ii.

For the next several weeks, as coachloads of schoolchildren tromped through the public rooms of Buckingham and inevitably left behind quid coins, Oyster cards, takeaway wrappers, homework assignments, keychains (and in one dismal incident, chewed gum stuck to the underside of a two-hundred-year-old antique endtable) to the horror and overwork of the Palace caretakers, Emma thought carefully about the fact that she really should try to find a job. She had graduated from St. Andrews with a solid 1:2 degree in English last spring, and as her mother was in good health and could easily be around another thirty or forty years, that meant she had a whole lifetime to fill before she ascended to the role that all of this was preparing her for. In the past, heirs in waiting had led the leisurely lives of spoiled aristocrats, but Britain had gone sour on that idea quite a while ago, what with the future Edward VII drinking, carousing, constructing special sex chairs as not to crush his numberless paramours with his portly princely physique, and other such escapades that had contributed to Queen Victoria's perpetual state of Non-Amusement with her eldest son. Modern royals were expected to go to college and do something at least resembling a career, not just smashing wine bottles on ocean liners, visiting ill children in hospital, and riding down the Mall in fancy carriages, escorted by men in tall furry hats. They were to have charitable causes, public involvement, productive investment, and to do enough to keep down the constant low-level mumbling that the royal family was an absurdly outdated cabal of useless wankers living it up on the UK taxpayers' dime. It was, to say the least, a delicate balance.

Moreover, now that Emma's status as heiress to the throne was confirmed, it would soon be time for her to conduct her first solo overseas tour; she was expected to have visited, if perhaps not all fifty-three countries of the full Commonwealth, at least the sixteen of which she would be ruling monarch by the time she became queen. She had been to several of them as a child with her parents, but those probably didn't count. They had suggested she start this autumn, in fact, but there hadn't been time to pull together a state visit on short notice, and besides, nobody wanted to go to Canada in winter, not even Canadians. So it would be next spring and summer, which further illustrated the complications faced by a young royal trying to have a career; most regular jobs wouldn't let you just take off for several months to jaunt around the world. Nor were you going to stick the future head of state of close to a third of the earth's population behind a coffee counter. Security and logistical concerns had to be factored in. There were plenty of online crazies obsessed with the beautiful blonde princess. If one of those showed up, at the very least Liam had to be there to punch them in the nose and rugby-tackle them to the ground.

Overall, Emma's options were slim. She supposed she could try to catch on at a London publishing house, but she was also aware that most entry-level positions in publishing were drudge work, and if she did have a certain freedom to select her occupation, it seemed a bit pointless not to take advantage of it. Interning on a movie set? Maybe in the short term, but not for a career. Then what –

And then, almost blindingly simply, she had it.


"I'm sorry, Princess," Liam said. "You want me to what?"

"You – heard – me." It was the middle of their usual run, and Emma was now wishing that she had waited until breakfast to bring it up. Every morning, he loaded her into the Range Rover and drove her out to Richmond for a jog in the park, once she had mentioned that she wanted to get in shape. At least it was supposed to be a jog, and that was how Emma took it. Liam, however, ran at least five miles a day in addition to performing a hundred pushups and a hundred crunches, and as such tended to unmercifully smoke her in his dust. Not too far, of course; he couldn't be out of eyesight, but he had the annoying skill of being able to speak perfectly normally while she was dying like a wounded warthog in the savannah. Hence probably why he was making her repeat herself. Liam's competitive streak was no joke. He wouldn't even go easy on little Neal in video games.

"I said," Emma wheezed. "Ask – Killian – if I can get a job – at the British Library."

Liam raised one eyebrow, in that habit the Jones brothers apparently shared. "It wouldn't be glamorous, you know. Cataloguing and fetch-and-carrying and making sure nobody walks out the door with Anne Boleyn's copy of Tyndale's New Testament in their backpack. Killian once spent six weeks organizing the daily editions of every London newspaper between 1850-1855. Not exactly riveting."

"Just – ask – him."

Liam hesitated, in a way that Emma knew him well enough to tell that he didn't want to do it. As they slowed to a walk beneath the half-bare trees, fallen leaves scuffling beneath their trainers, she said, "What? Why not?"

"Only… I don't know that it's entirely fair to Killian," Liam said, a bit dryly. "Expecting him to do his job normally with you around."

"What do you mean? I wouldn't be there to distract him, I'd be doing the same things he – "

"Whether or not you meant it, Princess," Liam said, even more dryly, "you can be assured that you would have that effect. And Killian is… it's a good place for him, there. I wouldn't want anything to happen that could threaten that."

Emma considered that no matter how much Liam teased his bookish, awkward, mishap-prone sibling, he was also extremely protective of him, for good reason. Liam didn't talk about his past very much, but she knew that the boys were the products of a broken working-class London home, mother dead and father drunk or absent, so that Liam had had to be both of Killian's parents as well as his brother. As such, Killian was his baby, who had to be shielded from the harsher shocks of life when he had already experienced enough of them. She couldn't blame Liam for it, but at the same time, she knew a little too much about living in a bubble, and the fact that while being pushed out of the nest might be jarring, it was the only way to fly. "How about we let Killian decide? Can you at least ask him?"

Liam opened his mouth, apparently discovered that he had no answer for that, and shut it. They finished their circuit, reached the Range Rover (looking rather lonely by itself in the car park) and climbed in. Hopefully they were still early enough to dodge the worst of rush-hour traffic on their drive back into the city, and the silence remained as they pulled out. Emma watched the world go by as she always did – at a safe remove, behind a thick sheet of bulletproof glass – and had just about decided that Liam wasn't going to answer when he said abruptly, "All right. I'll ask him."


The Queen and the Duke were in Scotland, the Duke having been invited to open the new wing at the University of Edinburgh in his titular capacity, and Emma had the royal family's private quarters almost to herself. The House of Windsor was smaller than usual these days, anyway. Mary Margaret's only sister Princess Ruby, Emma's aunt, was single and childless, and lived in a massive, probably haunted old pile in Northumbria. Both David's parents, her paternal grandparents, were dead, and his twin brother James had caused no end of embarrassments for the royal family in the past, by pretending to be the prince in various business transactions and investing the profits in various shaggy-dog schemes. At least so Emma had heard, as she barely remembered her uncle; he had died in a paragliding accident in Italy when she was five, and the conspiracy theorists had never shut up about their belief that "the Firm" had had him done in to put a halt to his brand-tarnishing shenanigans. Certainly nobody had been too broken up about his loss, not even David.

Then there was the queen mother, Regina Windsor – actually stepmother, the second wife of King George, Mary Margaret and Ruby's father. She lived in Kensington with her husband Robin, who had been created Duke of Kent to give him the proper pedigree to marry her; the dirty laundry in this case held that they had been sleeping together well before the king was actually dead. They had two grown sons, Henry and Roland, and Regina was the member of the royal family who could be reliably counted on for a scathing quote about the rest of her relatives, something shocking at an official appearance, or some sort of rumored scandal in her household. For this reason Mary Margaret had tried to minimize her stepmother's role in public life, and every six months or so the tabloids could be counted on to report the sordid details of the feud between the Queen and the Queen Mother, very few of which were actually true. After years of battles, the two women had realized that they were hurting the monarchy and themselves the most, and Regina had grudgingly accepted that she could not have the same influence on her stepdaughter's reign that she had had on her husband's. An entente cordiale was therefore in place, but Emma and her grandmother were not close. It was a shame, as Regina was one of the few others who could have helped her prepare for the role, but the damage appeared done.

As such, Emma's upbringing had been rather lonely. Henry and Roland were the only members of the royal family even close to her age, but they were both in their thirties and married now, and the rift between their respective mothers meant that they and Emma were not exactly bosom buddies. Her best friend was probably Crown Princess Elsa of Norway, whom she had met in the usual haunts for rich young European royals; she had also gotten close to Elsa's aunt, the Queen of Norway's sister Ingrid. Indeed, the British and Norwegian heiresses were planning to spend the Christmas break together at Emma's chalet in Switzerland, for as Princess of Wales, she was entitled to her own holiday. Though she'd probably have to be back to attend church with the rest of the royal family on Christmas Day, as the Queen would be spending it on her estate of Sandringham in Norfolk as usual.

There was also, Emma thought, the fact that she was now entitled to move out of Buckingham and establish her own household at either St. James' Palace or Clarence House, which she was definitely interested in doing. Buckingham had never been the favorite residence of anyone in the royal family and she really needed her own place. She loved her parents dearly, but now that she had graduated from university, she didn't want to just move back home, no matter how common the activity might be among other members of her age group. If she was going to make something of herself, or ever have a social or romantic life again, the first step was leaving here. Liam was scrupulously discreet, bless his heart, but good luck getting a guy in here without the entire staff knowing. Which in short order, meant the newspapers would as well. Everyone who worked with them on a daily basis was vetted and background-checked, of course, but those anonymous tipsters had to come from somewhere. In the past, Emma had identified the loose-lipped among her inner circle by telling one person one thing and someone else another, and seeing which version ended up in the Sun. As such, she had learned caution and self-sufficiency early on. Her default was to assume that someone would sell her secrets out for money, because eventually almost everyone did. It was, apparently, just too tempting.

She was thinking of this, a bit glumly, when her phone buzzed on the arm of the Louis XIV sofa, startling her. She fumbled for it, swiped it open without looking at the number, and said, "Hello?"

There was a long pause on the other end, as the caller adjusted to the shock of reaching her in person. Then a voice said, "Your – Prin – Em – ?"

Emma's heart gave a pleased, surprised little twirl. "You're going to have to find something more efficient to call me," she teased. "Hi."

"H-hi." Killian Jones cleared his throat. "Er – Liam gave me the number, I hope it's all right to ring you directly. I heard you might – that you wanted, well – that you were interested in working at the Library?"

"I – yes, I am," Emma said. "Liam wasn't keen on the idea, but he said he'd ask you. So – so you agree?"

"Yes, yes of course I do!" Killian sounded shocked that she would even have to ask. "I asked the RBM curator, and we'd be honored to have you. In fact, we just got a huge bequest of books and papers from Isaac Heller's estate, we could use the extra hands."

"Get out. The Isaac Heller?"

"The one and only," Killian said proudly.

"That's amazing!" Emma couldn't hold back her excitement. Isaac Heller had been the archetype of the eccentric, reclusive literary genius for years; he was actually American by birth, but had been such a resolute Anglophile that most people tended to forget. He shut himself up in his rambling country mansion in Yorkshire and produced a long succession of bestselling novels, along with some highly regarded books on literary criticism, mostly about fairytales. He had passed away in rather mysterious circumstances earlier this year, and apparently willed his entire oeuvre to the Library. "When can I start?"

Killian laughed. "Tomorrow at 9.00 am?"

"Yes – yes. I'd love to."

"Great. See you then?"

"See you then."


Liam, predictably, was rather stunned that Killian had actually agreed, and in the car the next morning, he made her promise that she would take it easy on the poor boy. But by the time they pulled in and parked, Emma had basically tuned him out in her excitement. Liam, of course, had to accompany her, which was a bit awkward in view of the whole thing, and she really didn't think that a deranged bibliomaniac was going to leap out at her from behind the card catalogue, but protocol was protocol, and if it got everyone to cooperate, so much the better. Her parents weren't back from Scotland yet, but Emma figured it was better to ask forgiveness than permission. She was a grownup, after all. This was her call.

They went inside, were goggled at by the interns, and escorted up to the place she had visited Killian before. He was there along with his supervisor, the curator, and they welcomed Emma effusively, pronounced themselves delighted, and then took her in to spend the morning in a deathly boring lecture about the approximately 1,257,634 rules for working at the Library. Of course she was the Princess, but that did not equate to special treatment, as this place was not Bob's Drugstore and countless historical treasures depended on the proper execution of her duties. But Emma listened intently, lapping it up. She didn't want to be "Your Royal Highness" here. She just wanted to be Emma.

At last, however, the procedurals were through, they took a lunch break, and then spent the afternoon barely scratching the surface of the first of the hundreds of boxes from the Heller estate. Everything had to be extensively described, registered, photographed, preserved, labeled, sorted, and stored, and thus it promised to take an abominably long time, but Emma did not care. She went home that night with eyes crossed, fingers blistered, back aching, and feet killing her. She had rarely felt so happy in her life.

That was how the rest of the autumn proceeded. Emma had managed to keep her new job out of the news, and as such she enjoyed a rare degree of freedom and autonomy at the Library. Her coworkers knew who she was, of course, but none of them talked, and since she worked in the back away from the visitors, nobody came to gawk at her like a zoo exhibit. She and Killian were paired on the Heller project, and as such spent every day together digging through the boxes and unearthing all kinds of items that even Killian, with his encyclopedic knowledge of all things literary, could not identify. The eminent author had apparently owned books of which no other copy existed in the world, along with manuscripts nearly as convoluted and impenetrable as the famous Voynich, at the Beinecke Library at Yale University in America. Emma joked that they must be the sorcerer's apprentice's notes, to which Killian grinned and shrugged. "I hope so," he said. "What's a good story without a little magic?"

What, indeed. The weeks of working together with just the two of them had wrought nearly as miraculous a change in Killian. He was still shy and skittish, but to far less a degree than previously, and there was so much more to him than just Liam's clumsy little brother. He could read at least six languages, identify a manuscript or incunabula's date and country of origin nearly at a glance, and spent hours digging up some of his favorites to show Emma – not the famous ones that anyone else would know, but ones where monks announced, "I am done copying this long gospel, now I am going to get drunk," or doodled in the margins, or snarked at stupid things their contemporaries had said, or otherwise let bits and pieces of their actual personalities shine through the veil of time. The Library also owned royal acts and charters from the twelfth century on, and Killian accessed these for Emma as well, tangible relics of her ancestors over eight hundred years. Born into a royal dynasty almost a millennium old, directly descended from William the Conqueror, Emma had always been uniquely aware of history and her place in it, but this was the first time she had really felt it.

All in all, it was getting harder every day to maintain her resolve never to date another commoner. She reminded herself that while Killian might be king of this realm, surely he would crumple if faced with the bright lights and nonstop scrutiny and relentless pressure of her world. She liked him – more than liked him, in fact – and was fairly sure he felt the same for her, but it seemed stuck in a holding pattern, both of them knowing that they could not make the first move to go further. Liam, who sat in the corner of the reading room with some book or journal or other (he must have gone through half the Library's archives on the Royal Navy by now, which was no mean feat) was already prone to clear his throat loudly if they spent too long accidentally getting lost in each other's eyes. Whether it was to remind them that the boxes were not going to unpack themselves, or to warn Killian not to try anything funny with the princess, or to warn Emma not to toy with his little brother's heart, or all three, she did not know, but it was definitely getting obvious. She couldn't keep ignoring it forever, but she might try.

That, therefore, was how the autumn passed. And then, Christmas.