Chapter 325: Can We Keep Her? Please, Father.
There are plans that are brilliant, and there are plans that are terrible, and there are plans that are both at the same time.
Sneaking a six-year-old into the Fae palace required three things: a servant’s entrance, a distraction, and the absolute conviction that rules were guidelines written by people who lacked imagination.
The girl followed without speaking. She held Tristan’s hand the way a drowning person holds a rope: with her entire body weight committed to the grip and zero faith that the rope would hold. He held back just as tight, because somewhere between the rock and the corridor, his ten-year-old brain had made a decision that his ten-year-old mouth had yet to announce.
He was keeping her.
He pulled her into his cousin’s chambers, which were empty because Seraphina was at her lessons and would remain there until the afternoon bell. The wardrobe was enormous, built for a girl three years older and several inches taller than the child standing in the middle of the room leaving muddy footprints on marble.
Tristan opened the wardrobe and pulled out a dress. He held it against the girl, measured the discrepancy, and acknowledged that the garment could have housed two of her with room for a third.
"Perfect fit," he said, handing it to her.
She looked at the dress. Then at him. Then at the dress again. She put it on over her torn one, because she was six and assumed that was the goal. The fabric pooled around her shoes in a puddle of silk and she stood in the center of it, a small face floating above a very large dress, and Tristan decided this was acceptable.
"You look great," Lucian confirmed.
She almost smiled. Almost.
"Food," Tristan announced. "Lucian, kitchen. Operation: Feed the Girl."
The palace kitchen was staffed by fourteen people, guarded by two posted sentries, and operated under the direct authority of a head cook named Laurel who had once made the King of All Fae apologize for entering her kitchen without knocking.
Tristan’s plan was to walk in, take food, and walk out.
"This is a terrible plan," Lucian whispered as they approached the service entrance.
"All great plans look terrible at the beginning."
"This one looks terrible at every stage."
They entered through the bread pantry because the bread pantry was adjacent to the cold storage and the cold storage had cheese, and Tristan had determined through extensive research that cheese was the most portable food group.
He made it four steps before his boot caught a stack of copper pans that had been left on the floor by a kitchen assistant who would later be reassigned to root vegetable duty for the remainder of the season.
The crash was spectacular. Eleven pans hit the stone floor in rapid succession, each one producing a sound so loud and so unique that the cumulative effect was less "kitchen accident" and more "musical performance by a man who hated music."
Lucian dove behind a barrel.
Tristan, who had never once in his life hidden from a consequence, stood in the center of the pantry surrounded by pans and smiled at the three kitchen staff who appeared in the doorway.
"I was looking for cheese."
"Your Highness." The nearest cook looked at the pans. Then at Tristan. Then at the barrel where Lucian’s elbow was visible. "The cheese is in the cold storage. Where it has always been. Where it was yesterday when you also stole cheese."
"I was unaware that princes could steal from their own kitchens."
"Your father has a policy, Your Highness."
"My father has many policies. I find them aspirational."
Lucian’s face appeared above the barrel. "Can we also have bread?"
The cook’s expression suggested she was reconsidering her career.
They escaped with cheese, bread, a bowl of stew that Tristan had argued was medicinal, and three apples that Lucian pocketed.
The girl was where they had left her, sitting on the floor of Seraphina’s chambers in a dress that could have doubled as a tent. She looked at the food. Her eyes went wide.
"It is yours," Tristan said, sitting cross-legged in front of her. He placed a piece of bread in her hands. "Eat."
She ate. She ate with the silent, focused intensity of a body that had been empty for longer than a six-year-old should ever be empty, and both boys sat beside her and said nothing, because the sound of a hungry child eating was a sound that required silence and respect.
Tristan watched her. Lucian watched Tristan. A decision was forming behind Tristan’s green eyes that Lucian recognized, because he had seen that look before, on the day Tristan found a three-legged fox in the woods and carried it home.
The fox had lived in the palace for two years.
The door opened.
King Atlas Aelindor, sovereign of the Fae realm, stood in the entrance to his niece’s chambers and surveyed the following scene: his son, cross-legged on the marble floor; the wolf boy, crouched beside him with an apple core in his hand; and a small, white-haired girl in his niece’s dress, holding a piece of bread, staring up at the Fae King with the expression of a rabbit who had just met a hawk and was running the mathematics on its survival.
Atlas’s gaze moved from child to child. His assessment was thorough.
"Father," Tristan said, rising. "Before you say anything. We will walk her, water her, and feed her. We will clean up after her. She will be zero trouble. I am taking full responsibility."
Lucian nodded vigorously. "We already fed her."
The King of All Fae pinched the bridge of his nose.
His eyes dropped to the glowing crescent on the girl’s wrist. His assessment recalibrated with the speed of a ruler who had spent thirty years reading people and could read a child’s history in a single mark on her skin. That brand came from kingdoms to the east, across two borders and a mountain range. She was very far from where she had been kept.
"You are far from where you came from, child."
Her pink eyes went wide. The bread trembled in her fingers, and her entire body contracted as if preparing to be struck.
"Where are your parents?" Atlas asked, his voice carrying a gentleness that Tristan heard from his father only when the situation was worse than it appeared.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "I have no parents."
The words came out small and practiced.
Atlas’s jaw tightened by one degree. "What is your name, child?"
"I have no name."
The answer landed on the room and the room absorbed it the way stone absorbs rain: completely, without giving any indication of what was happening underneath.
Unnamed slave children were a practice limited to kingdoms whose policies towards orphaned Fae fell below every standard Atlas’s court recognized. The fact that she was here, alone, branded, unnamed, and six years old, told a story he could read without her speaking another word.
"Her name is River," Tristan said, immediately and with absolute certainty, as if the question had been settled long before his father asked it. "That is where we found her. On a rock by the river."
The girl looked at Tristan. Then at the floor. Then back at Tristan.
"River," she repeated. The word came out hesitant, tasting it, testing whether it would be taken back. When it stayed, when Tristan grinned at her and Lucian gave an enthusiastic thumbs up, something shifted behind her pink eyes.
She said it again, quieter, to herself. "River."
Tristan made a face at Lucian. The face was deliberately, catastrophically stupid, involving both eyes crossed and his tongue extended at an angle that defied anatomy. Lucian responded by inflating his cheeks and making a sound that could only be described as a deflating animal.
River laughed.
The sound was so small and so unexpected that every person in the room went still. A hiccup of a laugh, buried behind the bread she was holding to her face, her pink eyes bright above the crust for one unguarded second before the guard came back down and the laugh was gone.
But it had happened. And Tristan had heard it. And the look on his face said he intended to spend the rest of his life making it happen again.
He turned to his father with green eyes so wide and so earnest that they could have been registered as weapons.
"Can we keep her? Please, Father."
Comments