Night had folded itself over the palace like a thick vellum. In the private wing, the lamps were kept low — not for secrecy so much as for mercy; faces sharpened under bright light, and the king wanted gentleness now, though he had forgotten gentleness in the months that had gone by. The throne room had been emptied of pageantry; the banners were rolled up against the walls, their gold threads dulled by the long, small business of war. Only the portrait of the late queen remained upright, front-facing and unblinking. Her painted eyes had the soft composure of someone who had never known how wholly a court could break a man.
Princess Lily sat at a small table by the window, her hands wrapped around a cup of tea that had gone cold. The city beneath the palace was a patchwork of lamplight and shadow; far-off watchfires burned like small stubborn stars. Her dress was simple — no coronet for the night — and she had pulled a thin cloak about her shoulders. In the quiet of private rooms, the weight of royal fabric could be traded for the plainness of a plain-clad woman who wanted to be counted for more than a name.
King MacLinny entered without any announcement. He walked with a measured step, the kind a man keeps when his bones have learned to bear grief. The crown he wore in public rested tonight on the shelves — out of sight — but he still carried the tendency of presence, the authority that had been hammered into him by years of small decisions that accumulated into law. He sat opposite Lily and appraised her not with the distance of king to subject, but with the strange, private index of father to child.
"You're still awake." he said, and the sentence was not a complaint so much as an observation that held room for worry.
Lily didn't reply at once. She looked out the window and the night blurred behind the glass. "I can't sleep." she said finally. "Too many people are awake for the wrong reasons."
MacLinny's expression folded. "The kingdom is awake with danger, yes."
She turned to him. "Danger is not cured by staying hidden, Father. People need to see a face they trust. They need the symbol of us moving among them, not barricades and proclamations."
He reached for the teacup beside him and set it down with the little ritualism of a man trying to buy time for words he had been turning over for nights. "You know why I cannot permit that?" he said quietly. The room was small; his voice was not trying to be heard by others. "You are the heir. You are—" He stopped as if the word might rupture into a hundred smaller shards. "You are what our kingdom and our future depends upon."
Lily let that hang there, but she would not bow under the weight of it. "I am also a human being." she said. "I am not a paper crown to be rolled and stored away for safekeeping. I am tired of being a portrait on a wall. I have watched people whisper and point since the incident. They look for anger. They look for someone to blame. Staying here for months — closed and untouchable — does not convince them of our strength; it convinces them the palace fears the invasion."
He looked at her then in a way that made her feel naked, as if he were reading the network of lines that made up her face. "They blame because they are afraid. You say the palace fears the invasion, and that is true; but the palace also fears bereavement turning into more bereavement. We did not recover from the your mother's sickness, Lily — it reshaped us. I will not risk losing you to an emboldened enemy."
"Is that the real problem?" she asked, voice rising though she tried to keep it even. "Or is it that you do not trust the world to be kind? Because that is not the same thing as protecting us. That is closing the shutters and saying you have done something."
MacLinny's hand curled into a small fist on the arm of his chair. He had lived long enough to know that royal arguments were either soft, quiet things that finished in a kind of compromise, or they became dangerous like a blade left in a garden. He chose the first for as long as he could. "This isn't a game, Lily." he said. "You want to ride out with a handful of masked guards and smile at a crowd for two hours, and somehow you believe that will heal three months of fear and suspicion? Or will it just create a rumor that the princess was reckless? Or get you killed?"
"You think I want to be reckless." Her teeth clicked together, an audible tremor. "You say that like I would go on a whim. I do know what the world needs. It needs trust ti get rebuilt again. Someone on whom they can trust that this time will pass out. It needs a human who will stand in the sun and not hide. If Mr. Orsic has made you trust the K.P.P's method — (which I do not at all endorse) — then let me be the counterweight. Let me walk the markets with a small detail and talk to mothers and children. Let me do what a princess should be: remind people that their ruler is one of them. And they care about their situation."
He leaned forward, his voice softening with a different edge, one closer to desperation than command. "You have been the symbol since you were born. People will follow what looks like permanence. But symbols become either anchors or lures. If Kreg's men were able to place a small device near the princess yesterday—"
"Razille was not trying to harm me." Lily snapped. Her face tightened. "She didn't put a bomb to bring the palace down. She brought a parcel. She is a Postknight. They are being scalped with suspicion because a man wants to cut them off like a bad branch."
MacLinny's jaw worked. He had heard the words before, arguments that tried to put nuance into what Orsic had already broadcast as simple facts of security. "The act itself put the princess at risk," he said. "That is all that matters in this hall."
"And you are letting fear be the only voice." Lily's hand trembled now. "I watch you sign orders where the only light left is Orsic's sense of rightness. He is skilled — too skilled perhaps for his own measure — and he shapes our response to his preference. You saw what happened to those postknights in the square. Was that a triumph of safety or a spectacle of accusation?"
MacLinny's eyes, for all the king's habit of being measured, betrayed a flash of the old pain. "Your mother died after your birth." he said, voice catching. "You know that. I have operated since with half of a heart. I will not lose the other half because I am stubborn with pride."
Her face softened at the mention of the queen; she felt suddenly small, a child again in front of a man who bore the map of a hospice and a throne. "I know, Father." she said. "I used to imagine her in the hallways — laughing and telling the servants off for letting the pots boil over. I miss her too." She paused, gathering a steadier line. "I don't ask you to put me at silly risk. I ask you to let me do my duty in a way that will not be empty. Let me go under guard. Let me visit the infirmary. Let me—"
He cut her off, not angrily but with a slow, very deliberate movement. "The postknights are accused in the square, and you would let a princess place herself where knives could be thrown at her. It's not bravery I would deny so much as blind hope. You are as dear to me as the kingdom. If the people need healing, they will get it — but the path to healing need not run through the woman who, if she falls, will be the death of public hope."
"You treat me like a glass." Lily said, the word a crushed thing she had said a hundred times in private to herself. "Like something precious and fragile you cannot touch."
"And because I did not tell you—" he began, then stopped, as if to weigh each syllable.
She lifted both hands, palms out in a small gesture pleading for bridge. "Tell me why. Tell me the strategy. Let me understand the plan instead of being excluded from it. If I am the future, why is the future being hidden like a relic? Teach me the map rather than lock me away."