The commoner king

Every Exit

Elera p.o.v

I let myself feel sorry for a hour. Then I got to work.

I learned this trick when I was eleven. You see, feeling bad for yourself is okay but only for a while. If you let it go on long it starts to eat away at everything. So I give myself sixty minutes. I sit with my feelings let them be as bad as they are. I don't pretend to be fine. Then I stand up.

I sat on the edge of my bed. Let my sadness be bad for exactly one hour.

Then I stood up. Started testing exits.

The sickness approach worked until the morning.

That evening I complained of a headache. It was a headache, not a dramatic one, just a normal headache that anyone could get. The kind that might need a days rest and maybe a doctors visit if it didn't go away.

The palace doctor came to see me before I even sent for him. Not my personal doctor. The one who works for the palace. Sennas old doctor had retired two years ago. I had asked for a new one but it seemed that request had been quietly ignored. The palace doctor checked me out said I was okay and left a report that went straight to my fathers desk, not mine.

I checked you see. The paper he handed me had a crease than it would have if it had come straight from his office. Someone had read it first folded it again and handed it to me second.

Fine. I noted it.

The guard approach lasted four hours.

His name was Petyr. He had been on my corridor for eight months. We had a non-relationship. We saw each other every day. Pretended that I didn't notice when he was tired and he didn't notice when I had been crying. I liked him for that. It felt respectful.

I approached him at the end of his shift with a folded letter and a coin. I thought it was the amount. Not too much, not too little.

"I need this delivered to an address in the market " I said. "Discreetly."

Petyr looked at the letter then the coin, me. He looked genuinely sorry.

"I can't Your Highness " he said.

"Can't. Won't?" I asked.

He paused. "Can't " he said carefully. That meant he wouldn't which meant he had been told not to which meant my father had briefed the guards before the foreign king even finished his tea.

I took the letter back. I left the coin. It felt like the thing to do.

The kitchen corridor approach lasted until I reached the kitchen corridor.

There was a guard at the end of it. I had never seen him before. He was standing still like someone new to a post trying to look like they had always been there. I turned around before he saw me and walked back the way I had come.

My father had sealed the kitchen corridor.

That meant he had thought of the kitchen corridor. That meant he had thought of everything I might think of. That meant he had been inside my head before I had. It was a clarifying thing to understand about your own parent.

I sat at my writing desk. Drew a line through everything I had tried.

* Physician. No.

* Guard. No.

* Kitchen corridor. No.

The servants exit had a new lock. I had tested it that morning. The lock was three days old, four Installed before the king arrived.

The western garden gate had two guards now of one.

The roof access, which I had discovered when I was fourteen had a bolt on the outside that hadn't been there week.

I sat with the list. Let myself understand it fully.

This wasn't my father scrambling to close exits after I started looking for them. This was pre-emptive. He had mapped my movements identified every route I had used or might use and sealed them before we even had the conversation in the corridor.

He had been planning this for weeks. Maybe longer.

The question I kept thinking about was, how long had my father known that this specific king would ask for me specifically?. What had he offered in return?

I was still thinking about that question when there was a knock at my door.

Not a knock, actually. A small papery, the sound of something sliding across stone.

I looked at the floor.

A folded piece of paper sat inside the gap at the bottom of my door. No envelope. No seal.

I crossed the room. Picked it up and unfolded it and read it once and then read it again because the first time didn't make sense.

Stop running. It makes you look guilty. Trust me. Not yet.

Six. A fragment. No signature.

I didn't need a signature.

I knew that handwriting. I had seen him write a vendors receipt once. He had. Written my name under the receipt just to prove his handwriting wasn't that bad.

It was that bad. It was unmistakably his.

He was in the palace. Right now. Close enough to slide a note under my door.. He had chosen paper instead of knocking, which meant he couldn't knock, which meant someone was watching him too.

Trust me.

I stood in the center of my room with his handwriting in my hands. Felt something I had worked hard to dismantle, over six months of silence rebuild itself in my chest without my permission.

I didn't trust him.

I did not trust him.

I had no idea what I trusted anymore.

I folded the note. I pressed it flat. I tucked it into the lining of my winter coat.

Then I sat back down at my desk. Stared at the wall and thought: not yet.

Not yet meant eventually.

Eventually meant he had a plan.

The question was whether his plan and my survival were the thing. And whether after six months of silence and one receiving hall and a note slipped under a door I was willing to bet my life and my childs life on the answer being yes.

I stayed up until the candles burned to nothing. I didn't come to a conclusion and the morning came anyway.