The king stared at her for a long moment. He had sought counsel constantly these last months and had learned to wear patience like a shield. He had also, in the solitude that followed the queen's passing, learned that the heart could harden into a fortress from which no sound of reason could pass unless it was set in concrete. "Because my duty is to keep the house standing." he said finally. "People need the continuity of the crown. They do not need an example of grief compounded by an unnecessary death."
"But if you keep everything under a glass," Lily replied with a bitterness that tasted like old bread, "you will turn the people's need for a hope into longing for a spectacle. They will either become furious that the palace hides or they will become indifferent because they do not see themselves in the palace."
There was a long silence. The portrait of the queen looked down, perhaps more compassionate than either of them. King MacLinny's fingers drummed a slow, thoughtful beat on the arm of his chair. The small details of his life as a man and a ruler braided through the words: the old advisors, the ministers who moved like pieces across a board, Orsic's relentless steadiness, the worried council of priests of Eloin laying prayers against the worst of nights.
"Who would you have me send?" the king asked at last, trying to shift the language away from accusation. "If not Orsic's men — and I know you despise that — then who is trustworthy enough to be at your side and not create a larger problem?"
Lily's lips pressed together as she thought of names. She could have said Seraphine or Colins, of course; they were Postknights and now under heavy suspicion, and yet their steadiness had proven itself. She could have said Selvine, who never wore expression without calculation. But there was a truth she recognized in the way the court moved: even if she chose them, Orsic could and would bend that choice into policy and turn a guarded procession into a photograph of weakness or worse, an opportunity for political capital.
"What we need is truth," she said, "and a visible one. Let me—" She stopped. She could not say what she had been thinking for days: that if she could walk single streets wearing a common cloak and meet a miller, a widow, a boy with a scraped knee, she could remind people the crown was not above them. She also knew that such an act would be seized upon by Orsic's men and used as a document of either courage or naiveté.
King MacLinny watched her and then, slowly, the old fatigue around his eyes deepened. "You demand legitimacy when the kingdom is fracturing." he said. "Perhaps if you were older — if this were not the first wound I feared to bleed into another — perhaps I would be less bold. But understand me: every public move I make now ripples outward. The enemy watches with patient hands. If they can manipulate a single event to make the crown look weak, they will use it."
Lily's jaw set. "Then let me at least be taught. Do not make me an object of silence. Teach me how to read the patterns of fear and how to move carefully inside them."
She leaned forward, earnest in a way that made her voice smaller. "If you are too afraid to risk me, then why not teach me self-defense? Let me do what you cannot do without losing the image of the crown."
The king's eyes softened in a way that felt like an apology. "My dear light." he murmured — an old pet name from before protocol and grief took language away — "I have not forgotten how to love you. But I must also love a realm that is made of many lives beyond us two. I will not allow the realm to be more loved than you are."
For a long time neither of them spoke. Behind the curtained windows the city breathed, unaware of the intimate shoring that went on in rooms like this — two people entangled by blood and duty, trying to reconcile the map to the pulse.
At last the king rose and walked to the portrait of the queen, his hand resting upon the frame in a small ritual of memory. "She would say," he said in a voice so soft it might have been for her alone, "that a woman of the court must know the world in order to command it. She would have told me to let you know the lines of the world so you could step into them safely."
Lily moved to stand beside him, looking at the face in the painting. "Would she?" she whispered. "Then why did you hide that counsel from me?"
"For fear," he answered simply. "Not of you, but of a stubborn, noxious man who can turn compassion into weapon. I thought I could contain both — my grief and his ambition. I misjudged the danger."
She turned to him then, not as princess to father but as a woman who had been given a small, dangerous inheritance. "Then teach me." she said. "Teach me the protective lines. Let me understand our case for presence. And if you will not allow me to go free, permit me to go with a plan. Let me meet the infirmary once every two days under heavy guard. Allow me to tour the western quarter under Colins' watch. Something that is not theater but is me. Let me be part of the remedy, not merely the pretence of it."