On Other End, Few Days Ago
The palace had narrowed to rooms and hushed voices that moved like courtiers' skirts. Princess Lily woke to the steady tick of a clock she had never noticed before and the odd little noises of a household suddenly anxious — the rustle of parchment, the soft clack of boots on stone, the cough that was too long for any servant who had something on their mind.
From the window her view should have been the city waking: laundry lines, the crooked roofs, the market's first yawning stalls. Instead she watched a procession of men in sober clothes — advisors, captains, commanders — threading through the palace like a swarm summoned for a storm. Flags that had been bright the day prior now seemed heavy, as if the cloth itself had learned suspicion.
She dressed because that was what one did when the day demanded armor of silk instead of steel. The gown her ladies arranged was unobtrusive — muted blue to show steadiness, not to draw eyes. Her circlet sat light and exact on her hair. She moved through halls with a smile that fit the room, but the smile was a borrowed thing; inside, the taste was of metal and ash.
Orsic became a shadow in those days — far too present for a man who claimed only to be a guardian. She saw him at the council twice, once in the morning and again when the king called an emergency session because of the "attempted breach." She watched him speak in clipped sentences that made the prime minister lean in. She watched the king, who usually bore sorrow like a private cloak, fold the cloth of his face into something more severe. Worry showed at the king's eyes like lines carved deeper.
She walked the audience chamber once during a lull and saw Orsic speak to a cluster of governors. His posture was immaculate, his words measured. "Safety demands vigilance," he said, and the men around him nodded as though a bell had rung. Later she overheard a servant mutter to another: He's done well. The people feel safer when the K.P.P. appears to have acted fast.
Lily felt, for the first time, a green, hot coil unfurl in her chest. It was small, shapeless at first: irritation. Then it sharpened into anger. The tour she had promised herself — the one where she would ride slow through towns, listen without the velvet of a balcony between her and the people — had been taken from her like a toy snatched by a larger hand. The day she had craved as an act of honest curiosity was now sealed by proclamation and curfew.
They told her it was "temporary." They told her it was necessary to "calm nerves" and "ensure the path's safety." The king's voice had been steadier than she expected when he told her. "We will wait... for now." he had said. But his hand had drifted to his forehead at the edge of the words and she had felt, in that small line of touch, the cost of his decision.
And it had been a Postknight.
The thought sank like a splinter beneath her fingernail. Razille — whom she had accepted to come closer yo her at that moment — was in shackles now. A Postknight had been accused in the very square where Lily wanted to be free. It felt as if someone had replaced the world she wanted to open with a seal stamped in ash and suspicion.
Lady Miren, her closest attendant, watched her with the concern of someone who had polished crowns and also counted the cost of scandal. "Your Highness," Miren said once, voice soft as the gauze she smoothed, "the council believes this is for the best. Orsic has been useful — he seized the moment."
"He seized more than a moment," Lily snapped, surprising herself with the sharpness. She hated the sound of her own fury; it tasted like betrayal. "He seized my day. He seized the chance for me to hear the people."
Miren's fingers lingered over the dressing table. "I understand. But the kingdom comes first. The King—" she stopped, choosing the words with the care of someone carrying a tray on a crowded stair. "He is shaken. Maybe your father sees what we do not from where he sits."
That was true. The king's face had been a map of wrong turns and disasters —roads that once led outward but now closed like shuttered windows. He asked for reports, he asked for lists, he asked for assurances, and each request gathered weight like stones in the pocket of his coat.
At night Lily found herself at a window she had not meant to open. Beneath, the city shimmered with lanterns and curfew fires. She could see where the Postknight hall lay, a dark rectangle in the mid-ring, and she imagined the men and women inside — her neighbors and couriers, people who had lugged crates and carried letters and, in some cases, saved lives. The idea of them tarnished by allegations made her teeth ache. But she can't do much. What happened is nothing that can be forgotten easily.
Anger, though, is a complicated thing when you wear a circlet. It demanded action — yet every action expected of her would be weighed and policed, turned into an image by someone else's speech. If she have gone to the barracks and demanded Razille's release she would be a princess storming a guard, and the newspapers would have a scene.
She thought of the little things the people had given her when she'd bowed from the carriage — the child's sketch, the potter's cracked vase. She thought of the seamstress who had pressed a linen she said was made from "north wind," which Lily had laughed at until the woman's eyes flooded. Those small offerings had been honest. Those small hands had a truth to them she trusted. The memory made her prick with the emotions.
In the privacy of her diary she wrote in an ink pressed thin as a whisper:
> The world is full of people who move like they have already decided the story. I wanted to be the kind of ruler who reads the room before I write the verdict. Now they have written it out for me. How should I act when the page is not mine?
She did not yet know the full extent of Razille's story. The Postknights' banners had once looked to her like tidy promises. Now the banner's color seemed to him like a mask. A part of her — the small, stubborn child who had sneaked pies from the kitchen at nine — wanted to slip out and ride the road anyway. Another part — taller and steadier — knew that her father's safety and the kingdom's image required patience.
In private she requested a small audience with her father. It was a careful conversation held in the hush of the royal study, the walls lined with maps and the king's old hunting trophies.
"Father," she began, "I want to understand."
King MacLinny looked at her as if she had handed him one of the very things he feared to touch. "You've seen how the city responded."
"You saw Mr. Orsic speak. You listened." She did not hide the soft accusation. "You let him reel the tour back."
He folded his hands. "I did. It was my duty."
"His duty," she said, and the words were sharper than she meant them to be, "was to protect you. But what he has done is also to shape what people will think of our people. The Postknights—"
He cut in gently. "We must assume malice until proven otherwise. One cannot run the kingdom on hopes and stories."
"Yes, but if we assume so quickly, we might risk becoming blind rulers who let fear write our policy." She saw the tiredness in his face. "We must be careful not to use fear as a road."
The king's hand closed around the arm of his chair. "I know those words, Lily. I walk with them. But when a thing glitters at the feet of a princess, I cannot—"
"You can be brave, father." she said. The plea in her voice surprised her as it left. "You can be brave and show them that truth will be found by clear eyes, not by clumsy hands that throw blame like stones."
He studied her then, and for a moment there was the look of a father and not a monarch — something like wavering and pride. "You would have me risk what I have left," he said.
"I would have you risk the story you will leave behind," she replied. "If the world remembers a king who closed the road at the first false spark, how will they trust him when true darkness comes?"
His jaw moved; he did not smile. "I will consider what you say. But understand — if any harm comes to my daughter—" His voice trembled in the corner of the sentence, and the room became a single held breath.
That night she could not sleep. The palace hummed like a hive. She thought, not for the first time, of the priests' words from the ceremony: Eloin in the quiet, Eloin in the kind. If the god lived in innocents, perhaps a test had come not to prove her but to prove them. Her tour was postponed, but the thing she wanted was not taken entirely — she still held the memory of the streets, the infants on shoulders, the baker's laugh; she kept these like small seeds.
There were choices to be made. She had power enough to summon men, but not the sort of authority that could unmake a rumor. She had to be tactical — not because she feared her status, but because she feared that rashness would hand the story to men like Orsic.
So she made the smallest promise aloud, to no one in particular and to the one small god she had been taught to imagine: "I will go when the road is ready — not when others say so, but when I can see clearly."