Chương 66: [B2] Chapter 23: Gilded Cages

Viria had been a princess for four days, and her considered, expert opinion on the role was that it was the most comfortable cage she had ever hated. The stuffiness was total. There were rules for how Lyriel sat, rules for how Lyriel laughed, a specific and apparently non-negotiable order in which Lyriel greeted people at breakfast, and an entire vocabulary of things Lyriel did not say, which as far as Viria could determine included everything worth saying.

Three separate attendants had gently corrected her posture in the first two days. One of them had apologized while doing so, which was somehow worse. Fortunately, Viria knew this cage, as she had grown up in its sister. The bars here were velvet instead of living wood, and the words were poised, devoted, polite, and proper instead of graceful, patient, reverent, and predictable, but a cage with better upholstery was still a cage, and Viria had already escaped one of those before.

She found the system's casting choices, on the whole, extremely funny in a way she did not enjoy. In fairness, though she would never admit it out loud, there were parts of it she did not mind. For one thing, the bed was real. After weeks of jungle ground, moss and one particularly memorable half of a night spent knocked unconscious, Lyriel's bed was an outrageous cloud of goose down that Viria sank into every night with the shameless gratitude of the formerly damp. And there was a bath! A private one!

With heated water on demand! Viria had spent her first evening in it long enough that an attendant had knocked to confirm she had not drowned. I suppose I can take advantage of my current situation.

She found Lyriel's diary on the fourth evening. It was in the place she herself would have hidden one: not in the locked writing desk, which was the obvious decoy, but folded inside a spare bodice at the bottom of the winter chest, where no maid had reason to dig until the season turned. Lyriel's handwriting was small, disciplined, and angrier than anything else in the room.

Tyrian took my hand at the reception tonight and held it a moment too long, the way he does when people are watching, because affection performed is affection witnessed. He has never once held it when no one was looking. Mother says the engagement secures the eastern accord and that I am fortunate he is handsome. I have written and burned two three replies to that. Perhaps mother didn't notice the way he stared at me. Or the way he stared at all the other ladies present.

I have done the arithmetic a hundred ways: If I refuse him, I am the 'selfish princess who unmade an alliance for her feelings'. If I delay, I am 'difficult'. If I am difficult long enough, I become the family's problem instead of its pride, and problems get married off faster. There is no move on this board that ends with me both free and unruined. So I just smile. I hate how good at smiling I am. Viria closed the diary and returned it to the spot where she found it. Oh, she thought. Oh, I know you.

It was a different world with different bars, but the exact same predicament: Viria had been nineteen harvests deep in a hall that measured her worth in suitable households, and the only reason she had escaped the answer was that an eldritch god had opened a door in midair and she had been reckless enough to grab it before anyone could tell her not to. Lyriel had never gotten a door. She had gotten a winter chest with a false bottom and a smile she hated being good at.

Though her objective overview still listed Goal 2 as undisclosed, Viria closed the diary and suspected she no longer needed the disclosure.

"All right," she said quietly, to a girl she was wearing and would likely never meet.

"If there is no move on this board that works, let's see what we can do about changing the board itself."

The knock came once she'd finished putting the diary back.

"Um. My lady?" The door opened a careful third of the way, and a maid leaned through the gap. She was young, dark-haired, and her uniform very slightly askew.

"Your mom said to tell you it's dinnertime." Viria went still. Four days of attendants had calibrated her ear precisely. The staff of this palace said Her Majesty requests your presence, said my lady like a punctuation mark, moved like water, and would sooner have died than lean through a partially opened door. This one was fidgeting with her own sleeve, had said your mom, and was watching Viria's face with the particular held-breath alertness of someone waiting to find out whether she'd gotten it wrong again.

Viria ran Identify before she'd finished deciding to. IDENTIFICATION ACTIVE: Carmine Race: Human (Glamoured) Contestant: Ruby (Team Jewel) If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Viria recalled Ren's voice from two weeks ago: Ruby, Crystal, Jett, and Citrina. They're trustworthy, and they honor exchanges. Viria kept her face perfectly composed, which two families across two worlds had trained her to do, and rose with Lyriel's best unhurried grace.

"Thank you, Carmine. Tell her I'll head there now." The maid bobbed something that wanted to be a curtsy, visibly relieved, and turned to go. Viria passed her in the doorway, close enough that the words needed almost no breath at all.

"Let's talk more tonight, Ruby." She did not stop to watch the maid's entire spine go rigid. She was a princess, and princesses did not loiter. But she smiled the whole way down the corridor. And for once, she did not hate being good at it.

The talk, after dinner, took less time than either of them expected. Ruby, once she'd stopped being terrified, turned out to be exactly what Ren had advertised: earnest, quick, and honest to a degree that would have gotten her eaten alive in Duskwood Hall. Her team had scattered across the world upon waking. Through sheer coincidence, she had learned that Citrina was somewhere in the merchant quarter of the capital of the Arcturia Kingdom, but knew nothing else.

Her host was a palace maid, which meant access to every corridor and every rumor in the building, and no power to act on any of it. Viria's host could act on nearly anything, and could not be seen doing most of it.

"So I hear things and you do things," Ruby said, cross-legged on the floor of the royal bedchamber in flagrant violation of at least nine protocols, working through the plate of dinner rolls Viria had smuggled up in a napkin.

"And we help each other find our people. And neither of us tells anyone what the other one is."

"That's the shape of it."

"My team honors its deals." Ruby stuck out her hand, small and chapped from four days of actual scrubbing.

"Partners?" Viria shook it.

"Partners."

Three floors above the royal wing and a world away in every respect that mattered, Yukito spent his fourth evening as Crown Prince Aster of the Arcturia Kingdom doing what he had done every evening since waking: reading his own family like an enemy position. The broad shape had taken less than a day to learn, and would take considerably longer to survive: He was the crown prince and had an older sister as well as a younger brother. On paper, this was a family. In practice, it was a siege.

Natania was twenty years old, brilliant, and legally nothing. Arcturian succession ran through sons, which Yukito had confirmed the statute himself in the Royal Library, hoping to find it misquoted, and so the sharpest political mind in the palace had spent her whole life watching a throne she could run better than anyone pass across her toward a brother she had decided to unmake. She was never impolite, nor was she ever anything traceable.

She simply hosted the right dinners, funded the right charities, expressed the right gentle concerns about her dear brother's readiness into the right ears, and the nobility, one house at a time, quietly reorganized itself around her and around the brother she'd chosen as her puppet: Ethan. Ethan was eleven, and seemed to hate his older brother with all his prepubescent fury.

"You'll ruin it," Aster's little brother had hissed just that afternoon, in the portrait corridor, with no witnesses. Ethan was always careful about witnesses, which told Yukito exactly whose coaching that was." Everyone knows it. Nat says the whole court knows it, they just won't say it to your face. You're going to ruin everything and then everyone will finally see."

Yukito had looked at the eleven-year-old repeating a script written by someone who loved neither of them, and had felt his patience, which had been worn thin by four days of the constant nagging, barely hold, because the anger underneath the boy's rehearsed contempt was real, even if it was the manufactured kind.

And Yukito knew better than most what it felt like to be seen as something someone else had decided you were. He took a deep breath, refusing to let Natania get exactly what she wanted, or give her puppet get he thought he wanted.

"Okay," he'd said, and walked on, and heard the frustrated silence behind him of a boy whose script had no page for that.

The situation of his position, when he finally assembled enough of it, was elegant and ugly. He wrote it out that night in his childhood cipher, the one he'd invented as a kid for messages no one else needed to read, resurrected now for exactly its intended purpose: in a hand that would look, to any spy, like a bored prince's doodling: Crown requires two of three. Blood: next in line — held. Nobility: majority support — not held. Natania's column grows monthly. Commons: majority support — held, eroding.

Her charities are aimed at my base, not her allies. She is not courting the nobles anymore. She is spending their money to buy my people. That was the part that had genuinely impressed him, once he'd seen it. Natania had already won her column and was now methodically emptying his. She did not need to make the court love Ethan, all she needed to do was make the commons stop favoring Aster, and grief and grain prices would do the rest.

The worst part was that he could do almost nothing about it, because the law required all royals to graduate from the academy. The academy's session began in three days, Ethan was too young to attend, and Natania had already graduated top of her class two years ago. The palace would be hers, functionally unwatched, for the entire term. So don't fight where she's strong, he wrote, cipher-neat. Fight where she can't reach. The academy is full of heirs.

Every noble house that's drifting to her column has a son or daughter in those halls, and none of them have made up their minds about the people they'll owe favors to in ten years. While she courts the parents. I'll know the children.

He spent the remaining days in the Royal Library with the peerage rolls, building the map: nine margravates, their houses, their heirs, and any point of leverage that could be used in his favor: House Kite and their recent succession scandal, House Kestrel and their lout of a son, House Harrier and their patriarch's numerous illegitimate children, and so on. On the sixth evening, he stood before the royal family's private teleportation circle and checked his objective overview one final time.

World 3 — Objective Overview Goal 1: Locate all members of your team — Incomplete (0 of 3 located) Goal 2: Complete your host's personal objective — [Undisclosed: will reveal upon discovery] Goal 3: Complete a Gold-rank Adventurer's Guild request as a full team — Incomplete Somewhere out there, three people who would see straight through this borrowed face were wearing borrowed faces of their own, and the academy, the one place the law required him to be, was the largest gathering of important strangers in the kingdom.

If he were the system, Yukito thought, that was exactly where he'd have put them. The circle flared. The palace, the siege, and the sister who was currently winning it folded away, and the crown prince of Arcturia stepped out into the academy's arrival hall three days before term, carrying a cipher notebook, a peerage map, and the first plan he'd ever made for a war where being seen correctly was the battlefield.