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It had been three months since her birthday; Peony was now twenty-one and three months old. Or, rather, she was twenty-one and ten months old, but there was no use dwelling on those extra months. They weren't the princess' months, and therefore now they weren't hers. Everything she had belonged to the princess, and vice versa.
This morning she was walking in the garden with Sigil, a royal fairy and her mother's (the princess' mother's) friend. There was a robin poking through the grasses on the edge of the path, and she wished she knew if it was the same robin who had built a nest outside of her mother's (the princess' mother's) bedroom window or the one who had landed on the wall beside her yesterday, looked her over, and seemed to nod to itself before flying off again. Peony knew that robins didn't nod, but she also knew that they talked to fairies, and might be talking to Aunt or Katriona, and hence to Rosie. She missed Rosie. She looked sidelong at Sigil, who was small and round and friendly and not at all the sort of person who ought to terrify a princess, even a sudden and unexpected princess like Peony, and found herself once again too afraid to ask.
Sigil put her hand on Peony's arm and said, "What is it, my dear?"
Peony opened her mouth to say that it was nothing, and discovered to her relief that she was not entirely a coward. "I miss Rosie," she said.
"Of course you do," said Sigil, and waited there with her hand still on Peony's arm.
"I had a letter from her yesterday," she said, which Sigil almost certainly knew, and, "She's going to marry Narl," which perhaps Sigil did not, but the fairy merely nodded. "Of course I knew she would," Peony said, "everyone did, I think, who knew them -- so, I did, and Katriona, and probably Aunt."
Softly, Sigil said, "And Prince Rowland?"
Peony tried very hard to not wince at the word 'prince'; she supposed it was something that she was at least controlled enough that Sigil could pretend to not notice. People sometimes had to work very hard, or make very polite excuses for her, when she heard the word 'princess' spoken aloud. "Yes," she said after a moment. "I'm sure he knew."
"You should speak to him," Sigil said, and Peony bowed her head, studying the knuckles of Sigil's hand on her arm. They looked like Katriona's knuckles, or Aunt's, and Peony wondered if the queen's fairy made her own charms. She probably did. They didn't look anything like Rosie's knuckles, which were almost as worn as Narl's.
"I know," Peony said, and Sigil's hand slid away so that Peony had to look up and meet her eyes instead. "I'm afraid," she said.
"Vows like the ones taken by the princes of Erlion are stranger than we understand," Sigil said, "at least, we in our country. Perhaps in theirs they have a better idea; but then, they did send to us when young Rowland made his vow."
"To marry Rosie," Peony said.
"To marry the princess," Sigil said. "And he fell in love with you."
"Because we met -- he and Rosie met -- in a smith's yard with iron all around us for protection," Peony recited. "Yes, it's -- been explained."
Sigil pursed her lips. "They say that truth is truth in a smith's yard," she said. "The truth may run deeper than we know. He also met you in a smith's yard."
"I wasn't the princess then," Peony said.
"Weren't you?" Sigil asked.
Peony opened her mouth to say that of course she wasn't, she hadn't become the princess until Rosie did whatever it was that Rosie had done the night of the princess' twenty-first birthday -- but something in Sigil's face stopped her. "I -- no," she managed to say, not at all firmly. "What do you mean?" And she thought, suddenly, of babies and fairies and two very young girls without any inconvenient parents --
"No, no, my dear," Sigil said, "I don't mean that you were the baby who was born twenty-one years and three months ago in this castle." Peony glanced up at the castle as if to spot an empty cradle, then blushed. "But it is not a name-day with gold and white and lavender ribbons with pink and white rosettes," (Peony smiled a little, as she was supposed to,) "which make one into a princess, and I think you know that."
"If every there were anyone who looked less like she'd had a name-day with pink and white rosettes on her gold and white and lavender ribbons than Rosie, I'd like to meet her," Peony said. "And you can't tell me she wouldn't have been a good queen."
"I can't tell you that," Sigil said, "but I think that even if I could, I wouldn't. You love your friend, as you ought, and think the world of her. Do you not think that she believes you will be a good queen? Or I should ask, can you not believe it yourself? Because if you cannot believe it, there are very hard times ahead."
Peony said, "At least you don't ask me to believe it for Rowland's sake."
"No," Sigil said. "If you can't do it because it's right, you have no business doing it for love."
"Rowland tried, for love, to stop me from going to Pernicia," Peony said.
"It was an incredibly brave thing you did," Sigil said. "Most incredibly brave things look quite foolish at the time, and sensible people are quite right to try and stop them."
"What will he say," Peony burst out, "when he finds out?"
"That you were incredibly brave and also quite foolish, I'm sure. My dear, my princess, do you really think that he'll go running back up to the Gig to propose to Rosie? He's shown no signs of being drawn anywhere except toward you, these parts three months."
"Rosie was never very interested in him anyway," Peony said. "She always said, when I mentioned it, that he was 'nice enough.' Nice enough!"
Sigil smiled. "There, do you see?"
Peony shook her head, not so much in denial as in the hopeless effort to clear it. "I do love him," she said. "I -- I miss him. I miss when we were the blacksmith's apprentice and the wainwright's niece and ate our lunches every day by the forge. I miss -- oh, I miss feeling miserable and frustrated that we could never be married!" She paused. "That's completely ridiculous, isn't it?"
"It's not ridiculous to miss your old life," Sigil said, "but well, yes. It is rather ridiculous to miss people who are with you and to miss being unhappy, and I suspect that what you're actually feeling is not that at all."
"Well, good," Peony said, "but if I'm not being ridiculous, what am I being?"
"Afraid," Sigil said, serene as ever. "Just as you said. You're afraid that this is all going to be taken away from you again, and you know, now, what it's like to lose the life you've been living. You don't want to risk doing it again, and so you try to avoid living this life which is now yours."
Peony looked around at the gardens, the queen's private gardens that as the princess and the daughter of the queen she could walk through any time she pleased. She looked up at the castle where the queen (her mother, the princess' mother) and the king (her father, the princess' father) were probably having lunch, and where she could, if she chose, walk in and join them. Sit down with the king and queen for lunch! And if they sometimes looked at her, the queen especially, as if she were not quite the princess (the daughter) they'd been loving from afar for so long, well, Prince Rowland did not, and she was used to living with people to whom she was, at best, useful. And perhaps they would like her if she went in and sat down for lunch more often and tried harder to say "Mother" and "Father" instead of "Your Majesties"; after all, they were the mother and father of the princess but also of Rosie, and Rosie was her best friend in the world.
Sigil patted her arm again. "I know that I'm giving you sensible advice, my dear, and that that's the very hardest kind to take, but I'm going to keep offering it anyway."
Peony smiled. "Thank you, Sigil," she said. "Um. Could you tell me something?"
"I might, if you asked," Sigil said.
"The robins," Peony asked. There was one on the back of the bench ahead of them. "Do they speak to fairies?"
Sigil blinked. "Well, not to me," Sigil said. "But then, I suppose I've never tried to speak to them. It's not me you're asking about, though, is it? You want to know if they're carrying tales back home."
Peony nodded.
"You can't," Sigil said gently, "keep thinking of it as back home."
"Oh," Peony said. "Yes, I -- I do know. I was just thinking of having lunch with my parents, in fact," she offered.
Sigil smiled at her as if knowing exactly how difficult that sentence had been. "I think that that's an excellent idea," she said. "Give them -- and yourself -- a chance."
But the robin stared at her, cocking its head to one side and then the other as she passed, and Peony couldn't help but feel that all of those rough edges (like those seven extra months) where she and the princess did not quite overlap were quite visible. Rosie had said, after all, that the animals had known that she was the princess; and that no one would tell Peony what the animals knew now struck her as ominous. Ruling queens are supposed to be level-headed and decisive, she thought. I need to stop fretting. Perhaps when I pricked my finger on Pernicia's spindle-end her curse stole my old life, but the grandest magicians and the cunningest fairies in the kingdom and also Rosie made sure that it was the beginning of a new one.
And she ducked into the cool welcoming doorway of the private anteroom between the queen's private garden and the royal chambers, and Princess Casta Albinia Allegra Dove Minerva Fidelia Aletta Blythe Domnia Delicia Aurelia Grace Isabel Griselda Gwyneth Pearl Ruby Coral Lily Briar-Rose, called Peony, went in to have lunch.