The Courtship of Princess Ekaterina

Six months was long enough to learn the particular geometry of a palace hallway, the exact number of steps between the east stairwell and the breakfast room, the precise angle at which Katia needed to lock her left brace so it wouldn't catch on the antique runners Queen Anne refused to replace. Six months was long enough to relearn how to stand without flinching, how to laugh at a joke without checking the exits first, how to sleep through most nights without waking at three in the morning with her heart going like a hammer against her ribs. Six months, apparently, was not long enough to teach her how to have an ordinary conversation with Edward Blackthorne.

She proved that theory correct at half past eight that morning, standing in the corridor outside Dr. Carlisle Connor's clinic wing with her cane in one hand and her tablet in the other, when Edward rounded the corner in his gray Sovereign Guard uniform and stopped exactly four feet away from her, which she had noticed was the distance he maintained now, close enough to be professional, far enough to be nothing at all.

"Your Highness," he said. "Dr. Connor is expecting you at nine."

"I know when my own appointments are, Commander."

"Of course." He glanced at the tablet in her hand instead of her face. "I'll have a car brought around after, if you'd rather not walk back."

"I can walk."

"I know you can." A short pause, the kind that used to be filled with something warmer before Italy, before the hospital room where she'd woken up to machines and morphine and his hand gripping hers like he thought she might slip through his fingers if he let go. "I only meant it's raining."

She looked past him toward the window at the end of the hall, where a gray drizzle had, in fact, started to streak the glass, and felt the small, familiar defeat of being right about nothing. "Fine. The car."

"I'll tell the detail." He gave her the smallest nod, the kind he might have given a visiting dignitary, and continued down the corridor without another word, his boots quiet and even on the runner, and Katia stood there for a full ten seconds after he'd disappeared around the corner, furious at herself for the way her chest still tightened at the sight of him, furious at him for making it so easy to keep the distance, furious at the entire arrangement that had them orbiting each other like two magnets flipped the wrong way around.

Dr. Connor's exam went the way it always went now, methodical and encouraging in the particular manner of a man who had rebuilt her leg from the inside out and refused to let her forget how far she'd come. He checked the alignment of her braces, made a note about the new resistance settings, asked about pain levels on a scale she'd long since stopped answering honestly because the honest number worried him more than she wanted.

"You're stronger than you were at the start of the year," he said, snapping his case shut. "Your gait's more even. Another few months and we can talk about reducing the brace on the left side."

"You say that every few months."

"And every few months, it gets a little truer." He studied her over his glasses, the kind of look he probably gave every patient who tried too hard to seem fine. "How's everything else?"

"Everything else is thriving," she said, and did not elaborate, and he did not push, because Dr. Carlisle Connor had learned a long time ago which of her wounds could be measured with a caliper and which ones couldn't.

She found Jania and Jacen waiting for her in the small sitting room off the east gallery when she came back from the clinic, the two of them huddled over a shared tablet with the particular conspiratorial hunch of children who had absolutely not been discussing anything they shouldn't have.

"You're both terrible liars," Katia said, lowering herself into the armchair across from them and setting her cane against the side table. "We weren't lying," Jania said, snapping the tablet shut anyway. "We were talking about you and Edward."

"There's no me and Edward."

"That's the problem," Jacen said, with the flat, put-upon certainty of a ten-year-old delivering unwelcome news. "You used to at least argue with him properly. Now you just say 'Commander' and 'Your Highness' at each other like you're reading off cue cards."

"We are being professional."

"You're being boring," Jania corrected. "Mother says the two of you walk into a room like you're carrying separate weather systems. Grandmother thinks it's because you're both too stubborn to admit you miss each other. I think it's because you're both idiots."

"Thank you for that assessment."

"You're welcome." Jania folded her arms, entirely unbothered by the look Katia gave her. "Jacen has a theory too."

"I don't need to hear Jacen's theory."

"My theory," Jacen said, undeterred, "is that if you two got locked in a closet together for like an hour, you'd either kiss or kill each other, and either way it would fix the problem."

"That is not a theory, that is a threat to the palace's insurance policy."

Their laughter followed her out of the room, and she was still smiling despite herself when she found Arthur sitting cross-legged in the hallway outside the nursery, deeply absorbed in arranging a row of small plastic soldiers along the edge of the carpet, each one facing a different direction as though guarding some invisible perimeter only he could see.

"Hello, trouble," she said, easing herself down onto the bench across from him because the floor, these days, was an ambition better left for good days.

Arthur looked up at her with the particular gravity of a five-year-old who had clearly been thinking about something important for some time. "Edward needs to kiss you," he announced.

Katia blinked. "Excuse me?"

"He needs to kiss you," Arthur repeated, as though she might be slow rather than merely startled. "Jania says he's sad. You're sad too. Everyone is sad. If he kissed you, everybody would stop being sad."

"It's a little more complicated than that, sweetheart."

"No, it isn't." He knocked over one of his plastic soldiers and righted it again with the brisk efficiency of a field commander. "Mama kisses Papa when Papa's grumpy and then Papa isn't grumpy anymore. It works every time."

"Papa and Mama have been married a long time."

"So?" "So it's different."

Arthur considered this with visible skepticism, the kind that suggested he found the entire adult world's approach to romance deeply inefficient, and returned to his soldiers without further comment, which Katia had learned was his version of agreeing to disagree. She sat there a moment longer, watching him line up his tiny army against an enemy that existed only in his imagination, and thought, not for the first time, that a four-year-old's grasp of the situation was uncomfortably close to correct.

The message reached Edward two floors down and on the other side of the palace, in the cramped operations office at Sovereign Guard headquarters where he'd spent the better part of the morning reviewing patrol rotations with the particular grim focus of a man who preferred paperwork to whatever thoughts tended to surface when his hands weren't busy. His deputy, a broad-shouldered man named Reyes who had served under him for three years and had learned not to editorialize when he could avoid it, set a folder on the desk without comment and stood there a beat too long.

"What," Edward said, not looking up.

"Intelligence flag came through this morning. Thought you'd want it before the afternoon briefing instead of during it."

Edward flipped the folder open. It was a short report, three paragraphs and a photocopied registry document, the kind of thing that would have been entirely unremarkable if the name on the registry document hadn't been the one that made his jaw go tight the moment he read it.

Frederick Colonna had filed for a legal name change eleven weeks earlier, in a jurisdiction slow enough in its records processing that the confirmation had only just cleared. The new name, printed in flat administrative type with no fanfare and no apparent understanding of what it meant to the man reading it, was Frederick Blackthorne.

"He can't do that," Edward said.

"Apparently he can. It's a public registry filing. Perfectly legal, far as the paperwork's concerned." Reyes shifted his weight. "I know it's not exactly a tactical development. But given the history, I figured you'd rather hear it from me than see it flagged in someone else's report."

Edward read the document again, slower this time, as though a second reading might reveal some clerical error, some other man who happened to share a father and a birth certificate and nothing else. There wasn't one. Frederick had taken the name deliberately, and taken it publicly, and Edward understood exactly what kind of message that was meant to send, because he'd spent his entire adult life trying to distance himself from that same name and the blood that came with it, and his half-brother had just walked up and reclaimed it with the calm, deliberate cruelty of a man setting a trap he intended to enjoy watching close.

"Anything else attached to the filing? Address, employer, anything useful?"

"Nothing. Registered agent's a law firm out of a jurisdiction that doesn't answer inquiries from foreign security services without six weeks of paperwork first." Reyes hesitated. "You want me to loop in the Director?"

"I'll tell William myself." Edward closed the folder. "Keep this out of the general briefing for now. I don't want it circulating until I've decided how much of it needs to reach the family."

"Copy that." Reyes lingered another moment at the door, the way he did when he had one more thing to say and wasn't sure the room wanted to hear it. "For what it's worth, Commander, taking your name doesn't make him you."

"I know that."

"Didn't look like you knew it, just now."

Edward didn't answer, and Reyes, wisely, let the door close behind him without pushing further.

Alone, Edward sat with the folder shut in front of him and let himself feel, for exactly as long as he allowed himself these days, the particular cold that came with being reminded of what he carried in his own last name. Blackthorne had never been a name he chose. It had been assigned to him at birth by a father he barely remembered and had spent the rest of his life trying to outrun through service, through discipline, through the slow careful construction of a version of himself worth more than the blood in his veins. And now Frederick, the half-brother who'd built an entire criminal career out of the worst of that same blood, had picked the name up and put it on like armor, as though daring Edward to explain to the woman he loved exactly what family she'd be marrying into if he ever worked up the courage to ask. He thought of Katia in the corridor that morning, the careful four feet of distance he'd kept between them, the way she'd looked at him like she was waiting for something he refused to give her. He'd told himself for six months that the distance was a kindness, that a woman who'd survived what she survived didn't need to be tethered to a man whose own family tree produced monsters with alarming regularity. Looking at the folder in front of him now, he told himself the same thing again, and found, for the first time, that the words felt thinner than they had before.

He put the folder in the locked drawer of his desk, the one reserved for things that needed to stay contained until he decided otherwise, and went back to the patrol rotations, because that, at least, was a problem with a clean and knowable shape.

Down the hall and up two flights, in the small sitting room off the east gallery, Jania had reopened the tablet the moment Katia was out of earshot and turned it toward her brother with the triumphant look of someone unveiling a masterpiece.

"I've been thinking," she said.

"That's usually when things go wrong," Jacen said, but he leaned in anyway.

"If the grown-ups won't fix it, we will." She tapped the screen, where a document titled nothing in particular sat mostly blank except for a single bullet point reading step one: make them talk. "We're going to need Arthur."

"Arthur already told her Edward needs to kiss her. In the hallway. Just now."

"See," Jania said, with the satisfaction of a general watching her scouting report confirmed, "Arthur's already ahead of us."

Neither of them noticed Queen Anne pause in the gallery doorway behind them, drawn by the sound of their scheming, or the small, private smile that crossed her face before she turned and walked on, already thinking, in her own quiet and considerably more sophisticated way, about exactly how much longer she was willing to let her granddaughter and the Commander of her Sovereign Guard go on pretending that four feet of hallway was any kind of distance at all.