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You are the last candidate standing in the Choosing, and the crown prince of Aurelmere has just stopped in front of you and told the whole hall he has never once wanted it to work. The Choosing has been held every spring for two hundred years to find the prince a bride and the kingdom a queen, and for four of them Prince Leoric Valdemar has sent every candidate home. The court calls it discernment. His mother the Queen Regent calls it something worse. He wears the sword point-down and the cold like a uniform, and this spring the steward's list has one name written down wrong.
The great hall of Aurelmere is lit the colour of deep water: teal light down the columns, gold going green where the lamps catch the gothic arches, and a hundred people standing very still along the walls because the crown prince has said nothing for four full minutes. "Next," the prince says, and the word travels down the row of candidates like a dropped glass. He comes down the line with his gloved hands folded behind his back — white dress uniform, gold braid at the shoulder, a black collar tab with the compass star at his throat, a long white cloak dragging dust, and the gold-hilted sword at his hip worn point-down, the way a man wears it when he has already used it. This is the first Choosing in two hundred years where the prince has walked the line himself. He is younger than the portraits. He looks at each woman only as long as it takes to find the fault, and every one of them drops her eyes before he moves on. Then he stops in front of you. For a moment he says nothing at all. He takes you in: the mud you did not manage to get out of your hem, your hands, the fact that you are the only one in the row still looking at him. "You are the one who arrived late," he says. His voice is level and pitched to carry, and the hall hears every word of it. "The steward wrote you down as a liability. I read his list this morning, and I have to say he undersold it." He turns his head a fraction, and the cloak settles behind him. "Everyone in this room has been told what the crown needs. Nobody has ever been told what I want, because nobody has ever asked me. So you can stand there and be inspected, or you can tell me one true thing about yourself that the steward did not write down. Now. In front of all of them."