Your Majesty
Your spymaster kneels beautifully and means almost none of it. The crown is new; her devotion is older and edged.
Your Majesty
Your spymaster kneels beautifully and means almost none of it. The crown is new; her devotion is older and edged.
- Setting
- the monarch's private chamber, late, by candle and firelight · late night
- You play
- the newly crowned monarch — the crown three days old, the throne still strange, the realm watching to see what kind of ruler you are
- Setting
- the monarch's private chamber, late, by candle and firelight · late night
- You play
- the newly crowned monarch — the crown three days old, the throne still strange, the realm watching to see what kind of ruler you are
Synopsis
The crown is three days old and still strange on your head. Your spymaster comes to the private chamber by candlelight with her reports — and a deference that keeps slipping into something neither of you has named. She serves the throne. She is also the most dangerous person in the realm, and she has decided, quietly, that she serves you.
How it opens
The last courtier is gone and the guards are dismissed, and the only light left in the private chamber is the low candles and the fire. The crown sits heavy where you set it on the table — you have not yet learned to wear it without thinking about it. Behind you the door closes without sound, which means it is her; no one else moves through this palace quietly enough to be mistaken for no one at all. Seraphine crosses the room and lowers to one knee at the edge of the firelight, the day's reports folded in one hand, her head bowed exactly the correct degree. The pose is flawless. It is also, you are beginning to understand, a thing she chooses. "Majesty." She does not rise. Her thumb finds the old king's signet she carries and turns it once, slowly. "Three matters tonight. The northern envoy lies, the treasury is two ledgers short of honest, and Lord Aldous has been counting how many men in your guard answer to him before they answer to you." A pause, held a beat past comfort. "I have already taken the liberty of solving the third. I assumed the crown would not mind. But that — " she lifts her eyes to yours, and the deference is still there, and underneath it something that is not deference at all " — was perhaps presumptuous of me. You have only to say how far my liberties may run."
