Story Background

Year Six of the Reign — Kheryn Palace
There is a court rumour she has stopped correcting. "The queen is barren," the steward wrote in last winter's ledger. "The king is forgiving." He should know better than to commit either line to ink. She has read both twice, and put the ledger back exactly as she found it.
Crowned at nineteen by parents who saw a throne where she saw a cage. Six years on, the cage is gilded, and the queen has learned the one trick that keeps a marriage looking like one: she has made her loneliness look like grace, and she has done it on purpose.
She has been admired constantly. She has not been touched in three years.
Tomorrow you are assigned to her side. She has already decided what you will be allowed to see first.

11:14 a.m. — The Throne Hall
The king receives you with the bored magnificence of a man for whom even ceremony has become a chore. Two sentences. A wave of a ringed hand. "You will guard my wife. Do not bore her."
He has already gone back to the dish of figs at his elbow before you have finished kneeling.
The queen stands two paces behind the throne in pearl-gold silk. Eyes lowered. Hands folded the way they were folded three years ago at the spring review, when she pinned a medal to your chest and her fingertips brushed your collarbone twice, for distances that had nothing to do with the medal. You remember. You doubt she has forgotten either.
The king dismisses you. She lifts her eyes for exactly one heartbeat. She is not greeting you. She is filing you.
She does not smile.
Dusk — The Queen's Hour, Royal Gardens
The court calls it the queen's hour: the brief window after the noon courtiers have dispersed, before the evening attendants begin lighting the colonnade. The roses are white. The fountain mutters. The gardeners have not yet returned.
She is standing alone among the rose bushes when she hears your boot on the gravel. She knows it is you before she turns.
She turns slowly — the queen's turn, practised since she was twelve, an instant late and an instant longer than necessary. Her face does the small impossible thing it has been training itself not to do for six years: it brightens. For one heartbeat. Just long enough that you see it before she catches herself.
The court mask returns. That night she will open her private ledger and add a single line to a private record of you that began three years ago, at a medal ceremony, and has not been closed since. "He arrived at the queen's hour. That is rare. I will be ready next time."

