I should tell you how it started.

Six years ago I was twenty-three and newly graduated from the Royal Botanical Institute in Valdenne City, which was where the kingdom sent its best students in applied science and where, that summer, the Crown Prince had visited as part of a regional initiative.

I had been unimpressed by royalty before I met him.

I was a scholarship student from the northern provinces, the daughter of a pharmacist father and a schoolteacher mother who had worked two jobs between them to supplement what the scholarship didn't cover. I had opinions about the hereditary accumulation of wealth and power. I had read the relevant political theory.

Then Aric Valdenne walked through the institute's greenhouse with three security men flanking him, looked at my specimen charts on the wall, and asked a question that had nothing performative in it — a real question, the kind that required knowing something about plant taxonomy to ask.

"Your root cross-sections," he said. "The secondary growth pattern here is atypical. What's the substrate?"

I told him.

He asked a follow-up.

I told him that too.

We talked for twenty minutes about mycorrhizal networks while his security team stood at the perimeter looking professionally unhappy about the duration.

He came back the next day.

And the day after.

And the visit that was supposed to be three days became two weeks.

I won't pretend I didn't know what I was doing. I knew. I was a scholarship girl from the north with political opinions, falling for a man who represented everything I'd been trained to critique, and I did it anyway because the specific person had nothing to do with the theory.

We had four months. Secret ones — not shameful, just private. The kind that exist in the space between what's possible and what's sanctioned.

Then his engagement was announced.

Not to me.

To Lady Serana Croft, of the southern nobility, in an arrangement that had been in negotiation for two years. In the kingdom of Valdenne, Crown Princes married strategically. That was simply the way it was.

He told me himself. Not through a courier, not through the press release. He came to my apartment at midnight and told me, and he looked at me with the expression of a man doing something he had been told was correct and finding it unbearable.

"I don't have a choice," he said.

"I know," I said.

"I'm sorry."

"I know that too," I said.

I didn't cry in front of him. I waited until he was gone.

Two weeks later I did a test in the bathroom of my apartment at five in the morning.

I looked at it for a very long time.

I thought about what happened to commoner women in Valdenne who carried royal children outside of formal arrangement. I thought about what the palace would do with an inconvenient heir. I thought about Regent Cassius Vorn, who had managed the kingdom's affairs when Aric's father was ill and who had a reputation for solving inconvenient things quietly.

I packed a bag.

I left.

I raised my son in Harren, three hours north, in a house at the edge of the forest, and I told myself it was the right thing.

Standing at the door in the late-autumn morning with two black cars at the end of my lane, I was less certain than I'd ever been.

I opened the door anyway.