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them have nowhere to go. So, I want to set up camps to take care of them, to make sure no onestarves or freezes or dies because of what our kingdom is doing.”
    His eyes flashed, and I thought, This is the key to Jed. This is the most important thing in the world to him. The whole time I’d known him, which was about three weeks now, he’d seemed mopey and directionless, like an old sheepdog who’d been taken away from his herd. As nice as he’d been to me, I knew he didn’t want to spend his life teaching pompous words to pretend princesses. So this was what he really wanted to do instead.
    â€œHave you told anyone?” I asked. “Have you asked your father or the king or whoever—”
    â€œOf course!” Jed said, so forcefully I jerked back against my brocaded chair.
    â€œAnd?”
    He shook his head mournfully.
    â€œThey put me off,” he said. “They say they’ll study the possibility; they’ll draw up a committee to see what ought to be done; they’ll think it over. . . . Not that they’d ever let me go, anyhow, because I’m supposed to be studying to take over my father’s job. But meanwhile, people are dying.”
    I tilted my head to the side, considering.
    â€œWhy do you need anyone’s permission? Why don’t you just do it yourself?”
    Jed gave me a condescending look, the first time he’d made me feel like the empty-headed piece of fluff everyone else seemed to expect me to be.
    â€œI have no great wealth of my own,” he said bitterly. “I don’twant to feed these people just for a day. I want to give them their lives back. But maybe you—”
    Something crept into his voice, a slyness I did not associate with Jed.
    â€œWhat?” I asked, my heart beating unusually fast.
    â€œWhen you are queen—or maybe sooner than that, once you have the prince’s confidence—maybe you can plead my cause for me. You could convince the prince to bankroll my refugee camps. It wouldn’t take much, not compared with the vastness of the royal treasury. Not compared with what they’re already spending on the war.” Jed leaned forward, beseechingly. “Will you help?”
    I felt a strange disappointment. What had I expected him to say? Given who I was, where I was, what I was—a female, now a female of the nobility—how else could I be expected to help? And I was no stranger to the power of pillow talk. Early on in my father’s marriage to Lucille, while I still thought of the tangled relations in our household as a war that I could win, I had many times thought I’d convinced my father of something—that Corimunde and Griselda should be required to wash dishes with me, say—only to hear the decision reversed the next morning. I would watch my father and Lucille retire to his room together and imagine Lucille purring her arguments—“Oh, yes, I’m all for fairness, but Corimunde and Griselda have such delicate skin, an affliction Ella is fortunate not to suffer”—without me there to counter her. So now I was supposed to possess that—not real power, not the right to make any decisions myself, but the power of persuasion,when coupled with a kiss and a breathy whisper and the rest of what men and women do in bed? Unaccountably, the thought disgusted me.
    It was a long moment before I realized Jed was still waiting for my answer. He was leaning so far forward in his chair that a small breath might knock him off and send him tumbling gracelessly to the floor. His expression was so full of hope, I wanted to cry.
    â€œI’ll—” I cleared my throat. “I’ll do what I can.”

7
    That afternoon, while sitting with my ladies-in-waiting working on a particularly vexatious tapestry pattern, I couldn’t get my conversation with Jed out of my mind. I jabbed my needle in and out, the loops of white thread accumulating as