normality collides with a court, the palace is no longer a home but an address for serving a sentence.