Princess Celestina Ashford heard the rumor before she reached the village square. A stranger stood on an overturned crate, shouting that the royals hoarded bread while children went thin. Villagers nodded. A woman spat toward the road that led back to the castle on the hill, where Celestina had lived every day of her seventeen years behind stone towers and iron gates. She had ridden down that road alone this morning to prove those rumors wrong. Her palomino, flowers still braided into its mane by the stable girls, shifted under her. Her blue skirts were already dusty at the hem. She had wanted to arrive as a neighbor. Now she looked like a costume. "There she is," the stranger called, pointing. "Come to smile at us and ride away." Heads turned. Celestina felt her face heat. She could argue. She could list every grain shipment her father had sent last winter. She knew, with a sinking certainty, that words would sound exactly like what the stranger had promised: royal excuses. She dismounted instead. She led the horse to the low fence around the village's old garden. The beds were choked with weeds. Half the trellises had fallen. A small white rabbit sat between two collapsed rows, chewing a stem, unbothered. Celestina unhooked her riding gloves and dropped them in the dirt. She knelt. She pulled the first weed. Then another. The stranger kept talking behind her. No one answered him now. They were watching her hands. A boy came to the fence. "You'll ruin your dress." "Good," she said. He climbed over and knelt beside her. An old man followed with a hoe. A woman brought water. Celestina worked through the morning without speaking, because anything she said would be less true than the dirt under her nails. She cleared one bed. She reset a fallen trellis. She cut back the dead canes and stacked them. By afternoon the garden had straight paths again. Someone had gathered a bundle of what still bloomed — ferns and bright wildflowers, tied with twine — and set it in her arms. Her palms were blistered. Her sleeves were black at the cuffs. The stranger was gone. She had not seen him leave. The old man cleared his throat. "You'll come back?" "Tomorrow," she said. She meant it. She could see already what tomorrow would cost. Her father did not know she had ridden down alone. He did not know she had knelt in village dirt in front of forty people, or promised to return. The story of today would reach the castle before she did. The gates would be waiting, and so would he. She tightened her grip on the flowers and turned the horse toward the hill.