She was learning so much in this new world. Why didn’t the Empress send all her heirs away to learn these sorts of things? While she had been at court, certainly Atlanta had learned about other people, other races, and seen some of them at court ceremonies, but there was something vastly different about living with them, interacting with them, eating with them.

Every conversation showed her something new, revealed something that she’d never thought about, hadn’t known a week ago—at least she thought it might have been a week, because there was no way of knowing how long she had been inside the crate, and the torn-away tag meant there was no date indicating when it had been dispatched. It was a little embarrassing to feel so naïve on a daily basis, but the others had only gently teased her about it and continued calling her Princess for her court origins, because inevitably, when some new task presented itself, she was prone to hesitation, as though thinking that a servant would appear and do that for her.

In truth, that was one of the oddest things. She could drop a garment in her room and no one tidied it away. She asked the ship why it did not provide maid service and it had said Niko had directed it not to make servitors for the occupants.

She did appreciate her clothing, tunics and leggings from a silky purple and blue material that was recycled from elsewhere—she didn’t care what, it was just so good to have clothes again. No one in court would have gone naked under the direst of situations, and the casualness with which the crew accepted nudity was only one more unsettling thing.

If she had been a different sort of personality, she might have shrunk under this treatment, withered for lack of nurturing. But something in Atlanta enjoyed this rough and tumble, the banter and the careless, affectionate insults. It felt like what she had always imagined having a family for all of her life would have been like—rather than those first formative years, which she barely remembered.

The pair that had raised her after she’d been chosen as Imperial Heir, who she’d been taught to call Mama and Papa, had been restrained and distant presences. When she had come of age, she had tried to seek out her real parents, only to find that they had died in an accident, returning from delivering her. She did not push further on the circumstances. Part of her knew it must have been the Empress’s agents making sure she would never be compromised by them.