Chapter 2

(Willow's POV)

Morning arrived with all the subtlety of an unpaid debt.

"Lady Willow! Lady Willow!" A knock, then the door cracking open. "His Highness will arrive within the hour."

I buried my face in the pillow. "I was hoping the kingdom would collapse overnight."

"It... did not, my lady."

"What a shame."

A pause. "Should I close the curtains again?"

"No. My disappointment isn't with the sun."

A quiet laugh slipped out before she could catch it, and despite everything, I smiled. Greta. One of the few servants who'd shown Willow any real kindness in the game, though those scenes had been so brief most players probably forgot she existed. I didn't intend to.

She threw back the curtains, and golden light flooded the room, along with a much less welcome reminder. The prince was coming. My arm still throbbed where the Duke had grabbed me the night before; a deep bruise had already bloomed under my sleeve. I looked at it for a moment, then made myself look away. There would be time for my father later. Today required strategy.

"Shall we begin dressing, my lady?"

I sighed. "I suppose refusing would only start an international incident."

Greta blinked. "...International?"

"Never mind."

Within minutes my bedroom became a battlefield, except the soldiers were maids, far too many maids. Someone made off with my nightdress. Someone else attacked my hair with alarming confidence. A third arrived bearing ribbons, jewelry, gloves, and enough pins to build a small fortress. I sat very still and let it happen to me.

"I have a question," I finally said. "Why does it take nine people to prepare one little girl?"

"Eighteen, my lady," Greta said, not looking up from a row of tiny pearl buttons. "The other nine are preparing the entrance hall."

"Eighteen. To greet one eleven-year-old boy?"

She considered that. "When you put it that way..."

"I feel we're dramatically overstaffed."

A few maids failed to hide their smiles. Good. At least someone in this house remembered how to.

They settled on pale blue silk embroidered with silver thread, beautiful, elegant, and about as practical as a hat made of teacups. The skirt bloomed around me like an overturned wedding cake, and the sleeves pinned my arms tightly enough that I doubted self-defense had been high on the designer's list of priorities. A sapphire necklace settled cold and heavy around my throat. I resisted the urge to tear it off. Jewelry, I decided, was simply a prettier word for chains.

When Greta finished my hair, she stepped back, pleased. "There."

I looked in the mirror. Long chestnut hair, clear blue eyes, delicate features, undeniably beautiful, and heartbreakingly lonely underneath it. I wondered how many years Willow had spent smiling because it was expected of her.

Then I stood. Enough. Pity wouldn't save either of us.

Downstairs, the manor had transformed into a stage. Fresh flowers lined every hallway. The marble floors had been polished until they threw the chandelier light back twice as bright. Crimson Ashworth banners hung between the tall windows, and servants hurried past making tiny adjustments no ordinary guest would ever notice. Everything existed for one audience.

My father stood waiting near the entrance, and gave me one brief, approving glance, no mention of last night, no apology, no acknowledgment of the bruise hidden beneath my sleeve. To him, the argument was finished.

To me, it had only just begun.

Outside, hoofbeats rose in the distance and grew steadily louder. Every servant straightened at once. The heavy front doors swung open, and a footman announced in a voice built to wake three counties:

"His Royal Highness, Crown Prince Adrian."

I lifted my eyes to the approaching carriage.

So. The first obstacle standing between me and a future that didn't end with my head on a chopping block had finally arrived.

The royal procession entered with the precision of a military parade, six knights riding ahead in polished armor that caught the sun like carved silver, followed by a black lacquer carriage trimmed in gold filigree, the royal standard snapping above it. Four white horses drew it to a graceful stop at the foot of the manor steps.

Each knight wore, beneath his armor, a tabard bearing the royal lion in gold thread against deep blue, and each carried, slung across his saddle, a ceremonial lance topped with a small pennant that never once dipped out of formation the entire length of the drive, the kind of discipline that spoke of years of drilling for exactly this sort of display. The carriage horses themselves were matched down to the shade of white in their coats, their harnesses studded with silver medallions bearing the royal crest, manes braided in the particular careful style reserved for state occasions. Somewhere behind the visible procession, I knew, rode a second, quieter carriage carrying the prince's tutors and physicians, always present, always unremarked upon, the invisible machinery that kept a crown prince alive and educated wherever he traveled.

Silence fell over the whole estate. Every servant lowered their head. Every knight went still. Even the breeze seemed to hold its breath.

A footman opened the carriage door and set a polished step on the ground. Then the Crown Prince emerged.

I'd braced myself for someone unbearably arrogant, a boy who already believed the world orbited him. Instead I got a child, maybe a year older than I was, with golden hair framing a face so precisely put together it looked almost unreal, the kind of face artists spend weeks trying to get right. His royal blue coat shimmered with silver embroidery whenever he moved; white gloves, polished boots, the whole practiced picture of a prince.

It wasn't the appearance that caught me, though. It was his eyes, blue, clear, quietly watchful. Not proud. Not mocking. Not even particularly pleased to be here.

He looked tired. Not physically. The kind of tired that comes from being watched every waking moment for so long you forget what privacy even feels like.

Well. That complicated things.

I'd prepared myself to dislike him on sight. Instead I felt something dangerously close to sympathy, and I shut that down immediately. Sympathy was exactly how stories trapped people. I'd survived one life already. I wasn't about to lose a second one because a prince happened to have kind eyes.

He descended the last step and approached with easy, measured confidence. Behind me I felt my father's presence like an invisible hand pressed between my shoulder blades. Smile. Behave. Do not embarrass this family.

I smiled. It cost me nothing.

Father bowed first. "Your Royal Highness. House Ashworth welcomes you."

"It is my pleasure, Your Grace." His voice was calm, courteous, none of the arrogance I'd been braced for. Then his attention shifted to me, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all.

So this was Willow Ashworth. And this was Crown Prince Adrian. The engagement that would eventually ruin us both had officially begun.

He inclined his head with textbook precision. "Lady Willow."

I dropped into a curtsy just as precise. "Your Royal Highness."

"I have heard much about you."

There it was, the standard noble greeting, safe and polite and entirely empty.

"I hope only good things," I said, smiling pleasantly. "Though I confess I haven't done enough in eleven years to deserve much discussion either way."

A flicker crossed his face, surprise, and then, unmistakably, the ghost of amusement.

"I believe," he said, "I should like to discover the truth for myself."

That wasn't in the script.

"I wish you the best of luck," I said sweetly. "I've only just met myself."

He stared at me for a heartbeat. Then, despite every lesson in royal composure he'd surely been drilled in since infancy, the corner of his mouth lifted, not a full smile, just enough to prove that somewhere underneath all that etiquette, an ordinary boy was still in there.

Interesting. Very interesting.

My father cleared his throat, loudly, and the prince's expression snapped back to formal in an instant.

"I trust your journey was comfortable, Your Highness?"

"It was, thank you."

"Please, allow us to welcome you properly."

Adrian nodded, then turned back to me and offered his hand. "Lady Willow. If you would accompany me."

I looked at his hand, then at my father, then back at the prince. Refusing would cause a scandal. Accepting changed nothing. I placed my hand in his anyway.

His grip was careful. Gentle. Like he was afraid of holding on too tight.

Nothing at all like my father's.

I hated that the comparison occurred to me at all.

We climbed the steps together, and to everyone watching we must have looked perfectly matched, the future Crown Prince and his intended, a picture worthy of every court painter in the kingdom. If only they knew.

Halfway up, Adrian leaned in, his voice pitched low enough that only I could hear it.

"You're not at all what the reports said, Lady Willow."

I kept my smile in place. "Is that a compliment, Your Highness, or a warning?"

He didn't answer. He just smiled, small, private, and far too knowing for an eleven-year-old boy who was supposed to be a stranger to me.

I had the distinct, sinking feeling that I'd already lost the opening move of a game I hadn't realized I'd started.

The reception itself was every bit as tedious as I'd expected, an hour of tea poured with surgical precision, of adults exchanging compliments so polished they'd clearly been rehearsed, of my father watching me the way a man watches a horse he's about to sell at auction. Adrian sat through it with the practiced patience of someone who had attended a thousand such gatherings and would attend a thousand more. I envied him that skill even as I resented needing it.

It was only when the Duke and the prince's chancellor withdrew to the study to discuss whatever dry political matters required a locked door and lowered voices that I found my opening. A steward asked, with the studied neutrality of a man used to arranging things he wasn't permitted to comment on, whether Her Ladyship might show His Highness the gardens before supper.

I did not miss the look my father gave me on his way out. Behave.

I intended to. Just not the way he meant.

The Ashworth rose garden in late afternoon light was, I'll admit, one of the few things about this life I hadn't minded inheriting. Gravel paths wound between hedges trimmed into perfect geometry, and the roses themselves, deep red, the color of old wine, climbed trellises that had stood in that exact spot for three generations. A stone fountain trickled at the garden's center, worn soft and green with age. Somewhere beyond the hedges, a bell tolled the hour in a tower I couldn't see.

Adrian walked beside me with his hands folded behind his back, the posture of a boy who had been taught to walk like that before he'd been taught to walk at all. For a while, neither of us spoke. The two footmen assigned to trail us kept a discreet, respectful distance, close enough to see, too far to hear.

"You don't want this either," I said finally. No preamble. No etiquette. I was tired of etiquette.

He glanced sideways at me, surprised, I think, less by the question than by the fact that I'd simply asked it. "Want what, exactly?"

"This." I gestured vaguely between us, at the garden, at the manor behind us, at the whole gilded machinery of the day. "The engagement. The wedding everyone's already planning as though we're furniture being delivered on schedule."

He was quiet long enough that I thought he might simply refuse to answer, the way royalty so often did when a question cut too close to something true.

"No," he admitted at last. "I don't."

"Then we agree on something." I stopped beside the fountain and looked at him properly, this careful, composed boy who had clearly spent his whole short life being exactly what everyone expected of him. "I have no interest in becoming your wife, Your Highness. Not out of any personal insult to you. I simply refuse to spend my entire life as a decision other people made on my behalf."

Something shifted behind his eyes, not offense, which was what I'd braced for, but something closer to recognition. "You say that as though it's a controversial position."

"In my experience, it is."

"Not to me." He looked past me, out at the roses, and for the first time since he'd stepped down from that carriage, his careful composure slipped just slightly. "Do you know what it's like, growing up already promised to a life you never chose? Every lesson I've had since I could walk has been in service of a crown I didn't ask for and a marriage arranged before I could speak in full sentences. I don't dislike you, Lady Willow. I don't know you well enough yet to dislike or like anyone. What I dislike is being told the shape of my whole future by men who will be dead long before I have to live in it."

I hadn't expected that. I'd expected a prince, polished and hollow, reciting duty like a memorized verse. Instead I'd gotten something almost unbearably honest.

"Then here is my proposal," I said, before sentiment could get the better of either of us. "We're eleven and twelve. Neither of us is marrying anyone this decade regardless of what our fathers put on paper. So let the paper exist. Let the engagement stand, publicly, formally, exactly as arranged. But privately, between the two of us, we agree that no actual decision gets made until we've both finished at the Royal Academy. Not before. Whatever we choose then, we choose as people who've had the chance to become someone first."

Adrian considered this with the same careful weight he seemed to give everything, turning it over like a coin he was checking for a counterfeit stamp. "And if, at the end of it, we still don't want to marry each other?"

"Then we don't." I shrugged, as though the fate of two noble houses and a royal succession were as simple as declining a second helping of dessert. "We find some other arrangement that doesn't require either of us to spend the rest of our lives pretending to be happy for an audience."

"You make it sound simple."

"It isn't. But it's simpler than the alternative, which is you and I resenting each other in a palace for forty years because two men who are not currently in this garden decided it years before we had any say."

For a long moment, he said nothing. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed, a real laugh, startled out of him, nothing like the practiced courtesy from the receiving line. It changed his whole face. He looked, for just a moment, like an ordinary boy standing in a garden instead of the weight of a kingdom's future standing in royal blue.

"You're the strangest noblewoman I've ever met," he said.

"I'll take that as agreement."

"It's agreement." He extended his hand, the same careful, gentle grip as before, though this time it felt less like ceremony and more like something real. "Until after the Academy, then. No decisions before that. Whatever comes after, we choose it honestly."

I shook his hand. Somewhere behind us, one of the footmen shifted his weight, and I imagined the report that would eventually reach my father: the young couple got along well in the garden. Let him believe that. The truth was ours to keep.

"One more thing," I said, releasing his hand. "If, between now and then, either of us happens to fall in love with someone considerably more suitable, the other one helps. No jealousy. No sabotage. Just two people getting each other out of a story neither of us wrote."

Adrian studied me for a moment, and there was something almost fond in it, the particular fondness reserved for someone who has just said the exact thing you didn't know you needed to hear. "Agreed, Lady Willow."

"Willow," I said. "If we're conspiring together, you might as well use my name."

"Willow." He tried it out like a boy trying on a coat that fit better than the one he'd been given. "Then you may call me Adrian. Every time my title comes out of your mouth, I'll assume you're performing for an audience."

"An excellent assumption, Your Highness."

He laughed again, and this time I let myself smile back without calculating what it cost me.

We walked the rest of the garden path in something that almost resembled comfortable silence, two children who had just quietly, privately, dismantled a small piece of the future everyone else had built around them, brick by brick, without either family noticing a single stone had moved.

Bells rang for supper somewhere beyond the hedges. Adrian offered his arm again, out of habit or performance, I couldn't quite tell, and I took it, because the game wasn't over, only its rules had changed.

Supper that evening was a formal affair in the Ashworth dining hall, the long mahogany table set with the family's finest silver, candles burning in branched candelabras polished for the occasion, a roasted pheasant carried in with more ceremony than the bird had likely ever earned in life. My father presided from the head of the table, satisfied in the particular quiet way of a man who believed his afternoon's political maneuvering had gone precisely as planned, entirely unaware that the two children seated across from him had, in the space of one garden walk, quietly reorganized the very future he thought he'd secured. Adrian complimented the wine with practiced grace, asked my father polite questions about the southern harvest, and performed, across three full courses, the exact picture of a young man settling comfortably into his intended's household.

I watched him do it and understood, for the first time, precisely how much work went into being a prince, an entire childhood spent learning to say nothing true in the most convincing possible way. It was, I thought, rather a shame, that a boy so capable of honesty in a rose garden had to spend every other hour of his life performing its opposite.

By the time his carriage departed that evening, torches lit along the drive, the household staff once again arranged in perfect rows to bid him farewell, I stood beside my father on the front steps, watching the royal procession disappear back down the long road toward the capital, and felt, for the first time since waking up in Willow Ashworth's small, unfamiliar hands, something that might, cautiously, have been called hope.

Seven years, I thought, watching the last of the sunlight catch on the fountain's worn stone edge. Seven years to become someone the story never accounted for.

I intended to make excellent use of every one of them.