chapter 5 : To Defy

Earlier that very day, in the Court of Greldoran, where rules were engraved in stone (and then, for good measure, re-engraved in bronze, gilded, and ceremonially ignored), Leonor of House Virellien sat up straight and tried.

This was unusual.

Normally, lessons with Lady Drellimore were an endless gauntlet of:

“Don’t interrupt,”

“Don’t levitate the teacups,” and

“That fork is not a weapon unless you’re dining in Galthmoor.”

But today, today was different.

Leonor had resolved, heroically and without prompting, to behave.

Her dress was neatly pressed (if faintly singed), her golden curls were combed back with enough ribbon to choke a minor duchess, and she’d even gone so far as to polish her shoes.

This alone had unnerved three separate footmen.

Lady Drellimore, who looked like she could survive an assassination attempt and critique your posture while doing it, gave a tight-lipped smile.

“Very well, my dear. Let us try again. You are receiving a visiting noble. What do you say?”

Leonor rose to her feet. She had practised for this. She had cue cards. She had annotated footnotes. She had even asked a butler. (He had wept softly and gave her a biscuit.) Quite handy.

She cleared her throat.

“Good day, Your Excellency. You are welcome in our halls, and may your cows remain… extremely… fertile?”

There was a pause.

A long one.

The sort of pause in which kingdoms fall and alliances are quietly rewritten.

Lady Drellimore’s face remained still. Only one eyebrow betrayed her, twitching with the intensity of a drowning man trying not to scream.

“…Why,” she said at last, “cows, Lady Leonor?”

Leonor brightened, thinking she was being asked to elaborate. This was, in fact, her worst mistake so far.

“Oh! Because my history tutor said that landholding nobles with cows get more votes on the Harvest Council, and I thought that’s very important, so it’s a good wish, isn’t it? I didn’t mention pigs this time. That went badly.”

Another silence.

Somewhere behind the tutor’s eyes, a mental quill snapped clean in half. “No,” said Lady Drellimore, very slowly.

“While that may be… factually adjacent to etiquette, one does not begin a diplomatic greeting with bovine reproductive health.”

Leonor frowned. She checked her flashcards. She checked her backup flashcards.

They were color-coded. They had diagrams. She had cross-referenced two etiquette manuals and a copy of The Polite Pirate’s Guide to Parley and Romance.

She tried again.

“Um… Your sleeves are… tastefully majestic, and I hope your journey was not infested with frogs?”

The teacup cracked in Lady Drellimore’s hand.

A tutor’s assistant quietly excused himself to scream into a cushion.

Leonor’s palms were sweating now.

“That’s better, right?” she asked, too quickly.

“I didn’t mention plagues or murder this time. And frogs are statistically common in springtime travel through Fenmarch.”

“Leonor,” said Lady Drellimore, in the kind of voice usually reserved for lightning strikes and ruined upholstery,

“Are you doing this on purpose?”

Leonor froze.

She had tried. She was trying. She had really tried this time.

What she wanted to say was: “No. I’m trying.”

“But, but no one tells me why. You just say ‘not like that.’ Every time. Even when I try to fix it!”

“You want me to sound like everyone else? Fine. But if I just copy what they say, then you tell me I’m being robotic! And if I try to say it in my way, you say I’m being difficult!”

“I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. And I hate this stupid chair!”

What she actually said was: “Well maybe if people explained anything without using fifteen words for ‘no’ I’d have a better chance at being boring!”

Lady Drellimore inhaled sharply.

“You are being deliberately obtuse.”

Leonor winced.

“You’re obtuse!”

No. That’s not what I meant.

“I mean you’re all confusing and circular!”

Stop it. Stop talking.

“If you want me to say things I don’t mean, just tell me which lies you prefer!”

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The room went deathly quiet.

Lady Drellimore folded her hands like a priest preparing for an exorcism.

“Leave us,” she said to the other staff. They left.

Leonor stood trembling in her ribboned shoes, fury and panic warring inside her like two raccoons in a tea chest. She had tried. She had tried.

She could feel the tears behind her eyes, choking on frustration, already preparing their escape. She hated crying. It made her feel small. And weak. And worst of all: wrong.

So she took the only action that made sense.

She calmly unfastened her ribbon, dropped it onto the floor with a regal finality, and turned toward the wall.

Specifically, the tapestry on the far side of the room, behind which she had previously installed, strictly hypothetically, a rope ladder, a slide, and a lever marked DO NOT PULL UNLESS YOU REALLY MEAN IT.

Lady Drellimore narrowed her eyes.

“Leonor.”

Leonor looked back.

“If I’m going to get in trouble anyway, I’d rather do it for something interesting.”

She vanished behind the tapestry.

There was a brief, distant clang, followed by the unmistakable sound of a child breaking at least three rules and possibly a chandelier.

And Lady Drellimore, gazing into the wreckage of her teacup, muttered,

“…I blame the cows.”

Leonor ran. Not panicked running, this was tactical running. Strategic. Bold.

She could have used magic. But magic was easy. It was loud. Predictable. Convenient.

And lately, it felt like cheating.

Magic didn’t fix the thing that mattered. It didn’t fix how people tilted their heads at her like she was a broken puzzle piece. It didn’t fix how no one ever explained the why, only the wrong. It didn’t fix the feeling of being the only person in the room who seemed to be reading the wrong script, in a language no one would teach her.

What she needed now was stealth. Subtlety. Precision. And, ideally, a fish.

She reached the third-floor corridor at a sprint and grabbed her emergency satchel from behind the statue of Lady Maribrine the Punctual (who, in fairness, had died on time).

Her boots skidded across the marble, partly because she was in a hurry, and partly because she had spent the entire morning buttering the floor as a just-in-case measure.

A guard lunged. He slipped. His ankle discovered the yarn trap before his brain did.

Leonor didn’t slow down. She yanked open a hidden chute behind a suit of armor and vanished into it with the casual grace of someone who had, at one point, tried to live in the castle’s air vents out of sheer spite.

Every twist of the ductwork was memorized. Every hinge had been oiled. Every rat had been politely named and warned in advance.

She dropped into the laundry chute, popped out of the linen pantry, somersaulted across the main stairwell, and rolled to a stop behind a statue of the First Duke of Rind, whose only notable achievement had been inventing diplomatic sulking.

Leonor peeked around the base. No guards yet. Good.

She paused.

And in that brief, quiet moment, heart pounding, curls half-escaped from their sole remaining ribbon, she thought of the lesson again.

Of how she'd tried. Of how she'd really tried.

How she’d practiced, and color-coded, and memorized four different greetings depending on whether the noble in question raised pigeons or pigs.

How she had said the words wrong. Again.

Not rude, not mean, just wrong in that special way that made adults squint and smile like she was speaking underwater.

She recalled another time, maybe yesterday, maybe last week. It all blurred into one long polite conversation about nothing that mattered.

Except this one.

This one had mattered.

It had been over breakfast.

A rare moment with her father, who sat at the far end of the table like a statue carved from duty.

Leonor had practiced what she wanted to say for days. Rehearsed in the mirror. Made diagrams. Built a scale model out of candlesticks and cheese.

She had an idea.

A real one.

A good one.

A way to rework the capital city’s shielding runes to pull from ambient weather patterns instead of the mage lines, reducing drain by up to seventy percent.

wouldn’t just improve defensive integrity,

it would allow for consistent channel rerouting during mana droughts.

She was nine, and she had figured this out between etiquette drills and being told not to set things on fire.

She’d meant to say:

“Father, I’ve discovered a way to stabilize the eastern district wards using cyclical pressure systems from the valley’s prevailing storm fronts. It’s elegant, and it could help everyone.”

“I don’t want credit. I just want someone to look. To see it. To see me.”

What actually came out was:

“we can make the rain angry and then the walls will scream less.”

Her father had paused mid-sip.

Nodded, very slowly, the way one might nod at a goose that had just offered stock tips.

And then he’d said, with all the warmth of a winter tax audit:

“Very good, Leonor. Perhaps speak to the steward about your… angry rain.”

And that had been that.

No one had looked. No one had asked.

She’d left the diagrams on the dining table anyway, hoping someone might see what they really were.

The servants threw them out with the breakfast crumbs.

And now here she was, covered in dust and said breakfast crumbs, enacting an escape plan that involved luring a magical bird with a smoked fish.

She reached the eastern tower.

The teleportation chamber was warded, guarded, and Very Much Off Limits.

Unless, of course, you had read the blueprints backwards and knew the ventilation grate behind the tapestries was exactly child-sized and mostly unguarded because no one expected nobility to crawl.

Leonor was not nobility. She was royalty.

Not that it mattered. Not when it got in the way.

She crouched behind a stack of runed crates and watched the court mage chalk the circle, mumbling to himself in a dialect that sounded like someone gargling vowels.

His familiar, a raven named Bartholomew, preened smugly on a perch.

Leonor narrowed her eyes.

She reached into her satchel and withdrew: one slightly warm smoked kipper, wrapped in cheesecloth and ambition.

She lobbed it underhand.

Bartholomew made a noise like a snob being startled and launched himself after the fish.

The mage flinched.

The chalk slipped.

The wards flickered.

And in that brief chaos, Leonor moved.

She darted forward, grabbed a spare chalk stub, and with three fast strokes altered the destination coordinates from quaranta lorasca to Drisden alley, an alley so drab that even the smugglers who had used it as a teleportation coordinate couldn’t be,

bothered to guard it from outside use.

She slapped a rune-biscuit onto the calibration stone, reversed the directional drift, and stepped into the circle like it owed her something.

And just before the teleportation spell activated, just as the room filled with swirling soot and startled shouting,

She smiled.

Not a mischievous smile. Not a clever one.

A small, tired smile.

The kind you make when you’re not running from trouble.

You’re running to something that finally makes sense.

Not that she herself knew what that thing was of course.