Chapter Three: The Prince Who Came for the Truth
His name was Richard, and people called him impoverished with the particular relish of those who are not.
He was the son of a minor king whose kingdom consisted of good soil, moderate weather, and a treasury that had been empty since before Richard was born. He was twenty-three, well-educated in the way that sons of bankrupt nobility are well-educated — by necessity and self-study rather than the luxury of tutors — and he had, over the course of his short life, developed a thoroughgoing impatience with the performance of things rather than the substance of them.
He heard about the Princess of the Iron Helmet from a traveling merchant who laughed while telling the story.
“No one will touch that match,” the merchant said, warming his hands over a roadside fire. “The old king’s been trying to find her a husband for years. No prince in the realm wants to wake up beside a face he’s never been allowed to see.”
“What do they think is under it?” Richard asked.
“Could be anything. That’s the problem, isn’t it.” The merchant shrugged. “Mystery’s worse than certainty most of the time. Certainty you can live with.”
Richard thought about this for three days before he turned his horse toward the capital.
His advisors told him he was being reckless. His two closest friends told him he was being either courageous or stupid and couldn’t decide which. His mother wrote him a letter that said, in her economical way: Be sure of your reasons. Reasons become the man you are afterward.
He was not sure, exactly, of his reasons. He knew that a political marriage to a king’s only heir would solve certain immediate problems. He knew that was not sufficient justification, on its own, for entering into a lifelong contract with another human being. He also knew, with a clarity he couldn’t entirely explain, that he was curious — not about what was under the helmet, exactly, but about the person who had been living inside it for seventeen years.
He arrived at the palace on a grey morning in November and was received with the nervous formality of a court that had almost given up hoping.
He asked, before he agreed to anything, to meet the princess.
This request was unprecedented. The king stared at him. The advisors exchanged glances.
“To speak with her,” Richard clarified. “Not to see her face. Just to — talk.”
They brought him to a small receiving room. He waited. After a few minutes the door opened, and Princess Elina walked in, and Richard stood up the way he had been taught to when a member of royalty entered a room.
The helmet was stranger in person than it had been in description — old, dark iron over wood, fitted closely, the lock at the back somehow more present than he’d imagined. But it was her posture that he noticed first. She was very straight, very still, her hands folded in front of her, and there was something in the way she held herself — not arrogance, not defeat — that he would spend a long time afterward trying to name correctly.
Dignity, he eventually decided. The specific dignity of someone who has survived being made into a symbol.
“You’ve come to see if I’m monstrous,” she said. Her voice was low, clear, and completely without inflection.
“No,” he said. “I’ve come because I wanted to meet you before I made any decisions.”
A pause. The eye-slits aimed at him steadily. “Most people don’t bother.”
“Most people are afraid of uncertainty.”
“And you’re not?”
“I’m afraid of plenty of things,” he said honestly. “Uncertainty is just one of them. I’ve found it’s usually less frightening than the story you tell yourself to avoid it.”
Another pause, longer. The candles on the side table moved in a draft from somewhere.
“What would you like to know?” Elina said.
“What do you want?” he asked. “Not from the marriage. From your life. What do you actually want?”
She was quiet for so long he thought she might not answer. When she spoke, her voice was different — smaller, more careful, as if she were handling something fragile.
“To be outside,” she said. “In an ordinary way. To walk somewhere without people pressing themselves against the walls.” A pause. “To play the piano for someone who actually wants to listen.”
Richard nodded slowly. “I’d like to hear you play,” he said. “If you’d be willing.”
She looked at him — or rather, the eye-slits aimed at him, and he had learned already to think of them as her gaze. “Why?”
“Because you mentioned it first,” he said. “People usually mention the things that matter.”
