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It was impossible not to consider that a win.

Though it wasn’t until he turned on his heel and started marching off toward the palace offices that she could admit that fencing with a man who might as well be a slab of granite had the benefit of keeping her mind off all the rest of the things she wasn’t thinking about, or allowing herself to feel.

Vesuvius was dead. She waited for that to land in her. For it to explode out of that terrible heaviness in her chest and take her down with it—but it didn’t. It couldn’t.

Not only because she could not believe it. But because she understood that she could not show that kind of weakness. Not now. Not ever.

She followed Saviero into what was, for all intents and purposes, a conference room. Though because this was the palace, everyone referred to it as the salon. This particular salon was larger than many others littered about the palace and boasted a selection of antique sofas, chairs, and settees placed just so about the room, as if some previous monarch had decreed that if business must be done, it should be done graciously.

Inside, six of the ten members of her brother’s cabinet were already waiting for her, talking in low, troubled tones. There was a silence when she entered, but it did not strike her as being any less troubled. Quite the opposite.

There was a pause, and then they all stood and bowed, deeply. There were respectful murmurs of Your Majesty from all quarters. And then they all rose again, these older men who looked to her like a small sea of accountants and actuaries and were about as entertaining, and fixed their gazes upon her.

Cesca found herself absolutely delighted that she was dressed in so little. And that her hair was piled haphazardly on the top of her head in a multitude of braids. And that she had done her eye makeup with trowels of festive glitter.

If this was true—if she had to take her brother’s place and become Queen of all the things she hated—then she chose to be delighted that she was dressed like a party girl while it was happening.

Something awful and choking and dark seemed to swell deep inside her, but she wrestled it back down.

Of all the people in the world that she least wanted to let see her crack, the six cabinet ministers staring at her from around the salon were high on that list, if not at the top with Saviero himself.

Cesca might not have spent her life steeped in tedious responsibility like her brother. She might not have had her hand ransomed off in marriage as a baby, or sworn off every possible moment of fun once she was of age the way Vesuvius had, but she was still a member of the same family. The same blood. And her mother had always been at pains to tell her that a princess was more than a title. It was a role. Cesca needed to assume that every time she was not alone, or in the presence of trusted friends—and I must warn you, her mother had told her when she was still a girl, even before she’d learned the truth in the form of a picture stolen from a woman she’d considered a friend, there will be precious few of those, I’m afraid, because that’s the nature of the life we lead—she was on stage.

If this was a stage, she was the show. So she tamped down that shaking thing inside her that she was fairly sure was a grief-torn howl and smiled blandly as all her brother’s ministers stared back at her in varying degrees of horror.

This was the way they always looked at her. It was nothing new.

“So it is true,” said one of the ministers. A deeply boring Lianderoan aristocrat whose family had been in service to the crown for time immemorial. “While the kingdom was plunged first into chaos and then into desolation, you were doing what you always do. Making a spectacle of yourself in the bowels of the city.”

“That is how you address your Queen, Lord Frick?” she replied, with a laugh that made more than the man she was looking at flinch. “And yet I am meant to feel shamed that I could not divine current events as they occurred? How curious.”

She was aware of Saviero beside her, standing rigid and emanating that heat she was too aware of, tonight—this morning, she corrected herself—but also something that seemed a lot to her like fury. That, at least, felt normal.

Normal felt like a lifeline.

The only way to deal with this was to jump in and do it, so that was what Cesca did. She glided over to a chair that sat slightly apart from the rest and reminded her of the throne. Then she settled herself in it, flinging out the train of her flowing overgarment to billow about, but also making sure that every minister in the room was aware that she was wearing hot pants. And more, could see the length of her legs from slightly below the hinge of her thigh all the way down to her ankles.

Because she might be the new Queen, but she was never going to let them crush her into something appropriate the way they’d done with Vesuvius. Look where that had led.

Cesca waited to see if they would all descend into group apoplexy, but when they did not—though there were certainly red faces to go around—she inclined her head. She thought she might have to say something, or order them to fill her in on whatever it was they needed her to know, but there was no need.

They all started speaking at once. In aggrieved voices. And she took in absolutely nothing they were saying because it was a whole lot of male voices, creating the sort of cacophony she had learned to tune out years ago.

She looked back across the room to where Saviero was still standing there near the door, and found that he was staring right at her.

And suddenly it was as if there was nothing in the room but the two of them. Except, perhaps, that outrageously blue gaze of his.

It was possible they stayed like that, taking each other’s measure from across a room of angry men, for a lifetime. Possibly two.

Then Saviero shifted position and, somehow, that was enough to silence everyone else.

That was interesting, Cesca thought. He was younger than them all and yet clearly had authority over them. It wasn’t simply that he outranked them. So had she, all her life, and they had always managed to get their cutting remarks in. She wondered how Saviero had managed it, though she also knew that she’d rather cut out her own tongue than ask.

“Let’s view this situation as triage,” he said, his deep voice rolling through the room and filling it. “First and foremost, it is Christmas. There’s a wedding scheduled to take place later this morning and it is my considered opinion that this wedding needs to take place.”

“Are you proposing that I marry Sintia?” Cesca asked crisply. And laughed again. “How shockingly progressive, Saviero. I didn’t think that you, of all people, would be advocating for the first same-sex royal Lianderoan wedding.”

One of the other ministers sighed. “She’s not ready to be Queen,” he said, as if he was addressing the room. Or perhaps the nation. “Why are we pretending otherwise?”