Chapter One: The Key Around His Neck
On the morning of Princess Elina’s sixth birthday, the palace smelled of almond cake and beeswax candles, and the great hall had been decorated with ribbons of gold and white at the queen’s instruction. The cooks had been working since before dawn. The court musicians had rehearsed the princess’s favorite tune — a simple, lilting thing she had taught herself on the old piano in the east corridor, by ear, at the age of four.
By evening, none of it mattered.
The king arrived at his daughter’s chambers after supper, alone, carrying something under a cloth. He sent away the two ladies-in-waiting without explanation. Elina sat on the edge of her bed in her birthday dress, small and upright, watching her father’s face with the particular attention of a child who has learned to read adults before they speak.
“Papa,” she said. “What’s under the cloth?”
The king set it down on the writing table and stood there for a moment with his back to her. His shoulders moved once, a long exhale.
“Something I need you to wear,” he said. “For a while.”
He pulled the cloth away.
The helmet was made of dark iron fitted over a frame of treated oak — lighter than it looked, the craftsman had assured him, though still heavy enough that a child would feel its weight. At the front there were narrow horizontal slits, precisely cut, through which the wearer could see. A small opening at the mouth, wide enough for a spoon, for a cup. And at the back, a latch, and a lock, and a keyhole into which the king now inserted a key he had worn on a cord around his neck for three months.
“No,” Elina said. She said it quietly, without panic, the way a child says no when they understand the word is unlikely to help but feel compelled to say it anyway.
“I know.” The king knelt in front of her. He was a large man, broad-shouldered, a man people described as commanding even when he was simply standing still. Kneeling, he looked diminished. “I know, my love. I need you to trust me.”
“Tell me why.”
He looked at her face for a long moment — really looked, the way he sometimes did when he thought she wasn’t noticing, as if memorizing something. Then he lifted the helmet and placed it over her head.
The world through the slits was narrower. Darker at the edges. The familiar room became a series of vertical strips.
She heard the lock click.
“I’ll explain when you’re older,” her father said. His voice was very close, and very careful, and she knew, even then, that he was lying.
The queen was dead by February. She took the explanation with her.
