"I meant visiting the families. I won't be able to bear it on my own. I hope Gavon is not too injured to accompany me."
Ursa snorted.
"What's funny?"
"Nothing, Your Highness. I simply look forward to watching your paramour try to charm away grief. It will be an educational experience for him."
"He's not as shallow as he pretends to be."
"He is not pretending. He is shallow." She pulled my nightdress from the trunk. "You'll see. He'll find an excuse to send you alone. Pretty things avoid ugly rooms, except for me." She smoothed her hand over her glossy raven braid. "I don't shy away from ugliness."
She didn't. Ursa did not shy away from anything.
"Don't worry. I'll come with you." She draped the nightdress over the back of the chair.
I didn't argue, because she was probably right about Gavon, and I needed her there.
"Up." She motioned for me to raise my arms.
I did as she commanded, and she pulled the dirty sweater off me. Then she crouched in front of me and started unlacing my left boot. "You'll need to do something about these calluses before the annual ball," she said after pulling the sock off. "How are you going to put these bruised feet into a pair of delicate sandals?"
I groaned. "Did you have to remind me of that nightmare? I hate those stuffy balls when my mother parades me like a prize mare."
Ursa chuckled. "You are a prize mare, Your Highness."
"I'm not. I'm the third child of the Queen of Tarina, the spare no one needs."
"You'd be surprised," she said in that conspiratorial tone of hers, the one she used for the things she'd gathered through her spy network, which I secretly funded. "From what I'm hearing, the Catonian court is spending a fortune on this year's ball. At least twice as much as they did last year. They must be planning something big."
I rolled my eyes. "As if I care, or if that has anything to do with me. The heir to the throne is probably going to announce who he is going to marry, and it's not going to be my sister because she's the next Queen of Tarina." I reached for the cup and took a few sips of the tea that had cooled while I was crying.
"Maybe it's you?"
I snorted, almost spraying Ursa with the tea. "That's not funny. I'm probably last on the list of possible candidates. Tarina is a small and unimportant province, and I'm no great beauty. Prince Arlen has never shown the slightest interest in me."
She pursed her lips. "You know it's not about personal interest. It's all politics."
"Yeah, and I'm just as unattractive politically as I am physically."
Ursa pulled back and glared at me. "I don't want to hear you talking like that. You are beautiful, intelligent, and well educated, Your Highness. Any prince would be lucky to snag a rare flower like you."
"Oh, dear Elurion." I jumped to my feet, startling Ursa. "I need to take care of the Silver Princess!"
"Can't it wait for me to take off the other sock?"
"No, it can't!"
I pulled the rare flower from my pack. She was wrapped in the insulated cloth I'd packed her in, and when I unwound it, my stomach dropped. The petals that had blazed like captured starlight on the mountain ledge were limp and dull, their glow faded to almost nothing. The fine metallic roots that had drunk so greedily from the magnetic rock hung slack, reaching for a substrate that wasn't there.
I lifted her, as careful as I'd be with a wounded bird, and settled her into the field container that I'd built specially for her. It was a glass cylinder ringed with coolant cells and lined with the magnetized soil. It was a crude contraption, but it held a charge, and it held the cold, and it was the best I could do to recreate the conditions she needed.
"She doesn't look good," Ursa said.
"She's been ripped out of the soil of her homeland and dragged down a mountain in a sack." I sealed the lid and watched the coolant cells frost over. "It's shock. She will recover."
I had to believe that she would make it, so today's tragedy would have at least some kind of silver lining.
9
