Then she scurried after the disappearing guard, caught his hand, and, hardly recognizing herself, pulled him along the corridor, past the house staff’s wing to the schoolroom, which had a door that could lock and a thick, soft rug.

She knelt, pulling him down beside her. He was surprised. “Are you sure?”

She reached for his hand and put it inside her robe, moving it against her breast, a technique that had worked on everyone before him. It worked this time too, but this time was different, because his hand was shaking and his breath was catching. Something about the way he sounded, or smelled, or just was as he touched her, excited her. She understood now what some of her friends meant when they talked about sex as if it was something they badly wanted. She had wondered if they were lying, to make everyone else envious. She still suspected some of them were lying. But she understood the wanting now.

Afterward, they whispered to each other about doing it again sometime soon, and Lovisa meant it. She returned to her bedroom, tired, then unable to sleep, nagged by an unsettled feeling she tried to ignore. She tossed and turned. Then she sat up, remembering the tea she needed to drink to guard against pregnancy.

Slipping out of her room again, she carried a tea sachet from her schoolbag downstairs to the kitchen. The kitchen in the middle of the night always seemed three times bigger than it did during the day, and it was all her domain. She could raid the pantry, light a fire in the massive oven and sit as close to it as she wanted, think and plan in solitude. She was queen.

Queen, she thought, remembering the death of the Queen of Monsea, and all the questions she’d had before she’d come home, gotten distracted, and had sex with one of her parents’ guards. She still didn’t know the guard’s name. Was that normal? Was it fair to him? What was wrong with her? Focus.

Quietly, Lovisa boiled water, set her sachet to steep, then sipped the odd, bitter tea, wondering why doing so didn’t remove her worries about the guard. She couldn’t stop replaying what they’d done. His small kindnesses, his excitements. The questions he’d kept asking. Was she comfortable? Was she cold? Did this feel good? Were his hands too rough? No. They hadn’t been too rough, but his mouth had grown rough, a mix of tender and rough all at once that had made her dizzy with want.

Something moved in a distant corner. Lovisa nearly jumped out of her skin before realizing that it must be the fox again. Except that she’d closed the fox in the attic.

I’m so tired, I’m hallucinating and scaring myself. I need to go to bed.