"Drop it," Raven said. "This act of yours. The calm face, the pretty manners — it's far too obvious to be convincing. Just behave the way you actually behave, day in and day out."
Chasey lowered her head slightly.
"I'm sorry," she said. "For everything I've done to you in the past. Sincerely."
The prince stood there and could not, for a moment, believe his own ears.
"I promise," she went on, "that from now on I will never stalk you or bother you again."
He laughed, scornfully, a short ugly sound. "And how exactly am I supposed to believe an empty promise like that?"
"Think back over these past few days," she said gently. "Have I followed you once? Have I turned up anywhere you were? I haven't. And that isn't going to change."
He fell silent at that. He simply looked at her, scrutinising her, as though the answer might be written somewhere on her face if he stared hard enough.
She changed the subject before he could find it.
"Please eat something. Anything. Just enough to keep your strength up."
He turned away coldly and dismissed the whole business as pointless.
"A hunger strike only works," Chasey said to his back, "if the person on strike actually values his own health. However fine you feel right now, if you keep this up, your body will break down. It always does. It doesn't matter how strong—"
She did not finish the sentence, because her knees went out from under her.
The prince turned in time to see her stagger, and then she was falling into his arms, and he was staring down at her, startled out of every expression he owned.
In the end, she got him to the table.
The prince sat down and took his first taste of the hot vegetable soup that had been waiting for him, and his eyebrows went up. He looked visibly surprised. Whatever he had imagined the flavour would be, this was nothing like it.
"It isn't bad, is it," Chasey said, smiling at him across the table. "Thank you for finally agreeing to eat."
Afterward she sat alone with a cup of tea in the quiet of the late afternoon, enjoying the peace, and the peace did not hold, because the word came back.
Murderer.
It circled her mind and would not settle.
"Emily," she said that evening, "have I ever committed a crime? In the past?"
"A crime, my lady?"
"I mean something truly terrible. Like killing someone."
Emily burst out laughing — genuinely, helplessly, one hand over her mouth. "My lady! You could never do such a thing. Never in your life."
Then, seeing that her mistress truly did not remember, Emily offered to recount a few of her old habits, to put her mind at ease.
"You were deeply afraid of bugs," she said. "Terrified of them. But you could never bring yourself to kill one. You always ordered the servants to catch them and release them outside instead. You used to say that killing them would be far more troublesome and unpleasant than simply letting them go."
"Ah," said Chasey. "Well. From now on you can handle the insects however you like."
Emily smiled and said, with complete confidence, "My lady is truly a good person. You would never wish harm on anyone."
Chasey felt a little of the weight lift off her chest, and thanked her sincerely for the comfort.
A while later she decided to go into town on her own to buy ingredients. To avoid drawing attention she wrapped herself carefully in a black hooded cloak and slipped out through the side gate, and for a while it worked; nobody looked twice at her in the market crowds.
Then, on a corner near the fabric stalls, she came upon a nobleman bullying a small child.
He had the boy's stuffed toy in his fist, held up out of reach. "Look at this filthy scrap of rubbish," he was saying, loud enough for the street to hear. "Worthless. I ought to burn it for firewood — that's all it's good for."
Chasey could not stand by.
"Stop that," she said, stepping out of the crowd. "At once." She fixed him with a look. "Why won't you return the toy to the child?"
The nobleman turned, sneering with contempt, evidently surprised that a stranger in a plain cloak would dare interfere in his business. Deliberately, watching her the whole time, he threw the stuffed toy down into the dirt.
"Go on," he taunted the child. "Come and pick it up yourself."
She walked forward. She did not hurry, and something in the way she came on made the man begin to sense that this was not going the way he had assumed.
Then she pulled back her hood.
The nobleman froze. Whatever presence she had, it stopped him mid-breath, and he stammered out, "Wh— who are you?"
The crowd around them had begun to murmur. Silver hair. Violet eyes, of a shade that only the highest families carried. The nobleman's face turned pale as the murmuring reached him, and he understood that he had just crossed someone he should never have provoked. He was trembling by the time the word Zeviana went past him.
"Apologise to the child," Chasey said. "Immediately. And return the toy to him properly."
He tried, stubbornly, to argue. "We are both nobles. Why would you treat a fellow noble this way, in the street, over some—"
"Did your family never teach you," she said, "that being born a noble gives you the right to bully whoever you like, without cause? Is that what they taught you at home?"
The murmuring swelled into open comment on every side. The nobleman stood thoroughly humiliated in the middle of it, seething with resentment at being disgraced in public by a woman.
But he had no choice. Before her authority, he bent down and picked up the stuffed toy out of the dirt. He tossed it back at the boy and grumbled a threat under his breath as he did — "watch yourself from now on."
"If you have any objections," Chasey said coldly, "you are welcome to bring them directly to the Zeviana estate."
The nobleman and his followers fled, scrambling over one another in their haste to get away.
She knelt down in the street so that her eyes were level with the child's. He gazed back at her, clutching the toy to his chest, his face shining with admiration.
"If anyone ever bullies you again," she told him kindly, "come and find me. I'll help you."
From a distance, someone had watched the whole of it — the confrontation, the crowd, the girl kneeling in the dirt of the market street. A figure clad in full steel armour stood quite still at the edge of the square, observing everything with a sharp, watchful gaze, and said nothing at all.