Sweet Romance20 min read
The Red Underdraw and the Regent's Needle
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"I spat my tea across the room."
I didn't mean to, but the words from the guard's mouth—"red underdraw"—hit me like a slap. The room fell sharp and hot despite the pans of ice by the cushions.
"Where?" I demanded, already on my feet. "Who found them?"
"By the rose bushes, Your Grace," Chang Crowley panted. "A patrol heard noise. They found Esme—Esme Campos—and a man with no upper robe. He had a red underdraw—" He stuttered as if the words tasted wrong.
I laughed once, short and brittle. "Get the doors. Send for Jessalyn and Dolores. No one leaves."
Greta Dubois stood by the far screen when I entered the rose walk. She gave that small, perfect bow she always saves for cameras and high plates. Her silk did not show a bead of sweat. Of course not.
"Your Majesty," she offered, eyes sweet as poison. "I heard a commotion and thought to inform you. Such a shame."
Esme knelt on the ground with hair in a tangle, cheeks streaked with tears. The guard beside her—red sash gone, shirt nearly ripped away—lowered his head. He looked like a man who expected the worst.
Greta's smile sharpened. "They were found together in the hedges, Your Grace. Esme was brave. She saved us all by crying out."
I let her speak until she finished. I let the court spy in her voice, the little waves that meant she was laying bait for the rest of the house.
"Bring her to the palace," I said plainly. "And the guard—bind his hands. Sun Cai Nu, help the girl. Esme, rise."
Esme flung herself forward and grasped my ankle like a drowning woman. "Please, Your Grace," she sobbed. "I saw a man with the red underdraw. I tried to stop him. He lunged—"
"Enough." I pulled a hand away. My robe stuck to sweat. "You were doing what any decent woman would. Go rest."
Greta stepped forward immediately, voice soft as a fan. "This is disgrace. Someone in the palace steals ladies' things. We must search them all."
"Search them how?" I asked. "With torches and priests? Sisters, calm. I will handle this."
She blinked. "You will not punish—"
"Listen," I said, and let my voice be cold. "This is not a trial. Search is for facts. No forcing, no public stripping. We keep dignity. If any head is guilty, it will fall after proof."
Greta's smile froze into something mean. "You always protect your favorites."
"I protect the palace," I said. "And I will not let one angry woman make a spectacle to feed herself."
She looked surprised and then furious. That small anger told me she had wanted a scene.
After the guards took the pair away, I walked back to my cooling bowl of bean soup. I had barely sipped when a breathless runner arrived.
"Your Grace," Chang Crowley said, bowing so low his forehead hit the carpet. "A note. From His Majesty's chamber."
My fingers tightened. The paper trembled. I knew Jaina Douglas's tiny hand, the way she drew the X on the corner like a secret. She had asked me to call her Jaina when we were children. The court said "Your Majesty." Our joke had always been ours.
"Read it," I said.
"'Meet at Three Pure Halls. There is talk from the West. Do not be late.'"
I set the note down and laughed, the sound softer this time.
"Of course there is talk from the West," I murmured. "The Grand Duchy envoy arrives in two days. They want alliances. And trouble always comes in silk."
Jessalyn burned a look at me. "Do you want me to go with you, Majesty?"
"No. Stay. Bring tea."
I had no right to be lazy, yet the heat made my limbs heavy. For months I avoided audiences. The season was unforgiving. I had taken to sipping cool soups and reading cheap stories between accounting ledgers. I was Empress of this small realm of carved screens and lacquered steps. I liked my quiet. That did not mean I could not move when a blade sang.
At the Three Pure Halls the air smelled of incense and distant snow, as it often did when Chance Romano arrived. He moved like a shadow that had learned to love light—quiet, exact, dangerous. He had been mine in a way: when I was a child, I had picked him at market because my uncle said "buy a fine guard" and I had pestered him into keeping one. He called himself "Chance" then because he had been sold cheap. He called himself that still.
He bowed at my presence, then at Jaina. He never bowed too long to Jaina, like a man who could not quite kneel to the sun and the moon at once.
"Your Grace," Chance said. "Majesty."
Jaina's smile softened in the way of a person who had learned to hide a cliff. She had slept little for weeks. There was a new line near her right eye. She lowered her voice.
"There are rumors," she said. "They whisper the Grand Duchy comes to ask for arms, to ask for troops. And I have men in the border who were raided last month. I called Chance to guard the halls."
"Prince," Chance answered, always formal when he must be. "I have doubled the watch."
Jaina's eyes flicked to me. "You saw she handled the hedgerow incident?"
"I was told. Esme and the patrol found something. I will have my men inspect. If a palace servant smuggled things out, I will find the trail."
I found I could not keep my voice from softening. "Chance."
He looked at me as if I had spoken a private name into the dark. "Yes?"
"Take care," I said so plainly it was almost silly. "Eat. Don't sleep on cold ground. You hold too much of the house on your own."
He smiled, that half-thing he used with me. "You make me sound like an elder. I am still a soldier."
"You are stubborn," I said. "And reckless. And I will call you stubborn until you stop breaking yourself to build fences."
He gave a small, nearly imperceptible nod. "I will guard, Your Grace."
I let the meeting end with plans. We walked away from the Three Pure Halls into the sun. The envoy would arrive. The palace would be in motion. I folded my hands to hide the clammy inside of my sleeves and thought of the many small things it took to keep a kingdom together: a bowl of cold soup, a silk thread sewn tight, a watchman who would not sleep.
Two days later the Grand Duchy envoy, Marco Martinez, arrived wearing a dark riding coat and the kind of insolent praise reserved for castles and inns. Marco did not kneel. He stood like a challenge.
"Your Majesty," he said, and his voice was like polished wood. "A pleasure."
Jaina rose with court grace and let the soft talk of welcoming begin. The dance started—the proper speeches, the formal bowings, the spooning of soup. I watched Marco's eyes slide sometimes to my shoulder, but only as one looks at a painting for its frame.
At the center of our long hall the servants wheeled in heavy trays. It was then a thin hand flicked and an arrow hissed. Time narrowed to knife-slide.
Chance moved like a seamstress snatching the last flower. He shoved me behind him with one motion and his body took the arrow.
"He—" I tried, but my breath vanished. The world reassembled around the sound of metal and a double cry.
"Guard the envoy!" Jaina snapped, voice like a blade. "Seize the attacker!"
I saw Chance's arm, where the silk was stained, and he still stood between us. The arrow had nicked the shoulder, grazed skin. When the crowd scattered like spilled fish, he stayed. He did not cry out. He only lifted his chin and gripped the arrow as if it were a personal insult.
Someone leapt and ripped the assailant's mask. A frantic woman, not a man, squinted up with mad eyes. It was a servant, small and ordinary. She spat poison, perhaps, or perhaps she sang a lie. The knife she had thrown had missed the envoy and found a tray. Chaos rose to a roar.
"Seize them!" I shouted, the command a sudden weight in my ribs.
Men ran. They bound the woman and took three others with her. They drank a quick poison, one after another, as if they had already planned for shame. They died, quiet and small, and Chance watched each fall with the expression of a man holding a ledger of deaths.
Later, after the cry had been pulled through the palace like a thread and tacked down, Chance came to my side at the palace chamber. He moved slowly now.
"You're hurt," I said.
"It is nothing," he said, and there was a little tremor in his voice that had not been there before.
"Don't be a fool." I reached out and grabbed his sleeve. The fabric was wet. "You bled."
He made a sound that could have been a laugh and could have been an apology. Then he did something he never did in front of others. He let his shoulder drop against me. Close enough that I could smell iron and smoke and something like clean laundry.
"You always fuss," he said.
I couldn't name the thing that swelled up in my chest then—anger, fear, relief. "You must sleep," I ordered.
He pushed his chin up. "I sleep when the palace sleeps."
"I am the palace tonight," I said. "Sleep when I say sleep."
He closed his eyes once and then let out a breath. When he opened them he looked at me like a man seeing the house he had guarded for years and found it had a door he could not pick.
"You always do this," he murmured. "You rescue people you barely know."
"I'm not rescuing a person," I said. "I'm rescuing what keeps breathing here."
There are truths that sit between us—truths about who is the sovereign and who is the shield. The court thinks Jaina the only ruler. The court thinks Chance is its sword. I know other things: Jaina is more than the robe she wears. Chance has always been closer to my heart than I told anyone.
After the attack the palace shook in thoroughness. Men were taken. Secrets, always like old soot, were scrubbed.
For days I did not sleep. Greta Dubois came to my rooms daily with reports, her voice honey-left, as if the palace were a stage and she the lead player.
"You let that Esme go on with you," she said one late night, fingers fanning at her cheeks. "You make this endless. You let traitors breathe and hide and it looks weak."
"It looks prudent," I corrected. "And dignified."
Her lips tightened. "Dignified rarely gets the applause."
I kept my temper. My hands shook, but I said, "Go check the storerooms. If money moves in this palace, it will be from there."
"Of course," she said. "Anything for you, Empress."
I watched her go and then slid open the small drawer where Jaina had once hidden a letter as a girl. I carried the memory of that small paper like a hand-grip through cold water. We had been children, two small conspirators of bones and paper crowns. We had cut our names into each other's wrists with a pin once—only a child thing, foolish and sticky. She had promised me a marriage if she ever sits on a throne. Only the world had made promises worse and deeper.
That evening Chance knocked and came in without waiting for an answer. He wore a dark cloak. On the cloak a cut had been stitched, the thread a pale red.
"You look tired," I said. "You should eat. You should rest."
"Tell me why," Chance said, "the one who would send poison into the palace would have taken care to make the hits correct. They used low hands. They used servants as knives. But the leader—"
He stopped. "Who benefits most from a failed alliance?"
"Greta?" I asked before I meant to. The word left like a speedboat.
He looked at me a long moment. "She wants power. If the Grand Duchy alliance falls, she will step forward as the woman who warned the crown."
"She got money from who?" I asked. "How deep is the rope?"
He met my eyes and, for once, did not turn away. "There are men from outside claiming hegemony, merchants who do not belong to us. They buy influence in the kitchens, in the drains. They bring knives. Someone laced pockets."
"What will you do?" I asked.
"Find the rope. Pull. Watch who wakes to catch it."
He moved like a man who knew knives and also how to hold a child back from a fire. He did not know how to ask for affection. He never had to. I could see that sometimes it cost him, and he counted it like sugar.
Two nights later, the court arranged itself for the banquet. Places were set like a field of small suns. I had chosen barley-stuffed dumplings and iced plum broth. Chance had brought his guards and still stood at the door like a doorway threatened by rain.
"Empress," Marco murmured in my direction, leaning like a cat. "You are brighter than the day."
"Eat," I said. "And stop flirting with dishes."
"Easier to flirt with a dish," he whispered in that smooth voice.
The banquet should have been a show of silk and knives. It should have been a place where emissaries traded lines. Instead, it was an instrument we used to see the lattice of people.
Midway through the night a chambermaid screamed. Arrows flew. We were trained to duck, to seize, to order. Chance shoved me to the side again and this time took an arrow into the chest.
"He moved for me," I heard someone say—a courtier, loud enough to be honest. "He blocked. He took—"
Chance fell. For a long breath the palace held only his breathing.
"Stay," Jaina ordered, not as a ruler to a subject but as something almost essential. "Stay alive."
They took Chance to a private room. I went because I could not not go. When the curtain was pulled back I found him quiet, blood feathered across his shirt.
"Tell me it is nothing," I begged.
He smiled at me with one cheek wet with sweat. "Daphne—"
He called me by the childhood name like a small, impossible love. My heart hiked like a bird.
"Don't," I said. "You are trying to make me weep."
"I am trying to make you order me fit for your stubbornness," he said, and for the first time there was no jest in his voice.
I knelt and cleaned the wound. The arrow had nicked something vital and his breath came in uneven folds. The doctor—an old, blunt man—pressed wet linen to the site. Chance hissed but did not complain.
"Why do you always do this?" I whispered.
"Because you are here," he said. "Because when you look at the court it will tear itself to pieces and take the palace with it. I am tired of keeping everything from falling."
"You keep me from falling," I answered, though my voice shook.
"That's what shields do." He gave me a lousy grin. "And sometimes, I get to be closer to the warm pieces."
We did not speak of the thing between us. That slow, dangerous thing brewed like tea.
After the attack, the investigations tightened like a net. There was a flurry of arrests and confessions and sacrifices. We pulled string back and found a net. The center of the net led, bafflingly, to the household of Greta Dubois and out through an old laundress of a woman who had pockets in every apron.
Greta came to my private room that afternoon with a new silk and the smooth voice of a snake.
"You have been busy, Empress," she purred, laying a plan like she placed combs and pinions in her hair. "Now who should wear the head that ends the conspiracy? I think—"
"You think you will be rewarded," I said, cutting through the music of her voice. "You think you'll be its heroine."
Her smile did not break. "I will keep the house stable. I only ask that you let me do this."
I reached into the drawer by my bed and brought out the small iron seal that had been carved for me when I became Empress. It was dull and heavy. Greta's hand hovered like a moth.
"I will not have the palace run by men in merchant jackets," I said quietly. "Nor by women who sell tragedies for their boots."
Her mouth made a small sound. "You will regret this."
"Perhaps," I said. "But I will not regret letting one more knife through my halls."
When the evidence was brought forward it was small and ugly at once: receipts, folded letters with bribes listed, a chain of favors—someone in Greta's household had taken money and used it to buy knives, to frame a few young servants who would be made into men with hatred.
I asked for a hearing. Greta presented herself with silk like a shield. She had allies, men who whispered in the corners. She had taken care to be presentable. She even smiled at Marco Martinez during the session, the kind of smile that said, If you fall I will hold the tray.
"Your Grace," she said into the hall. "The palace has been shaken. I would not have your safety endangered. If someone is to be punished let it be the milkmaids and the laundresses."
"You deliberately placed poison among servants," I said slowly. "You used their hunger and fear. There will be no theater. We will have a public accounting."
Her face creased. "An accounting? Without decorum?"
"Exactly," I said. "Public."
The next morning the court gathered like birds around a prize. Greedy faces. Curious. Vindictive. I sat and let the sea of them speak. One woman after another testified, each small piece clicking into place: money passed through hands, knives bought with coin, a laundress who had a ledger and a son on the street with a club.
"Greta," I said when the net closed, loud enough for the hall to hear, "you are accused not only of treachery but of using the poor as blades. How do you answer?"
Greta's mouth thinned. "I answered by keeping the palace intact."
"You used people to try to topple the palace that shelters them." I let my hand rest on the seal. The men at the side leaned forward. "You sold our safety."
She laughed once, brittle. "And what of you? You protect every stray like a mother hen."
"Yes." I spoke slow, each syllable a hammer. "Because I will not make the palace a market. I will not let your lust for standing on a stage be bought by merchants. For your role in the plot, for the harms you've arranged, your position will be revoked."
Greta's eyes flashed. "You cannot touch me. I have my father's men. I have—"
"You have lost favor," I said. "You have trusted the wrong hands. And you helped a plot that tried to cut down a guest in our halls."
Her face finally cracked. The small, carefully measured anger broke into a raw animal wail. She lunged from her seat and wrenched at the hem of my robe. "You made me nothing! I will not—"
Five guards seized her arms. The court gasped. Some were sympathetic; many smirked. They had wanted this to be bigger, murkier, but greed had a hard time pretending not to be greedy when exposed.
"Greta Dubois," I said, the seal heavy in my palm. "You choose the merchant's coin over the palace's blood. For that you will be stripped of title. You will lose your silk and your household will be dismantled. You will kneel and beg the crown for mercy."
Her face turned the color of pomegranate pulp. "No," she choked. "You cannot—"
"Stand," I said. "Fall on your knees and name what you did."
She fell, not because she wanted to, but because the court demanded it. Her hands clawed for the floor and found it the same as any woman's hands—rough paw to stone. She began to shake.
"Forgive me," she cried. "Please! I will give up what I have—"
The court had been electrified. The younger women whispered. The men recorded the moment in their faces. It was not only a fall. It was a public unthreading of a life.
They dragged her out to the courtyard where the servants came to watch. Soldiers had been ordered to find any men who had bankrolled the plot. A week later several merchants were ruined in pamphlets and losing houses as men who had once courted them deserted them for other fish. The laundress's son was taken, and in the market his debts were returned by hands that used to be kind.
For the ones who were complicit the law was sharp. The laundress's son was jailed, but the higher hands were stripped of status and wealth. I made sure the punishments were public and loud: kneel, apology, loss of income, separation from loved ones. A wife left by her husband in the street, a son disowned for having taken money. One man was dragged by two dozen soldiers through the hall as mothers shrieked. The court recorded it all.
Greta's fall lasted three days. She begged. She clawed. Her letters to those who would help were burned before she could send them. On the last day she knelt at my feet, mascara streaked down like war paint.
"Please, Majesty," she moaned. "I made ends meet. I was raised to survive—"
"You raised yourself to betray others," I answered. "You thought yourself queen of a small play. You will be free of that life but you will also be free of its comforts. Good. Let the palace not be the place where men and women sell safety for vanity."
They took away her household, her silk, even the small boxes of trinkets her father had given her when she left her home to be conspicuous. She knelt in the courtyard, framed by servants with their hands over their mouths, and the public watched.
When it was done she was only a woman with a raw throat and empty sleeves. A few of the latecomers in the crowd took pictures on small glass plates and sold them in whispers. The merchants talked about profit and it sounded like knives. The palace felt quieter, like a room after a glass is swept away.
Chance recovered slowly. He slept badly at first, waking as if a tram had run his shoulders over. His arm took time to knit. He refused to be tended by men who were tender; he demanded I allow Jessalyn to hold his arm while the doctor worked.
"Empress," he said one afternoon when I had slipped into his room unannounced. He watched me with that odd, small smile. "You are making a habit of appearing where you are told not to."
"I am making a habit of not leaving people alone when they break," I said.
He took my hands. "You are also making me say all the bad things. I should have told you sooner."
"What bad things?"
"That I have always—" He stopped, eyes sharp with a thing I had not dared let myself feel. "You laughed when you bought me like a curiosity. You led me out of a market with a coin and a promise. I stayed because you kept me from cold. I stayed because I wanted to be where you were. I stayed because I liked that you scolded me."
My cheeks warmed. "That is sentimental."
"Call it what you like." He breathed. "I like you. I have always liked you."
"Like?" I echoed. The single word folded the room into a smaller place.
He nodded. "I will put it plainly then. I love you, Daphne."
That was not a small thing. The palace spun a little. I had never said it back because I had been afraid—afraid of the thinness of feeling in courts, the way affection is made currency. But there it was.
"Chance," I said, and then the room waited on the sound of my next breath. "I have always felt that you kept too many things for others. I do not know if I can return what you give. I do not know if I—"
"Then do not," he said. "Stay. Stay with me for now. Let us shelter each other. Whatever shape this takes, we will decide with time."
We decided like that, in small pieces and soft words. It was not a marriage announced with trumpets. It was a promise made over stitches and warm linen. The nights I watched him sleep I would think of the market where a child bought him with a pocket of coin, and how a cheap purchase had become the best thing I ever had.
The palace calmed. The Grand Duchy envoy left the capital a calmer man because he had tasted protocol and found it better than dagger-soup. Marco Martinez left privately pleading with ministers—his face in the transit halls a stain of respect. He told no one, to my delight, that he had admired the way Chance had moved.
Weeks later Jaina walked into my room with a trunk. She had the look of a person carrying a secret like firewood. I had grown used to that look. When she sat and unfolded a small paper, her hands did not shake.
"Do you remember when we were children?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "You promised me your hand if you ever sat on a throne."
She looked away like a child who had told a lie that still tasted like candy. "I lied to you then because I was afraid. But I kept you anyway. I hid the truth of me because my life needed it. Today I must do something dangerous."
"What is it?" I asked. My hands folded without thinking. "You can tell me."
"I will go to the hall," she said, "and declare a thing. I will tell them I am as I am. I am Jaina, not the son I'm said to be."
My breath snagged. It was what the old rumors had whispered, the small thing we had laughed about as girls. But to tell it aloud in court was to invite axes. It would render every old enemy a blade with both hands.
"Why?" I breathed. "Why reveal now?"
"Because hiding has become an arrow itself," she said. "If people find my body a pretext to raise others, then I lose everything. If they find me and still love me, that is stronger than a mask."
"People will call for your head," I said. "They will call for my head too."
"Let them call," she said. "I would rather be alive and true. I would rather fight as I am, not as a myth."
I looked at her and saw the years we had stitched together. We had been fools and conspirators and later conspirators again. She had hidden a life inside the robe of a monarch and made it like a lamp. If it broke, the blast would be large. If it stood, we would have made something new.
"Then we will stand," I said.
The day she opened the hall the court filled like stormwater. Men gaped. Women arranged their skirts like shields. The envoys looked at each other as if invisible wires had been cut.
Jaina stood and spoke.
"My people," she said, and the voice was not the carved thing I had sometimes found in morning rooms. It was honest and brittle. "I have lived my life protected by a lie. I did it to keep one life safe. Today I remove the armor. I am Jaina Douglas. I am not the man the court has called me. My body is mine. I rule because I rule, not because of costume."
A silence like snow fell. Then the court erupted—some in shame, some in anger, some in scheming delight. They asked questions and the answers were private and wounded. Some older ministers found their mouths dry. Some younger men cheered, and the cheering sounded like a trap.
Greta's supporters muttered at the edges. They had wanted to make me look weak. Now they had an easier prize: people who would not be placated. I watched as the court attempted to rearrange itself.
Jaina's confession burned away half the old politics. Men who had been paying for a play lost their wages and their station. Those who had been loyal found themselves in a clearer light. Chance stood by my side and by Jaina's, which made some men angry enough to make noise I enjoyed very little.
After the reveal the palace restructured. Jaina stepped back into rule with less guile and more courage. The threat that had been a shadow for months was driven out into daylight and the monsters that fed on darkness lost their power.
We held together because we had to. Chance and I found time between meetings for a walk beneath the moon. We argued. We made small vows. Sometimes we did not speak at all.
"You have a way of making war end up in tea," I said one night.
"And you," he returned, "have a way of turning crumbs into treaties."
"You're our shield," I said.
"And you are—" He stopped, searching for a word that was not command or desert.
"You are stubborn and loud," I supplied.
He laughed. "So are you."
We did not promise forever with promises that court scribes might write. We promised in the small acts—an extra mat, a bowl of soup, a letter left on a desk. We were not dramatic lovers with poems and dramatic suicides. We were people who had known each other through both cheap coin and sharp iron. That counted for more than all the court's speeches.
Months later the palace felt steadier. The laundress's son had been tried and, as a young man, had to stitch his way back into the world. The merchants who had bankrolled the plot were cast out and fled to the markets, their names a cautionary tale.
Greta was gone from court. She walked out not to the streets but to a small house at the edge of town where I arranged for her to be watched and used as an example. The crowd liked spectacle. The palace learned how much spectacle bought respect—and also how quickly respect collapsed.
Chance and I would occasionally stand on one of the temples and look out over the roofs like two slow birds. He would rest his head on my shoulder for a breath and then pull back like a man who had stolen heat.
"I thought once," he said quietly, "that I would spend my life on the edge of someone's life. I never expected—"
"—to be the center?" I finished.
He did not smile. "To be wanted."
"You will be wanted all the days you keep your head on your shoulders," I said.
"And you," he said, "will be loved in your stubbornness and you will love in your own way back."
"Is that a bargain?" I asked.
He took my hand. "If it is a bargain, it is a fair one."
We kept our bargain. The Grand Duchy sent letters of alliance. Marco Martinez returned to his ship and later sent gifts of spices and folded silk. Jaina kept her throne and made me her consort in everything that mattered: counsel, breakfast politics, the secret times that are the life of any palace.
Esme stayed in the palace. I did not brand her. I did not banish her. She married a quiet gardener and had two small boys who liked to run over the tiles and tie knots into rope. She would later tell me that she never felt safer than when I scolded with a hand on her shoulder.
Greta wrote a long letter and I burned it unread. I do not know if she forgave herself. I like to think she learned that a palace is not a stage for one woman to be queen. It is a city of many small safe places. It will take more than a single punishment to make it good. But I had to show that we could see treachery and break it without breaking every life around it.
"Do you ever regret," Chance asked me once, as the winter came early and the light grew thin, "the choices you made—childhood bargains and market purchases?"
I thought of the small market, of a child in a red cloak, of a cheap guard with a brave face. I thought of Jaina hiding who she was to stay alive. I thought of the little men in the bakery who had once been cowards and were now necessary in making bread.
"No," I said finally. "I regret only the things I did not do. The rest I will keep."
He kissed the corner of my mouth like a thief. "Then keep them. Keep us."
We did. We kept the palace like a bowl of soup. We did what we could to keep it from boiling over. Sometimes we failed. Sometimes we had to show our teeth. Sometimes a woman in silk would rise before the moon and try to sell a knife to a laundress. But we were there.
When I lay awake in the thick summer, or when the palace felt too small for all the whispers it held, I would think back to the rosebushes where Esme had found a man with a red underdraw and to the day I spat my tea across the room.
I had not known then how much of my life would be about catching arrows in the air. I had not known how often a hand could push me out of the line of an attack. But I had Chance and I had Jaina and I had the small dignity of the people who work in kitchens and courtyards. I chose them, and they chose me back, each in their odd, sometimes terrible ways.
"Are we safe now?" Jessalyn once asked me, fanning her face.
I smiled and put my hand on hers. It was steady. "Safe never comes like a blanket. It comes like a fence. We build it plank by plank."
"And when the fence breaks?" Dolores asked, lingering in the doorway.
"We fix it," I said. "With friends, with guards, with soup. And when all else fails, we remember the night when Chance stopped the arrow."
Chance heard and came in with a tray. He set down two bowls of cold plum soup and looked at me with the same stoic face that had saved me twice.
"I like you," he said simply, handing me a bowl.
"I know," I said. "Thank you."
He sat and ate and did not say more. Sometimes the simplest things—someone taking a bowl—are the most honest.
I will remember the day of the red underdraw not because it was dramatic but because it was where we began to mend the palace in a different way. My name is Daphne Guerrero. I am the Empress they call "queen." I am also the woman who bent down to tie Chance's shoe when his hand shook. I am also the friend who sat with Jaina when she told the court her truth.
In the end, we did not need a grand ending. We needed the small steady work of keeping the palace from cracking.
We kept it.
The End
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