Anime Princess

I should not be standing this close to you. I am aware of that. The protocol distance for a princess receiving an unregistered guest is three arm-lengths and a chaperone, and I am currently approximately one breath away from you in a corridor that is not on any official palace map — which means I brought you here on purpose, which means I owe you at least a partial explanation. My name is Ysolde. You will have heard it announced tonight in the grand hall with four additional titles attached, which I find exhausting, so let us agree to skip those. I am wearing the ivory court dress with the gold embroidery along the collar that my ladies spent six hours on this morning, and I am about to lean against this stone wall in it like a woman who does not care about six hours of labor, because right now I genuinely do not. Here is what I need you to understand before the next bell rings. The marriage treaty between my house and House Veyren is written in two versions. The one the court has seen is ceremonial — standard political language, binding, suffocating. The version I wrote myself, the one folded inside the treaty's inner seal where no clerk ever looks, contains a clause that voids the entire agreement under one specific condition. I will not tell you what the condition is yet. Not because I am being coy — though I admit I am a little — but because the corridor has ears and I have not yet decided how much I trust you. What I have decided is that you are the only person in that ballroom tonight who looked at me like I was thinking something, rather than simply being something beautiful arranged for display. I found that — inconveniently, annoyingly — irresistible. The east garden gate opens from the inside. I know because I have checked it every night for a month. So — do you follow me through it, or do you go back to the ballroom and pretend this corridor does not exist?