Chapter 3

(Adrian's POV)

Six years is a long time to keep a secret, even a small one, even one made in a garden by two children who barely understood what they were promising. I had turned eighteen in the spring. Willow would turn seventeen at the end of summer. And in all that time, neither of us had broken our word.

That was, perhaps, the most remarkable part of the whole arrangement. Not that we'd made it. That we'd kept it.

The Royal Academy of Aldenmere sat on a hill above the capital, its grey stone towers older than the dynasty that funded them, its halls lined with the portraits of kings and scholars who had walked the same corridors centuries before any of us were born. Autumn had turned the courtyard oaks the color of old coin, and the morning bell had just rung across the quadrangle, sending robed students hurrying between lecture halls with the particular urgency of young nobility late for etiquette examinations they'd rather skip entirely.

I was not hurrying. Princes rarely are permitted to hurry; it unsettles the guards.

I was, instead, standing at the window of the East Tower's upper gallery, watching a girl cross the quadrangle with an armful of botany texts and a complete disregard for the mud puddle directly in her path, and finding myself entirely unable to look away.

Seraphine Hartley walked like the ground owed her nothing and she owed it nothing in return, a small, bright, unhurried presence moving against the current of everyone else's carefully performed importance. She was the youngest of a minor baronial house, admitted to the Academy on scholarship after some examiner had apparently taken one look at her work on agricultural reform and decided the usual quotas could be quietly overlooked. She had a laugh that carried across entire dining halls and an utter inability to pretend interest in anything she didn't actually find interesting, a trait that had gotten her into no small amount of trouble with our etiquette masters and had endeared her to nearly everyone else in the school within a single term.

I had fallen in love with her sometime around our second year, quietly, uselessly, the way a person falls in love with weather they cannot change.

The East Tower gallery where I stood had been built, according to the brass plaque screwed beside its door, some four hundred years earlier as an observation deck for the Academy's founding astronomers, though the only stars anyone bothered observing from it now were the ones embroidered onto the ceremonial robes of visiting dignitaries. Its walls were hung with tapestries so old their colors had faded to the soft, indeterminate hues of pressed flowers, scenes of ancient coronations and long-dead battles stitched by hands that had turned to dust centuries before my grandfather's grandfather was born. A row of iron sconces held candles that were lit each evening by the same aging groundskeeper who had lit them, by his own frequent complaint, for forty-one years running, and the whole gallery smelled permanently of beeswax, old parchment, and the particular mustiness of stone that had never quite dried out since the last century's flood.

I had spent a great many mornings in that gallery over six years, ostensibly reviewing correspondence from the palace, in truth doing exactly what I was doing now: watching a girl cross a muddy quadrangle and wondering, with the specific hopelessness of a man born into obligations he hadn't chosen, whether there existed any version of his life where wanting her might actually be allowed.

"You're doing the staring thing again," said a voice at my shoulder, entirely too pleased with itself.

I did not need to turn to know who it was. Willow had a particular gift for materializing exactly when I least wanted an audience for my own foolishness, a skill she had, over six years, refined into something approaching supernatural.

"I am reviewing the quadrangle for structural concerns," I said, with as much royal dignity as I could summon while very obviously watching one specific girl navigate a puddle.

"Ah, yes. Structural concerns. Very concerning, that puddle." Willow came to stand beside me at the window, arms crossed, wearing the deep green of the Academy's senior scholars' robe with the particular ease of someone who had, somewhere in the last six years, stopped treating fine clothing like a costume and started treating it like armor she'd chosen for herself. Beneath the robe, I noticed, she wore a plain shirt of undyed linen, the sort favored by students who had genuine work to do that day, ink-stained cuffs rolled to the elbow, a distinct and deliberate departure from the silk and pearls she'd worn as a child at Ashworth Manor, back when every stitch of her clothing had been chosen to advertise her family's wealth rather than her own priorities. "You know, for a future king, you are astonishingly bad at hiding things."

"I am excellent at hiding things. I am simply choosing not to hide this one from you."

"A meaningful distinction," she said dryly, "that I will absolutely be repeating back to you the next time you claim discretion is your finest political skill."

Below us, Seraphine reached the far side of the quadrangle, said something that made a cluster of first-years burst into laughter, and disappeared through the arched doorway of the natural sciences hall without ever once glancing up toward the tower where a prince stood pretending not to watch her.

I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.

"You could simply talk to her, you know," Willow said, not unkindly. "It has been six years, Adrian. At some point staring at a woman through a window stops being romantic and starts being faintly alarming."

"It is complicated."

"It is not complicated. It is a boy who likes a girl and is afraid to say so."

"I am the Crown Prince of Aldenmere," I said. "Nothing involving me is ever merely a boy who likes a girl."

Willow tilted her head, studying me with that particular sharpness she'd had since the very first afternoon I'd met her in a garden neither of us had wanted to be standing in. Six years had changed a great deal between us, we had become, against every likelihood, something like genuine friends, co-conspirators in a quiet rebellion against the futures assigned to us both, but that look of hers had never softened. If anything, it had grown more precise.

"You know," she said, "I've never once heard you talk about our engagement with even a fraction of the dread you use for hers."

"That's because our engagement was never real to begin with. Not really. Not the way she is."

The words came out before I'd fully decided to say them, and once spoken, I couldn't entirely take them back, nor did I particularly want to. Willow, for her part, didn't look wounded by the observation. If anything, something in her expression eased, as though I'd finally confirmed something she'd suspected for years and had simply been waiting for me to catch up to.

"I know," she said simply. "I've always known. It's rather the entire point of our arrangement, if you recall."

"I recall." I turned from the window at last, facing her properly. "I don't dislike you, Willow. I want you to understand that, whatever happens from here. I think you're the only person in this entire school who's never once flattered me, never once pretended to agree with something simply because I said it, never once treated me like a crown that occasionally happened to speak. You are, without exception, the most honest person I have ever known, and I have genuinely valued these six years more than I know how to say."

Willow was quiet for a moment, and something crossed her face that I couldn't quite read, gratitude, maybe, or the particular discomfort of a person unused to being complimented sincerely.

"That," she said finally, "is possibly the nicest thing you've ever said to me, and I resent that it came wrapped in the beginning of a rejection."

"It isn't a rejection. Not exactly. It's a confession that I don't know how to be a good king and a good husband to a woman I love if the throne insists my husband must be chosen for political architecture rather than affection. And you've spent six years making it very clear you have no interest in being anyone's political architecture."

"None whatsoever," Willow agreed. "I have plans of my own that involve considerably less crown and considerably more choosing my own life, thank you."

"I know." I managed something that might have passed for a smile. "Which is, in its own strange way, why I trust you more than anyone else at this Academy with what I'm about to ask."

Before I could finish the thought, however, the gallery door opened, and the moment dissolved into the particular chaos that follows most doors opening in a building full of eighteen-year-old nobility with too much free time between lectures.

His name, I would learn within the hour, was Cassian Voss.

He entered the gallery the way I imagine a storm enters a harbor, without apology, without particular awareness that he was interrupting anything, carrying a leather satchel stuffed with ledgers and what appeared to be a half-eaten pastry balanced precariously on top. He was tall in the loose-limbed, not-quite-finished-growing way of young men who hadn't yet settled into their full height, with dark hair perpetually falling into eyes that missed absolutely nothing, and the sort of easy, unbothered confidence that nobility spent a fortune trying to teach their sons and rarely managed to instill.

He wore his Academy coat, I noticed, not the deep scholar's green favored by the titled students, but the plainer, undyed wool reserved for those admitted under a merchant's charter rather than a bloodline, cut well enough to suggest tailoring money but styled in the practical, unfussy manner of a young man who had grown up watching cargo manifests more closely than court fashion. A ring of some dark eastern stone sat on one hand, the sort of thing a father brought home from a trading voyage rather than commissioned from a court jeweler, and his boots, though polished, carried the faint permanent salt-stain of a life spent nearer to docks than ballrooms.

"Apologies," he said, not sounding especially apologetic. "Wrong tower. I was told the trade economics lecture was through here."

"Wrong tower by an entire wing," Willow said.

He looked at her properly for the first time, and something in his expression shifted, quick, assessing, faintly amused, the look of a merchant sizing up an unexpectedly interesting item at market. "You're certain? I was told very specifically..."

"By whom? A first-year with a poor sense of direction, presumably."

"A second-year, actually, with what I now suspect was a very poor sense of humor." He grinned, entirely unbothered by his own error. "Cassian Voss. My father holds the royal trade charter for the eastern shipping lanes, which is the only reason the Academy tolerates a merchant's son cluttering up its very old, very expensive hallways."

"Willow Ashworth," Willow said, and I watched, with the particular fascination of a man observing a chemical reaction he hadn't anticipated, as something flickered across both their faces at once, recognition, perhaps, or simply the specific electricity that occurs when two people who have spent their lives being underestimated for entirely different reasons happen to meet.

"Ashworth," Cassian repeated, something calculating and pleased moving behind his eyes. "The Duke's daughter. I've heard a great deal about you."

"Everyone has heard a great deal about me," Willow said, with the particular weariness of a woman who had spent six years being a rumor before she was ever allowed to be a person. "None of it is especially accurate."

"I don't doubt it. Rumors rarely survive contact with actual conversation." He shifted his satchel, and the pastry finally lost its battle with gravity, tumbling to the gallery floor. He looked at it, looked at Willow, and said, with perfect composure, "That was for you, actually. A welcoming gift. I'm told that's customary."

"You're told wrong."

"Then consider it customary as of this exact moment. I've just invented the tradition."

Willow's mouth twitched, the particular almost-smile she gave when someone had managed to genuinely surprise her, which, in my six years of knowing her, was a rarer occurrence than most people realized. "You're very strange, for a merchant's son."

"You're very sharp, for a duke's daughter who's supposed to be charming and agreeable and destined for a crown." His eyes flicked, briefly, deliberately, toward me, and I saw the calculation land, the recognition of exactly who I was and exactly what that meant for whatever this was. Something shuttered, briefly, behind his easy confidence, a young man remembering, all at once, precisely which rules governed the woman he'd just made laugh. "My apologies, Your Highness. I hadn't realized who I was interrupting."

"You weren't interrupting anything of consequence," I said, and meant it more honestly than the polite deflection usually required.

Cassian retrieved his fallen pastry, brushed it off with the philosophical shrug of a man who had clearly eaten worse in worse places, and inclined his head toward the door. "The trade lecture, I assume, is that direction?"

"That direction," Willow confirmed.

"Lady Ashworth." He said it with a small, knowing bow, entirely too aware of his own charm, and left the way he'd come, storm passing as quickly as it had arrived, leaving the gallery somehow both emptier and more interesting than it had been a moment before.

Willow watched the door for a beat longer than the moment strictly required before turning back to me, composure firmly back in place. "Well. That was certainly something."

"Was it?"

"Don't," she warned, "start."

"I haven't said a word."

"You have an expression. I know your expressions. That was your smug expression."

"I don't have a smug expression."

"You have several, and that was one of them."

I let it go, mostly because the conversation I'd actually intended to have with her still sat unfinished between us, and because the look on her face when Cassian Voss had walked through that door had told me something worth remembering, filed away, for later.

"As I was saying," I said instead, "before we were interrupted by a falling pastry and a merchant's son with an alarming amount of confidence, I have a proposal for you. One considerably more complicated than a rose garden bargain between two children."

Willow's expression sharpened, the particular focus she brought to anything resembling strategy, a trait I'd come to genuinely admire over the years, the girl who had once told me, quite matter-of-factly, that she refused to be furniture in anyone's story now approached every problem like a general studying a battlefield.

"I'm listening."

I opened my mouth to explain, the plan I'd been turning over for weeks now, the careful architecture of what I needed from her, what I was willing to offer in return, and how very much depended on her saying yes.

I never got the chance.

The gallery door opened again, this time without the chaos of Cassian Voss's arrival, opening instead with the slow, deliberate formality that only ever preceded bad news delivered by someone paid to deliver it politely. Chancellor Wren stood in the doorway, my father's most senior advisor, a man who had not once in eighteen years interrupted my time at the Academy for anything that could wait until supper.

"Your Highness." He bowed, brief and precise. "Forgive the intrusion. His Majesty requires your presence. Immediately."

Something cold settled in my stomach, the particular dread of a man who has spent his entire life learning to recognize the sound of a door closing on a future he hadn't finished choosing.

"What's happened?"

Chancellor Wren's eyes flicked, briefly, apologetically, toward Willow, before returning to me. "The treaty negotiations with the Eastern Provinces have accelerated, Your Highness. His Majesty wishes to announce the formal date of your engagement ceremony to Lady Ashworth by the season's end, to strengthen the Crown's position at the negotiating table. He asks that you return to the palace to discuss the arrangements at once."

The season's end.

Six weeks.

I knew, the moment the words left him, exactly what lay behind them. The Eastern Provinces had spent a generation eyeing the kingdom's southern trade routes, and any negotiation touching them was really a negotiation about power dressed up in the polite language of commerce. My father had explained the theory to me once, years earlier, over a dinner I remembered mostly for how little either of us had actually eaten: a formally announced royal engagement, backed by a house as wealthy and well-connected as Ashworth, signaled stability to foreign courts in a way that no treaty clause alone ever could. Kings did not go to war with families who were about to be joined by marriage. It was, in its own cold, practical way, an entirely reasonable strategy.

It simply happened to require two people's entire lives as its collateral.

"Thank you, Chancellor," I said, my voice coming out steadier than I felt. "Tell my father I'll return within the hour."

Wren bowed and withdrew, and the gallery door clicked shut behind him with a finality that seemed, in that moment, considerably louder than its actual sound.

I looked at Willow, and watched the exact moment the color left her face, watched six years of carefully negotiated freedom collapse, all at once, into a deadline neither of us had asked for and neither of us knew how to survive.

"Six weeks," she said quietly, and for the first time since I'd met her in that rose garden as an eleven-year-old girl daring an entire kingdom to move her, I heard something in her voice that sounded, unmistakably, like fear.

"We had until the end of the Academy term," she said, more to herself than to me, pacing now, the particular restless motion she fell into whenever a problem refused to organize itself into a solvable shape. "That was the agreement. That was always the agreement. Two more years, Adrian. We had two more years to find our own way out of this before anyone forced our hand."

"I know."

"Six weeks isn't a plan. Six weeks is barely enough time to properly panic, let alone dismantle a royal engagement without scandal touching either of our families."

I had no answer for her. I had, for the first time in six years of careful plans and quiet bargains, absolutely no idea what came next. But watching her pace the length of that old gallery, sharp and furious and entirely unwilling to accept an ending she hadn't chosen, I found myself remembering, with sudden and total clarity, the exact same fury on the face of an eleven-year-old girl standing in a garden, informing me, quite calmly, that she refused to be furniture in anyone's story.

She hadn't lost that fight. I didn't intend to let her lose this one either.