Princess Liora had learned, long before she was old enough to resent it, that travel was never just travel.

It was ceremony on horseback. It was theater in motion. It was a moving lesson for the people who watched from roadsides and doorways: this is what the crown looks like when it chooses to pass through your life.

Springville had not been on the list of places she expected to stop long enough to taste. It was too small to matter to most maps, too far from the true arteries of trade. A village like this existed in the space between decisions, surviving on what fell out of the kingdoms’ larger plans. In Clayland’s court, villages like Springville were spoken of in the same breath as bridges and grain stores: useful things, necessary things, things that needed tending when they threatened to rot.

And yet the procession had slowed here. The advance party had made a stage out of its road. Captain Victor had asked for privacy as if privacy could be requested from a place that had no practice with refusing.

Now, as the inn door shut behind her and the room offered its dim quiet, Liora felt the weight of the last hour settle into her bones.

The Havka Inn was built for weary travelers and loud stories. Its beams were thick and smoke-stained. The air carried bread, damp wool, old ale, and the faint tang of river water that seeped into everything near Springville’s banks. Liora had stayed in palaces where the floors shone like polished stone mirrors, where every wall absorbed sound to make the world seem gentler. Here, the building kept every noise. Footsteps echoed. Voices leaked through boards. Somewhere below, a chair scraped hard enough to make her shoulders tense, as if she’d been struck.

Her handmaid, Sella, was already moving. She crossed to the small window, tugged the shutter half closed, then hesitated and opened it again by a finger’s width, as if caught between obedience and curiosity.

“They’re still staring,” Sella murmured.

Liora eased her cloak from her shoulders, and the simple act felt like shedding an identity. Not the princess, she would never fully shed that, but the outward layer of her. The part of her that was meant to look unbothered.

“Let them,” she said. Her voice came out calmer than she felt, practiced by years of needing to sound as though she approved of everything that happened around her. “A visit like this gives them something to talk about.”

Sella glanced back. “And how do you feel about so many eyes on you all the time?”

Liora’s mouth curved faintly. “I’d rather have their ordinary.”

Liora moved to the small table in the corner. It had been cleared of whatever traveler had used it last—maps, maybe, or a half-finished meal—and someone had set a pitcher of water there with two cups, as if hospitality was something that could be proven through objects.

Liora poured herself water and drank. It was cold, sharply so, and she understood at once why the soldiers had asked about the spring. The chill cut through the travel dust in her throat and woke her mind in a way she did not entirely enjoy. Cold water had a way of reminding you that you were tired.

The day had begun before dawn, as most days did when her presence was required on the road. She had been dressed in the half light, hair braided and pinned with care, boots laced tightly enough to keep her posture correct even when her body wanted to sag. Victor had spoken with the lead riders while she pretended not to listen. She had listened anyway, because she always did.

Words mattered on a tour like this. Not the words meant for villagers, but the ones spoken between loyal men. The real directives, the subtle shifts, the questions no one dared to ask within the castle walls.

Here, in Springville, those questions were everywhere.

From below, voices rose. Not loud, not shouting. The inn was full of people trying to sound normal while feeling anything but. Liora could hear the rise and fall of gossip, the way fear disguised itself as curiosity.

Then came a different sound.

Boots on stairs.

The steps were measured, heavy enough to belong to a soldier, but not rushed. Someone who expected the stair to make room for him, someone used to doors opening.

Sella stiffened. Her fingers went to the edge of Liora’s cloak as if she could pull it back into place and restore all the layers again.

Liora set her cup down before it could tremble.

The knock came at the inn room door, firm, not hesitant.

“Your Highness,” Victor’s voice said through the wood, polite and careful. “A moment.”

Liora did not answer right away. She let the silence stretch, not because she intended to punish him, but because she needed a breath to become the princess again.

Then she said, “Enter.”

Victor stepped in without bringing the hallway with him. He moved like a man who could vanish when necessary, which meant he had been trained not only to protect her but to keep her protected even from the awareness of threat. His cloak was dusted from travel. His hair was pulled back in a neat tie that had not loosened once all morning. His eyes were the steady gray of someone who saw too much and taught himself to show none of it.

He bowed, not deeply, but correctly.

“Your room is secure,” he said. “We’ve posted men on the stair and outside the back entry. No one comes up without passing a name.”

Liora nodded once, accepting the report as if it was inevitable. “And the wagons?”

“Secure. The horses watered. The villagers cooperative.”

“Cooperative,” she repeated softly.

Victor’s expression didn’t change, but Liora caught the faintest tightening at his jaw. He didn’t like the word any more than she did. It reduced people into a category: useful or troublesome.

“They’re afraid,” he said instead.

“They should be,” Sella muttered, too quiet for most men to hear.

Victor’s gaze flicked to her, then away again. He did not reprimand her. That alone told Liora how much the day had shifted. Victor was strict with protocol when it mattered. He allowed small disobediences only when larger dangers pressed.

Liora walked to the window, not all the way, but close enough that she could angle her head and see the road below through the narrow gap in the shutters. The town center was still crowded. The Clayland banner snapped once in the wind, then settled.

“They think we came to count their bread,” she said.

Victor stood behind her at a respectful distance. “They’re not wrong to suspect counting.”

Liora’s fingers tightened lightly on the window frame. The wood was rough. She could feel the grooves beneath her skin.

“What are we counting, Victor?” she asked.

The question was gentle. It was not meant to corner him. Victor was loyal, but loyalty did not mean he always knew everything. Often it meant he knew what he needed to do without being told why.

Victor hesitated, just enough to be noticed.

“Road width. Supply capacity. River access. The spring. We’ve had disruptions on the southern routes.”

“That is what we told them,” Liora said.

“Yes.”

“And what did you not tell them?”

Victor’s pause deepened by a breath. Liora could almost see him deciding where the line lay between truth and the sort of truth a princess was allowed to hold.

He chose his words carefully. “You were sent on this circuit for visibility,” he said. “The crown wants the people to remember you exist. It wants rival kingdoms to remember you exist. It wants stability.”

Liora turned from the window and met his eyes fully. “That is not an answer.”

Victor’s gaze did not flinch. “It is the answer I’m permitted to give.”

There it was. A wall, polite and smooth.

Liora looked away first, not out of defeat, but because she had learned long ago that staring down a loyal captain accomplished nothing. Walls didn’t break under a princess’s impatience. They broke under pressure from above.

“Does my father believe Springville is unstable?” she asked, choosing a different angle.

Victor’s lips tightened a fraction. “Your father believes instability spreads faster than plague when it’s ignored.”

“So he sends me to stand in it,” Liora said, and she kept her voice even.

Victor inclined his head, an acknowledgment without apology. “He sends you to be seen.”

Liora felt the familiar pull inside her, part resignation, part fury, part something like grief. She was not a child anymore. She understood her father’s motives more than she wanted to. King Aldric had ruled Clayland long enough to be surrounded by stories about his wisdom. Those stories were not entirely false. He could sense a crack in a wall before anyone else saw it, and he would brace the structure in ways that seemed excessive until the crack widened. He was careful. He was patient. He was, in most ways, a good king.

He was also a man who believed bloodlines were the spine of the world.

And lately, he had been speaking about blood as if it was a prophecy.

“Victor,” she said, and kept her eyes on the table, on the pitcher, on anything but the feeling in her chest. “Why did the advance party arrive yesterday?”

Victor’s pause was smaller this time, as if he had expected her to ask. “To ensure the village was prepared,” he said. “To secure lodging, water, and a perimeter. To keep your arrival orderly.”

“Orderly,” she repeated, and the word felt heavy.

Victor continued, the professional report tone returning. “There are also persons of interest in Springville.”

Sella inhaled sharply, unable to help it.

Liora looked up. “Persons,” she echoed. “Not places.”

Victor’s eyes held hers. “Yes.”

For a moment, Liora did not speak. Her mind moved through the village like a hand skimming a shelf: the innkeeper, frightened and proud; the women at the well; the men standing too straight when soldiers passed; children trying to stare without being seen staring. None of them felt like persons of interest in the way Victor meant it.

Then she remembered the forge.

Not the building, she hadn’t looked long enough to memorize its shape, but the boy standing near it. The soot on his hands. The heat on his skin. The way he did not lower his gaze when the procession passed, not defiant, not reverent, simply present.

And the strange, subtle flicker in her own attention when her eyes found him, as if she had recognized something before her mind could name it.

Liora kept her face composed. “What do you mean by interest?” she asked.

Victor’s expression tightened again. This was the edge of the thing.

“There is a smith here,” he said.

Liora waited. She had learned that if she filled silence, men like Victor would let her do it and say less.

Victor continued. “Skilled. Trained, at least in part, by Northdale craftsmen.”

Liora’s brow lifted despite herself. “Northdale?”

“Yes.”

“That is unusual.”

Victor’s mouth twitched slightly, not quite a smile, more like recognition that she had understood the correct implication. “It is.”

Liora turned back to the window, not to look out but to give herself somewhere to place her eyes.

“And my father cares about a village smith,” she said, keeping the words light so they would not sound like accusation.

Victor did not take the bait. “Your father cares about talent,” he said, and the correction was subtle but firm. “He cares about anyone who can be useful.”

Useful. There was the real word.

Liora thought of her own usefulness. A princess as leverage. A princess as symbol. A princess as reassurance to villagers who had never spoken her name until soldiers put it in their mouths.

She drank another swallow of water to steady herself.

“Does the smith know he’s being watched?” she asked.

Victor’s eyes narrowed slightly, and Liora knew she had asked the wrong question, not forbidden, but sharp.

“He does not,” Victor said. “He knows we’re here.”

Liora let that settle.

A part of her wanted to ask for the smith’s name. Another part of her refused. Names made people real, and once something was real, it could be pulled into a plan.

She didn’t want him pulled.

Not because she cared about him. She barely knew he existed.

But because she could feel her father’s hand in this. The way a tour could be visibility and stability and also something else beneath it.

“Is my father aware I looked at him?” she asked, and kept her tone almost amused, as if the idea was absurd.

Victor’s gaze held hers for a beat too long.

Then he said, “Your father is aware of what he asks his men to observe.”

That was not an answer either.

Liora felt her fatigue deepen. Not the physical fatigue of travel, though that sat in her shoulders like stones, but the deeper exhaustion of being a piece on a board, always moved by someone else’s hand.

Victor shifted slightly, as if concluding the report. “Do you require anything else, Your Highness?”

Liora wanted to say yes. She wanted to say she required a day without banners, without guards, without the feeling that her life was a corridor with doors she was not allowed to open.

Instead, she shook her head. “No.”

Victor hesitated, then said, “There is one additional matter.”

Liora’s gaze sharpened. “Go on.”

“A message has been sent north,” he said. “To your father.”

Liora’s chest tightened. “From here?”

“Yes.”

“By rider?”

“By runner,” Victor corrected. “Faster through the southern wood line than keeping to the road.”

Her mouth went dry. “What did you send?”

Victor’s pause was brief, but it existed.

“Confirmation,” he said. “That you arrived. That the village is compliant. That the environment is as expected.”

As expected. Again, that phrase belonged to a plan.

Liora held Victor’s gaze. “And the smith?”

Victor’s expression stayed still. “My men have observed him.”

“Observed,” she repeated.

“Yes.”

“And?” Liora asked, and her voice remained calm only because she had practiced calm in front of men for years.

Victor’s eyes sharpened. “He is skilled,” he said. “And he is attempting to remain invisible.”

Liora felt a pulse of something that might have been satisfaction, and she hated that she felt it. No one should have to attempt invisibility in their own town.

“Does he succeed?” she asked.

Victor’s mouth tightened slightly. “Not entirely.”

Liora’s fingers curled around the edge of the table. “Because of us.”

Victor did not deny it. “Because attention has been directed.”

Directed. The word made Liora’s skin prickle.

She kept her voice steady. “Why is my father interested in a village smith, Victor?”

Victor’s gaze held hers for a moment, and Liora saw the conflict there. Loyalty to king versus duty to princess. He had sworn to protect her, but protection did not always include full truth.

“I cannot speak for your father’s mind,” Victor said carefully.

“I’m not asking for his mind,” Liora replied. “I’m asking for what you’ve been ordered to do.”

Victor’s jaw tightened. Then he said, “We were told to pass through Springville and to note notable resources.”

Resources.

Not people.

Liora’s stomach turned.

Victor continued, perhaps because once he had begun, it was easier to keep moving. “We were told to note the smith’s ability, his temperament, his training. Whether he could be convinced to work for the crown if required.”

“If required,” Liora echoed, and her voice softened dangerously.

Victor held her gaze. “Yes.”

Liora let the silence stretch. It was not a weapon, not exactly. It was a space she needed to stop herself from saying something she could not take back.

Clayland did not only claim land. It claimed usefulness.

Liora’s voice came out quiet. “When the crown notices skill,” she said, “does it ever leave it where it was found?”

Victor’s eyes did not move. “Rarely,” he said. “Not if it decides the skill belongs elsewhere.”

The simplicity of it landed harder than poetry.

Liora exhaled slowly. “Will you speak to him?” she asked.

Victor’s answer came smoothly, too smoothly. “Not unless instructed.”

“And if instructed?” Liora pressed.

Victor paused. “Then yes.”

Liora’s throat tightened. She did not want her presence to become a curtain men hid behind while they reached for someone else’s life.

“Not while I’m in sight,” she said.

Victor blinked. Just once.

Liora didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to. “I will not be used as a distraction while a boy is cornered by soldiers.”

Victor’s expression held steady, but Liora saw the faintest softening at the corners of his eyes, as if he respected her more for saying it.

“As you command,” he said.

Liora hated that decency had to be given as an order.

Victor shifted toward the door, then paused, his hand on the latch as if he had debated whether to speak again.

“Your Highness,” he said quietly.

Liora looked up.

“There is another reason villages fear tours,” Victor said.

Her heart thudded once, heavy. “Tell me.”

Victor’s gaze flicked briefly toward the shutters, as if the village outside might somehow hear through wood. “Tours change things,” he said. “Sometimes nothing in a village is touched. Sometimes someone is touched.”

Liora felt cold again. “Touched,” she repeated.

Victor nodded once. “A conscription. A requisition. A favor demanded. A talent claimed. It is not always malicious, but it is always permanent.”

Liora swallowed. “And this time?”

Victor did not answer directly. He did not need to.

He bowed and left, shutting the door behind him.

The room felt smaller after he left.

Sella exhaled like she had been holding her breath for the entire conversation. “That’s strange,” she said.

Liora nodded once. “Yes.”

Sella moved to the window again, unable to stop herself. “They’re still down there,” she murmured. “The villagers. Like they’re waiting to see if you’re real.”

“They’re waiting to see if I’m dangerous,” Liora said.

Sella glanced back. “Are you?”

Liora’s mouth tightened. Sella was younger than her, a girl pulled from a minor noble house to serve as handmaid because she had gentle hands and a quiet presence. She had been trained to help dress Liora, to pour tea, to keep secrets. She had not been trained to ask questions with teeth.

Liora considered giving her the reassuring answer. Instead, she said softly, “I don’t know what I am anymore.”

Sella’s face softened. “You’re you.”

Liora almost laughed. She almost cried. Neither would have been useful.

She walked to the small bed and sat, feeling the thin mattress beneath the cover. Not a palace bed. Not even close. It creaked faintly under her weight, as if protesting the idea of royalty.

She pressed her fingers to her temple. The travel had left a dull ache there, like a headache built from too much sun and too many voices.

The door below banged. A gust of noise rose, shouts, laughter, a horse snorting. Then the sound muffled again.

Liora closed her eyes and let herself imagine, for the space of a heartbeat, that she was not here. That she was not on the road. That she was somewhere else entirely, somewhere quiet.

But her mind refused to go quiet. It kept returning to the smith in Springville, not because he was handsome, she couldn’t even be certain of that from the quick passing glance, but because he had looked unmoved by her presence. Not unimpressed. Not ignorant. Simply not rearranged.

Most people rearranged themselves when she came near. They found the proper posture, the proper bow, the proper tone. Even when they tried to pretend they did not care, their bodies betrayed them.

The smith had not.

And for an instant, when her eyes had found his, it had felt like stepping into a room where air behaved differently.

Liora opened her eyes and looked at Sella. “Tell me what they’re saying,” she said.

Sella blinked. “Who?”

“The soldiers,” Liora replied.

Sella hesitated. “I’m not supposed to listen.”

Liora gave her a look.

Sella sighed softly, defeated. “They were talking on the stairs earlier,” she admitted. “When I went down for water.”

Liora waited.

“They were joking,” Sella said, and her voice lowered as if the words themselves might be dangerous. “Not loudly. Like men do when they think no one important is listening.”

“What did they say?” Liora asked.

Sella’s mouth tightened. “They said Victor’s been fixated since yesterday. That he’s been circling the forge like a dog that caught a scent.”

Liora’s eyes narrowed. “And?”

“They said ‘the one in Springville,’” Sella continued, and she looked uncomfortable repeating it, like she didn’t like giving the phrase shape. “They didn’t say his name. Just that.”

Liora felt a chill that had nothing to do with spring water. A phrase like that belonged to orders, not jokes.

“The one,” she repeated softly.

Sella nodded. “One of them said he didn’t understand what a smith mattered to a royal circuit. Another said, ‘You don’t understand what the king wants.’ And then they laughed like it was funny.”

“It wasn’t,” Liora said.

Sella shook her head. “No.”

Liora stood again, restless now. She crossed to the window and opened the shutters a fraction more. Sunlight cut into the room, bright and sharp. It made the dust in the air visible, floating in slow spirals.

Below, Springville looked like a village that had been pinched between two fingers. People clustered near the road. Guards held their perimeter without blades. The wagons sat like sealed secrets.

And beyond the inn yard, half sheltered by a slanted roof, the forge waited.

Liora could not see Ranoke clearly from this angle. She could see the stone of the forge. She could see the dark mouth of the fire inside it. She could see the anvil, a blunt shape at the edge of the roofline.

She could imagine him there, because her mind had already built a picture: soot-stained hands, a shirt darkened by sweat, shoulders shaped by labor, eyes lifted in that brief moment when he noticed her looking.

She caught herself.

This was how distraction began. This was how stories grew in a girl’s mind, and she was not a girl in a story. She was a princess in a kingdom with enemies and debts and fragile alliances.

She shut the shutters again with more force than necessary, and the clap of wood echoed in the small room.

Sella flinched. “Your Highness.”

Liora exhaled slowly. “I’m not angry at you,” she said, softer.

Sella nodded, though she still looked uncertain.

Liora walked to the small table and leaned both hands on it. The wood was worn smooth in places by countless travelers who had leaned the same way, tired and thinking about roads.

“There are masks everywhere,” she said quietly.

Sella frowned. “Masks?”

Liora nodded, and her voice took on the slow, careful tone she used when she spoke only to herself. “The villagers mask fear as hospitality. The soldiers mask intent as courtesy. Victor masks obedience as protection. My father masks something as stability.”

“And you?” Sella asked, and her voice was almost too soft to hear.

Liora’s fingers tightened on the table edge. “I mask exhaustion as poise,” she said. “And I mask suspicion as obedience.”

Sella looked down. “You’re allowed to be tired.”

Liora almost smiled at that, a faint, small thing. “If I’m tired, the kingdom is tired,” she said. “And Clayland cannot afford to look tired.”

There was a knock again, lighter this time. Not Victor’s.

Sella moved to the door and cracked it open.

A voice spoke from the hall. “Your Highness. The innkeeper has brought food.”

Sella glanced back at Liora.

Liora nodded once. “Bring it.”

The tray came in with a bow and a nervous smile, carried by a middle-aged woman who kept her eyes lowered too carefully. Bread, cheese, dried fruit, something like a thin stew in a bowl that steamed faintly. The smell was plain but comforting, and for a heartbeat, Liora’s body remembered what it was to be hungry.

“Thank you,” Liora said, and she meant it.

The woman bowed again and hurried out.

When the door shut, Liora stared at the tray without moving.

Sella lifted a piece of bread and held it out. “You should eat.”

Liora took it. She bit, and the bread was dense, heavy with grain, as if Springville baked with the assumption that food needed to last through hard winters. She chewed slowly.

Below, the town noise shifted again. Voices rose, then fell. The feeling of a stage being rearranged.

Liora’s stomach tightened, not from food but from the sense of being watched even here, in a room that smelled of damp wood and old ale.

She forced herself to swallow.

Then she listened.

She could pick out words now if she focused. Names. Locations. Small jokes. Small complaints.

And then she heard it, like Sella had said. Not loud. Not meant for her.

“The one in Springville.”

A man’s voice, amused. Another voice answered, sharper.

“Keep your mouth shut.”

A pause. Then, quieter still, almost respectful.

“Victor said he’s different.”

“Different how?”

“Different like he doesn’t flinch.”

Liora’s fingers tightened around the bread.

The voices drifted away, and the inn swallowed them.

Liora stared down at her hands. They were clean, pale, soft from court life. They looked like they belonged to someone who had never carried a bucket or split wood. They were hands that signed papers, that accepted rings, that waved from balconies.

Hands that would never be allowed to be simply hands.

She thought again of the forge heat, of soot-dark hands, of the way the smith stood in the road like he belonged to himself.

Different like he doesn’t flinch.

Liora felt a small, sharp ache behind her eyes. Not tears, not quite, but the pressure of something she refused to let out.

She looked at Sella. “When we leave,” she said quietly, “we do not take anything from this village that we do not need.”

Sella nodded immediately. “Yes, Your Highness.”

“And if my father asks what Springville was like,” Liora continued, and her voice turned careful, “I will tell him it was unremarkable.”

Sella blinked. “But”

Liora lifted a hand, stopping her. “Unremarkable,” she repeated.

Sella’s mouth tightened as if she understood the danger in saying anything else.

Liora stood and crossed to the window again. This time she opened the shutters slightly more, just enough to let herself see.

Springville had resumed motion. People were moving again, though carefully. Guards were repositioning. Victor was in the yard, speaking to two soldiers with his head inclined, as if issuing quiet instructions.

Near the forge, a figure moved, briefly visible as he shifted in the shadow of the roof. Liora saw the lift of an arm, the flash of metal catching sunlight, the controlled motion of someone whose hands knew what to do even when the world changed around him.

She did not stare. She forced herself to look away, to keep her attention broad and royal, sweeping like she had been trained.

But her eyes returned once, just once, before she let the shutters fall back into place.

Not because of travel.

Because somewhere in the machinery of her father’s kingdom, pieces had begun to move.

And for the first time on this circuit, Liora felt the uneasy sense that she was not only being displayed.

She was being positioned.

She had worn masks her entire life. She knew how to smile when her stomach churned, how to speak when she wanted to scream, how to nod when she wanted to refuse.

But this was different.

This felt like someone else had placed a mask in her hands and told her it was hers, and she was only just now noticing how perfectly it fit.

That night, when the inn finally quieted and the soldiers’ laughter faded into distant murmurs, Liora lay on the narrow bed and stared into darkness that smelled of river damp and old wood.

Sleep came slowly.

Not because she was afraid.

Because she could not stop wondering what her father saw when he looked at a village like Springville.

And whether, once a king’s gaze found something worth keeping, it ever truly moved on.

Chapter 2

Book Sample