“Why you did it. I mean, Orlanko was going to take over. So what? You’d still get to be queen, even if you didn’t actually do anything.”

“He would have married me off to some Borelgai prince and ruled Vordan himself. We got a taste of what that would have been like. Concordat agents at every window, bodies in the river every morning, and anyone who objects gets hauled off to the Vendre or worse. And he was selling the country to the Borels and the Sworn Church, piece by piece. I couldn’t just stand by and let it happen.”

“I can think of worse fates,” Andy said. “Swanning about the palace eating off silver plates while other people do the work of running everything. Having to roll with some nasty foreigner from time to time doesn’t seem like too high a price, and as for the rest of it . . . what makes it your responsibility?”

“I . . .” Raesinia paused. “It has to be my responsibility. That’s what kings and queens are for, to take care of their people.”

“Just because you were born to the wrong family, the fate of the whole kingdom is your problem?”

“More or less,” Raesinia said. “That’s just the way it is.”

“Color me glad I wasn’t born royal, then.”

Raesinia shrugged. She couldn’t explain, not completely—her ageless state meant that Orlanko would have had to eliminate her sooner or later, presumably by announcing her “death” and shipping her off to the dungeons of Elysium.

But the truth was that she’d never really considered giving in. Raesinia frowned, trying to sort her feelings into something that would make sense. The luxury of palace life had never mattered to her, but that was because she’d grown up with it as the default. How can I explain what that was like?

She gave up. There was another, truer answer in any event.

“I hate him,” she said. “Orlanko. For what he did to me, for the way he treated my father. I couldn’t just lie back, not if it meant letting him win.”

“Ah.” Andy smiled and raised her glass in salute. “Fair enough. If you’d been a Leatherback, I think we’d have made you into a proper scrapper in no time.”

“I’m sure.” Raesinia raised her own glass and took a sip. “Maybe I went looking for revolution in the wrong place.”

Andy laughed, then froze and set her own glass down. A young man in the worn linens of a common laborer approached their table, heedless of the look he drew from the proprietor.

“Hello, ladies,” he said. “Where might you be headed?”

“Somewhere there’s willows,” Raesinia said.

He nodded, as if this answer made sense. “Not going my way, then.” As he turned away, his hand passed over the table, and a folded scrap of paper fell from his sleeve. “Best of luck!”