Keep the Prince

The prince had rehearsed this.

I could tell by the way he waited for the whispering to stop before he said my name. Rowan never liked an audience to miss the important part.

“Lady Seren Aster. Our engagement is dissolved.”

At the far end of the table, someone let out a small, satisfied breath.

I knew that breath. I knew the white lilies behind the prince’s chair, the chipped corner of the black marble table, even the place where the afternoon light fell across his left hand.

I had seen this room before.

Not as a child. Not at last winter’s reception.

On a screen.

Pain struck behind my eyes. For a moment, I was looking down at hands that were smaller than mine, holding a device in the dark. Rain rattled a window. Someone in another room called that I would miss the last train if I kept playing.

Then I was twenty years old again, standing before the prince I had expected to marry, with a room full of people waiting for me to disgrace myself.

“Do you understand?” Rowan asked.

I tightened my fingers around the back of my chair. The carved wood bit through my glove.

There had been a choice here. Three little boxes beneath a picture of a silver-haired woman in a blue dress.

Beg him to reconsider.

Accuse Mira Fen.

Strike the prince.

I remembered trying all three.

None had ended well for the woman in blue.

*A Crown of Lilies.* That was the name. A romance game I had bought in another life because the art was pretty and a friend had told me the prince’s route was worth the price. I had spent hours choosing gifts for him. Seren Aster had been the obstacle I wanted out of the way.

I looked down at my sleeve.

Blue silk. Silver buttons. A tiny repair at the cuff, where I had caught it on a pin that morning.

“Lady Seren?”

“I heard you.”

My voice sounded ordinary. That frightened me more than the pain.

Across the table, Mira Fen sat with a folded shawl over her knees. She was paler than she had been at the spring reception. Two fingers rested against the inside of her wrist, as though counting a pulse.

In the game, she had been the girl with the warm smile. The scholarship student who won everyone’s heart.

Here, she was a woman I had prevented from buying books.

I remembered writing the letter to the academy’s patrons. I had chosen every word myself. Concerns about character. Unsuitable associations. The unfortunate possibility of political embarrassment.

She had lost her grant three days later.

The memory from the screen did not replace that one. Both remained, equally clear.

“If you intend to make an accusation,” said Lord Halden Vale, “this is your opportunity to have it recorded.”

The minister of finance sat beside the court registrar. His papers were already arranged in three neat stacks. I had never seen Halden hurry, even when everyone around him did.

My father stood behind my chair.

“Seren,” he said quietly. “Accept the prince’s decision.”

Yesterday, I would have interpreted that as a promise. Obey now; I will repair this later.

Today, I saw the folded document he held.

My name was visible above the line where I was supposed to sign.

“What is that?” I asked.

His hand closed around the fold.

“An arrangement for your protection.”

Rowan leaned forward. “You are not being asked to confess to anything. The investigation into Miss Fen’s poisoning remains open.”

Mira’s eyes moved to him.

He continued before she could speak. “Until it concludes, the Crown believes a period of supervised residence would be prudent.”

There it was. The next scene.

The carriage with its curtains sewn shut. A country house with locked windows. Letters that never reached their recipients.

I remembered the game’s story jumping forward after that. Seren returned wearing black, her eyes veined with light, and attacked the heroine beneath a ruined castle.

Players called it the final battle.

I had called it inconvenient. I had been late for the train.

“May I see the arrangement?” I asked.

My father did not give it to me.

“There is no need to make this harder.”

“Then it should survive being read.”

The registrar looked up. She was a narrow woman with ink on the side of her thumb.

“Lady Seren is entitled to inspect any instrument requiring her assent,” she said.

My father laid the document on the table.

I read the first page without taking my hands off the chair. On the second, I found what they had placed beneath the residence arrangements.

Authority to execute instruments concerning inherited property.

Hollowmere.

My mother’s estate.

My birthday had been six days ago. The solicitor’s notice was still in my writing desk, beneath three unopened invitations. I had read it only because I had hoped my inheritance would pay for a wedding gift Rowan could not dismiss as ordinary.

The notice had said my mother’s trust had ended. Her property was mine. Her debts were mine too.

Now the Crown wanted permission to sign for me.

“What requires execution?” I asked.

“Routine matters,” Halden said. “The renewal of a supply agreement. Maintenance obligations. Your mother’s estate is not a collection of jewels to be left in a drawer.”

“The existing agreement has expired?”

“It reached its term on your twentieth birthday.”

“And you need my signature.”

“We need someone capable of providing it.”

Rowan’s expression tightened. He disliked conversations in which a person’s manners deteriorated slowly enough that he could not identify the moment to intervene.

I let go of the chair and picked up the document.

Hollowmere’s name brought another memory with it: a room of broken arches, a bright opening in the floor, my own voice coming from a speaker.

You should have left me here.

Then Mira raised her hand, Rowan drove his sword forward, and the woman with my face died.

I put the document down before anyone saw my fingers shake.

“I decline.”

My father’s voice hardened. “Seren.”

“The supervision instrument. I decline it.”

Halden glanced toward the guards.

“A refusal would require this hearing to consider alternative safeguards.”

“For an allegation?”

“For your own welfare, and the safe disposition of an estate whose facilities serve several thousand households.”

Several thousand. That was the first thing anyone had said about Hollowmere that was not in the game.

I turned to the registrar. “Does the old custodian provision still apply to inherited wardworks?”

Her pen stopped.

I had found that provision in the solicitor’s notice. At the time, I had been offended by its inclusion. A daughter of House Aster did not personally maintain underground machinery.

Now I wished I had read the enclosure twice.

“It depends on the property,” she said.

“Hollowmere. My mother’s charter reserved the holder’s right to undertake custodial residence when the estate passed out of trust.”

Halden’s hands became very still.

The registrar opened a leather book beside her. She worked through its index, then asked her clerk for another volume.

Waiting was difficult. I could feel each person in the room deciding what kind of performance this was. Another tantrum. A bargaining attempt. Something my father would end as soon as the door closed.

Mira watched me without expression.

Finally, the registrar said, “The provision survives. It does not exempt the holder from investigation, nor from the obligations attached to the property.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” Rowan asked. “Hollowmere has been operating under reduced staffing for years. You have never managed a household, much less a wardwork.”

“You are offering to put me in a household I would not be allowed to leave.”

“I am offering you a way to avoid further public harm.”

“Then we differ on what would harm me.”

My father stepped closer. The old instinct to yield rose so quickly I nearly did it. I had spent twenty years learning which tone meant he was disappointed and which meant there would be consequences.

“You will not drag your mother’s name through this,” he said.

I remembered her hands smelling of iron and lavender. I remembered her lifting me to see the waterwheel at Hollowmere. I remembered asking why the wheel stopped when she touched the brass lever.

Those were my memories too. Not a player’s.

“I will take responsibility for her property,” I said.

Halden reached for one of his neat stacks.

He had a draft ready.

Not for me, perhaps. Not for this precise request. But the speed with which he found it made the skin between my shoulders tighten.

“There is a practical accommodation,” he said. “Custodial residence, subject to restrictions agreed here. No return to the capital without leave. Full access for investigators. A ninety-day review of the estate’s safety and solvency arrangements.”

“Independent review,” I said.

“Licensed review.”

“By persons who do not hold the supply lease.”

He considered me for the first time as though I had become worth considering.

“The panel may include a guild examiner and a magistrate,” he said. “Its composition will be settled before the review.”

“And the existing supply arrangements?”

“Continuity of essential service during the review period. Existing permissions remain in force. You will not interrupt them unilaterally.”

There was the price.

I did not know what the words permitted belowground. I knew I could not leave this room holding nothing.

“Subject to emergency safety procedures under the charter,” I said.

The registrar checked the book again, then nodded.

Halden amended the draft.

My father watched the pen move.

“If you do this,” he said, “you will receive no allowance from my household.”

He expected that to finish it. It almost did.

I had never paid for bread. Someone had told me what it cost, years ago, and I had forgotten before supper.

“I will need the trust’s accounts,” I said.

“Those can be provided,” Halden answered.

“And an inventory of property transferred.”

“Naturally.”

The registrar drew the papers toward her and began reading the terms aloud. I made myself listen to every clause. When she reached the provision allowing an application to remove me after a failed review, I asked her to repeat it.

No automatic forfeiture. A petition and a hearing.

Not much protection. More than a locked room.

She placed the pen before me.

“You may take advice before signing.”

Everyone looked at my father.

I looked at the document.

“Please record that the option was offered.”

I signed.

Only then did I remove the engagement ring.

It caught at my knuckle. I had spent the morning making sure it shone. When I finally pulled it free, the skin beneath it was pale.

I set it before Rowan.

He stared at it rather than at me.