“Don’t lie. I know it wasn’t.” Frances stared at the hedge as though it were a vista overlooking the Royal City and not clumps of leaves in darkness—as though she could see past the castle hill straight to the city limits, the new mills and factories sloshing and burping out paper and logs. “And I know you kept Sir Yunnum’s regiment together. That kid is a mess.”

“That kid” had five years on the princess, but he was younger than Scratch and had already been leading his own regiment for six months. Then again, his father was some sort of duke. So what if he couldn’t fight his way out of a box of kittens? In the eyes of the kingdom, he was born to be great.

Scratch hated that kid.

“Thanks.” She coughed into her hand. “Thanks for noticing, I mean.”

Frances waved her away. “Oh, it’s not about noticing. Everyone noticed.”

“Everyone?”

“Sure. All the regiment commanders, obviously. You presenting them the plan all at once, that was clever. That way Yunnum couldn’t take credit.”

“Thanks.”

“Stop thanking me. And then Sir Onbriars told Lord High Commander Elwyn and he told the king.”

“He told the king?”

She had walked into the feast hoping—that blasted hope—that King Ingomar knew what she had done. That she, a command-less commander, was the strategist who had snatched the land he had so cavalierly claimed before even a whisper of an attack had been planned. He would have had to know, and if he knew he would have had to honor such an asset with a command. He hadn’t. Instead, he had congratulated Elwyn and sat back down and tucked into his ham and potatoes, not even acknowledging the great gift of Scratch, just a table away, slowly asphyxiating under lungfuls of disappointment and an overzealous waistband.

“But if he knew that I had planned the octagon . . .”

Frances faced her. The princess had a feral sort of beauty, more woodland imp than fairy, with short, stubby eyelashes and brows that arched mischievously, even through an otherwise blank expression.

“Come, now. You had to know this would happen.”

“I had to know what?”

There was pity on Frances’s face, strange and discomfiting, and Scratch remembered with startling clarity that she was talking to a princess. Moreover, she was freshly aware of her own body, that of a shrimpy, blue-veined Tangled Lakes girl. She was entirely out of her depth.

“You had to know,” said Frances, voice soft with gentle patience, “that he would never give you a command.”

She blinked. The leaves in the hedge began to form swirling pictures, the darkness revealing wavering images of menacing faces, garish, tonsil-bearing laughter, her mother’s raised hand. She blinked and blinked and they changed, kaleidoscopic mockery and dirt-dizzy fallen soldiers, mouths biting the wet, maggoty earth.

Oh. She was high.