A battle like that was a rare enough sight that a big crowd gathered, and the oddsmakers were trying their hardest to get people to place bets. Radha and I were out there with them, with Connor holding both our hands, until the fight entered its final stages and Radha hurried us inside so the little boy would not be too badly scarred by the carnage.

“Is the squid going to win?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “But we have to hurry to listen to the queen’s speech.”

I hoisted Connor up onto my shoulders and roared around the living room until he got distracted from the high-pitched noises coming from the sky.

“March forward, tyrannosaur,” he said, drumming on my scalp with his little fists.

“I’m not a T. rex,” I said, making my hands into three-clawed paws. “Are you blind? I’m clearly an allosaurus.”

“March, allosaurus,” he said, his voice high with delight.

Ash smiled at the sound of it. Niv was frowning over something in the newspaper.

I marched in slow circles of the kitchen, roaring occasionally. On the radio, commentators were filling the dead air until the Palace broadcast began. Virtually unprecedented, they said, and The impossible task of saying something that will make both sides happy, or at the very least not make either side any angrier.

“She doesn’t make many speeches. How come?” Connor asked.

“She’s a very busy woman,” Radha said, and her eyes flitted to the little shrine in the corner. Small paintings of the gods, Radha’s personal pantheon of chosen protectors: the bone-white royal tyrannosaur, and the queen herself at the center of it. “She’s busy working to keep us all safe.”

“Is that true?” he asked me, sounding skeptical. Niv and Ash avoided eye contact.

“Of course,” I said.

You have to kind of lie to kids. The truth is too messy, too ugly, too confusing. You have to give them this little bubble, this all-too-short time when they believe the world is okay. And my lie made Radha smile. She knew about my time in the Palace, but I’d never told her anything about the queen herself and she was too in awe of the woman to even ask.

The talking heads on the radio cut out, and a blare of trumpets announced a Palace priority message. Usually that meant some kind of emergency—a wildfire, or kraken lord attack. Sometimes it meant that on-street parking would be free for a remembrance or royal birthday. But this time, instead of the mellow spokeswoman who normally made those announcements, a clipped and proper male voice simply said:

Ladies and gentlemen, Her Majesty, Queen Carmen.