The palace smelled like lacquer and lilies and everything that had been painted pretty to hide the cracks. It was also full of people practicing the art of looking serious while their pockets were full of gossip. Aras had never liked palaces; they were crowds of expensive chairs arranged so that the wrong gesture could cost a life. Yet here he was, paper crown tucked into his belt, walking with a prince who smiled like he had been taught to apologize for every pleasure.
They arrived under the court's polite thunder: trumpets, perfumed pages, and the soft rustle of silk that had learned to pretend it did not mind mud. King Alric received Coren with the same theatricality the monarch wore to convince provinces to love him. The conversation that followed was less a negotiation than a chess game staged with porcelain dolls.
Aras—who had promised himself to be careful—found the palace's gardens by instinct. Gardens are honest places: a thing grows or it dies. Curiosity, he had decided, favored soil over throne rooms. He slipped away under the guise of needing air and found himself in a maze of clipped hedges and statues that stared like bored gods.
She was there when he rounded a corner: a figure in pale blue, perched on a stone bench with a book closed in her lap. Her hair was the color of late-summer wheat; her eyes were the particular green of someone who had seen too many diplomatic dinners and decided to catalogue the jokes for future use. People called her Princess Elara—the queen's youngest, a woman raised in the soft armor of etiquette and the hard one of restraint. In court she smiled politely and never quite completely. In the garden she seemed to be practicing a different face: one that let the corners of her mouth think about mischief.
Aras stopped in the hedgerow and watched. He liked that she read with her chin tilted like she was defying the air. He could have announced himself with the usual grin and a line about stolen endings and borrowed lives, but the palace taught a certain reverence for chance encounters. He preferred to be a surprise, not a performance.
"Elara," she said without rising, as if his presence had been expected all along. Her voice sounded like a bell muffled in silk. "You must be fond of public gardens."
"Public gardens are the only places in this palace that don't preen," Aras replied, stepping into the moonlight with the grace of a man who'd once pretended to be a duke for a night and discovered he liked borrowing other lives. "And you must be fond of escaping them."
She closed her book, a small smile threading light through her face. "You have heard where you're not invited and still come," she observed. "That is either bravery or a tremendous disregard for etiquette."
"Both," he answered honestly. "I like to collect the latter."
She laughed softly—an honest thing that made her look younger and more dangerous at once. "You're ridiculous," she said, which in princess-talk is a term of near-affection.
He sat beside her without asking. The garden held them like a secret and for a moment the world narrowed to hedges and the small orchestra of palace frogs. "Do you come out here often?" he asked.
"Only when the dinners are too long and my cousins monopolize conversation with statistics about linen," she said. "I come out here to be unobserved. To practice being honest."
Aras looked at her then, properly. He liked Princesses because they carried small rebellions like pins on their gowns—discrete, sharp. "Honesty is a dangerous practice in some rooms," he said. "Do you find it useful?"
"I find it necessary," she said. Her green eyes flicked to the palace towers where banners fluttered like carefully arranged accusations. "My father believes in tidy ledgers. I believe in messy people. Sometimes that makes dinner awkward."
"Messy people are better in bed," Aras said before he could stop himself. The comment was a jagged gift of impropriety.
Elara's smile curved into something dangerously amused. "Is that your standard opening line?"
"No," he confessed. "But I would like to try it on, if you permit."
She nudged him with a toe. "You are insufferable," she said, but her cheeks had warmed, and warmth in a princess is a political act.
They talked like people who had been denied practice at being themselves; they traded stories of terrible tutors and worse suitors, of courses in how to appear decisive without actually making choices. Aras found himself telling the truth in the garden, small confessions shaped like jokes: he'd once taught a whole militia to dance as a diversion; he'd stolen a bouquet from a duke because the duke's hands never learned to gift something innocent. Elara offered in return a story about a childhood rain that had taught her the language of puddles and a habit of collecting crumbs to feed sparrows.
"I don't like the ledger," she said suddenly, blunt as a coin in a palm. "I don't like that someone can sum lives and say the number is acceptable."
Aras's throat tightened with a recognition that was not theatrical. "We steal them back," he said. "Because someone left people on the margins with the belief that counting is godly."
She turned to him then, the moon painting silver on her hair. "And if you bring them to my father?" she asked. "What will be done?"
They both knew the answer, but this was a princess's test: compassion asked in an equation. Aras shrugged in a way that had learned to hide maps. "We try to make him see," he said. "If he will not see, we get louder."
"You must be careful," Elara said. "Princes promise. Kings execute promises that interfere with their image."
Aras looked at her and for once the grin was honest, without any barbs. "And you?" he asked. "Do you promise anything, Princess?"
She smiled like a small trap. "I promise you nothing," she said. "Except perhaps a terrible secret: I do not like the person my father expects me to be."
"Then we will be conspirators," Aras said, delighted. He reached for her hand—half to test the world and half because his front-line charm had mellowed into something softer. Her fingers closed around his like a small revolt.
They were interrupted by the clatter of boots—too loud in a garden that held its breath like a secret. A courtier rounded the hedgerow in search of the prince and brought with him a trio of soldiers whose posture smelled of duty and bad cigars. Elara's shoulders tightened. The spell of the garden broke like glass.
"You shouldn't be here," the courtier said, tone attempting politeness and failing. He looked at Aras with the sort of contempt people reserve for men without titles and too many stories.
Aras rose, hand falling to Keen as if out of habit. He had not meant to display the sword in the princess's presence. But perhaps this was not the moment for delicate discretion.
"Perhaps I shouldn't," he replied. "But then I don't belong to rooms built on counting either."
The soldiers approached, but Elara—who had been raised to be unseen while always watching—did something unexpected: she stood, walked the short distance between the hedges and the men, and spoke to them in a voice that carried no courtly sugar. "Leave us," she ordered. Her words were not a request; they were a position. The soldiers hesitated. A princess's command is a strange currency in the palace.
The courtier, red with concern and the wrong sort of courage, tried to insist. He reached for her sleeve. She drew back like a cat and, in that split second, grabbed his wrist and twisted. The courtier yelped, not badly hurt but horribly surprised. A princess's twist is not a common skill taught in etiquette classes.
"You will not touch me to enforce your spreadsheet," she said. "Go back and tell your masters that Princess Elara has chosen to be curious about truth tonight. If they wish to debate it, they may use a different hour of judgement."
The courtier stammered something about decorum and fled. The soldiers looked apologetic and awkward, the kind of apologies that can be bought with a bow and a dossier. The hedges resumed their watchful silence.
Aras looked at Elara with a new kind of interest—one that read danger in the way she carried herself like a tool. "You could cause a war," he murmured.
"I could," she admitted. "But I would rather cause the kind where people get better."
He laughed, the sound bubbling from something more than amusement. "Polite revolution," he said. "Sign me up."
That night, when the prince returned to his chambers and the courtiers spun the evening into a dozen different scandals, Aras and Elara found a quiet corner in a servant's corridor where the stone was cool and honest. She leaned in, conspiratorial.
"There is a room the king uses when he grows sentimental," she whispered. "A small cabinet where he keeps letters he considers inconvenient. He will lock away petitions he does not want to answer. If someone could find those letters—if someone could show his failures—perhaps he would not be able to count them away so easily."
Aras's fingers curled around the grip of Keen. "You ask for theft," he said, delighted and dangerously compliant.
"I ask for accountancy's inconvenient truths," she countered. "Call it… mutual theft."
They planned in whispers: Elara would create an opportunity during the king's reception, a small scandal of a missing dagger that would draw guards to the east wing. Miren and the twins—now palace-savvy thanks to Coren's subtle introductions—would lead a servant distraction. Coren would charm his father with enough questions to pull the king's attention away. Aras would… be Aras, which meant he would walk like a man who owned the night and then pocket whatever necessary evidence the king hid behind silk and denial.
The plan was messy, theatrical, and not remotely safe. It suited them all.
Before they parted, Elara reached up and pinched Aras's ear—an old childish habit she'd kept like a relic. "If you fail," she said, half-pleading and half-order, "do not die making a joke about it."
He kissed the place she'd pinched, an odd, oddly sincere gesture. "No promises," he said, "but I will try not to be a terrible corpse."
She smiled, and in the palace's long corridors that smelled of lies and lilies, two conspirators parted—one a princess in pale blue who traded etiquette for agency, the other a thief with a grin that had learned to mean more than trouble.
Outside, in the world that still counted people as beads, horns sounded distant and impatient. Inside, on a quieter scale, a princess had chosen love of truth over love
of comfort—and it felt, in the garden's cool air, like the first sweet strike of a revolution.