Choosing to run away was the hardest thing Isabel had ever done. It wasn't because sneaking out of her carriage was easy—it was certainly proving to be harder than she thought it would be—but because it went against what felt like every fiber of her being. A princess who abandoned her subjects hardly seemed worth the crown, in her mind, although it wasn't anything anyone had quite taught her.

Her mother had always stressed that being a ruler was a responsibility much more than it was a right, it was true, and Isabel had a vague memory of her father telling her something similar when she had been quite young. But what had really stuck the idea in her head had been the history she had learned, of all those royals going back to Oveja I.

Among those seemingly countless kings and queens, there had been every sort of ruler, no matter how the books and her tutors tried to flatter them. There had been wise kings and foolish ones, cruel queens and kindly ones. There had been royals who had taken the throne so late in life they had spent far more time as a prince or princess than as a king or queen, and those who had ascended to the throne so early in life they had been younger than Isabel herself was. And in the stories of her long-dead ancestors, Isabel had tried figuring out for herself the answer to a very simple question.

Were they a good ruler?

Isabel believed, with all her heart, that her mother was a good queen, and while her memories of her father were growing dim she thought there had never been a better prince consort. What made them good, though, was something that had only occurred to her gradually rather than all at once. It was because the great kings and queens of Zootopia had placed their subjects above themselves no matter the cost.

Queen Alicia II had starved alongside her subjects when a horrible drought had hit the kingdom, and her legacy was the elaborate plumbing that covered practically the whole of Zootopia to keep it from ever happening again. King Oveja V, in the perilous aftermath of his father's descent into madness, had married a ewe he never loved because it would help restore the kingdom's stability and the nobility's confidence in the throne. Princess Laila, who had been born eldest but so sickly that even with alchemy a simple cut was a life-threatening injury, had stood aside from her birthright to allow her younger but healthier sister to ascend the throne.

But for many kings and queens, such a pivotal moment had never come. They had ruled over a flourishing kingdom without ever facing a crisis that demanded such a sacrifice. That might not have been fair, perhaps—surely even in the most peaceful of times, there had been difficult decisions to make and opportunities to show off their mettle—but what Isabel had been left with was a question she could hardly answer.

Did she have that kind of strength within her?

As Isabel prepared to leave her carriage, it occurred to her that there had never been a royal such as herself. When she looked at the great golden doors in the palace outside the throne room and the family tree inscribed on it, her own name didn't stand out much only because her portrait hadn't been added yet. When her twentieth birthday finally came, though, she knew the difference from her ancestors would be obvious. Her peculiar blend of traits, both prey and predator, had always made her different, and when she looked for a resemblance to her predecessors it seemed always to elude her.

But, perhaps ironically, she was also the member of the royal family who most obviously belonged to it. Many of her forefathers, if they had shed their elaborate clothes and jewelry, could have walked any of the streets of Zootopia completely unremarked. They would have been only another sheep, one of the seemingly endless multitude that could be found anywhere from the poorest farms to the wealthiest shops to the grandest noble houses.

Isabel, however, would always stick out.

If there was another chimera precisely like herself she had never heard of them; chimeras were vanishingly rare and ones who combined both predator and prey even more so. It had been one of the reasons it had been such an unexpected delight to meet Commandant Totchli; it was true that she was obviously a rabbit with a fox arm rather than a complete blend of the two species, but it still gave them something in common. Besides, from what Captain Nicholas had said, the differences went much deeper than just Totchli's arm and the traces of fox fur that went up her shoulder. Most of the rabbit's organs had been replaced with copies of the fox's, or at least so he had claimed. Isabel saw no reason to doubt him—the captain had all the signs of an incredibly talented and clever alchemist—and she had been looking forward to speaking with him again. She harbored a desire to learn alchemy herself, and what Nicholas had shown had been quite impressive. She had, quite simply, liked the fox, which made it difficult to believe he was a traitor.

Certainly she had been cautioned, throughout her life, that there would be mammals who would say anything she wished to hear in the hopes of getting in her good graces, that by being a princess there would always be those who saw her only as a means to an end. Bogo himself had warned her of it, but...

Bogo hadn't seemed himself lately.

That, more than anything, had been what spurred Isabel to action, and it was why she was regarding one of the windows of her carriage dressed in a borrowed set of guard armor that didn't quite fit. Her carriage had, after all, all the supplies that guards would need to ensure her safety, which had included not just weapons but several uniforms and pieces of armor in a variety of sizes. Unfortunately, her chimeric nature meant that she was somewhat awkwardly sized and proportioned, everything too big or too small. She had done her best to alter them, though. Rolling in the cuffs of the trousers to make them shorter would have doubtlessly struck any actual member of the City Guard as unacceptably sloppy up close, and adding wadded up strips torn from a silk sheet to make the chest armor fit a bit better didn't do much to keep the bottom from banging against the top of her tail every now and then. She had opted for gloves—the fact that she had both paws and hooves was one of the parts of her appearance that had always struck her as painfully noticeable—and hid the glow of her platinum torc as best she could with the collar of the uniform tunic.

As Isabel used a spoon that she had flattened to remove the screws securing the bars to a window, she couldn't help but wonder if she was doing the right thing. It was a horrible feeling, but one that she was all too familiar with; none of the aspects of being a royal had ever come easily to her. She always felt as though she was simply acting and hoping that no one would catch on and notice that she was no smarter or stronger or kinder than anyone else. That however the gods might have blessed her mother and her ancestors, they had passed her over.

That was a fear she had never, ever told anyone, not even her mother, and Isabel had no intention of ever changing that. Maybe she was being foolish, and all she was doing was pointlessly risking her life. Someone had tried killing her, after all, and not just once. If it hadn't been for Commandant Totchli and Captain Nicholas, she would have died, and it made her certain that the fox simply couldn't be involved. He had wasted a perfect opportunity to kill her without drawing attention to himself, but even when Isabel had pointed that out, Bogo had been... off.

As Isabel fought with a particularly stubborn screw she realized she was getting dangerously close to stripping, she scowled at it and slowed down, working more carefully. It was like it was embodying all her irritation with Bogo, but she wasn't sure if it was really his fault. Isabel barely remembered Grandpapa Mateo, her father's father, since he had died a few years before her father did, but she had the vivid impression of a confused old jaguar who had seemed to think that she was Queen Lana II. He had been a bit like Bogo had been acting, prone to disturbingly long lapses of silence before saying things that just didn't quite make sense no matter how certain his tone had been. It must have been hard for her father to watch his own father decline; Isabel suddenly remembered how his eyes had been wet at the funeral.

She paused a moment as she let the memory wash over her. Sometimes it seemed like her memories of her father were too precious to take out and examine, or maybe it was just that they were too painful. Whatever the case, though, Isabel was glad to have it. Would her father have approved of what she was doing?

Isabel realized she had no idea; he had died when she was much too young. Or perhaps he had been killed, as Bogo thought. That was something that Bogo had never told her, nor had anyone else, but she had gotten the sense of it through the corners of conversations, between what was said and what was not. She had wondered, but not quite dared ask, if the attempts on her own life was some trap years in the making finally closing, what had started with her father ending with her. Or, then again, perhaps not with her. Perhaps her mother would be last. If someone had wished to see her mother suffer, Isabel was hard-pressed to think of anything that would have been a crueler torture, to watch first her husband and then her daughter die. The thought almost stopped her from continuing to remove screws.

Almost.

Isabel had gone back and forth several times now, her certainty coming and going in waves. But if Bogo's mind was going soft—or, worse, if someone was making it go soft—she couldn't rely on him. His answers to her questions had lately had a peculiar quality to them, as though he was speaking of things he had been told rather than things he had seen. She thought she knew the buffalo about as well as she knew any of the mammals who spent a great deal of time in the palace, and he had always been a solid and dependable presence. He had never lost his temper with her, but Isabel knew he had one, no matter how carefully he hid it. Behind that impassive face was a boiling cauldron of emotion, and she had learned to read the signs that most mammals probably missed due to his intimidating bulk. He should have been seething at Captain Nicholas's supposed betrayal, his words tightly snapped off and his posture even stiffer than usual. Instead he had sounded as though was trying to talk himself into believing what he had said.

Isabel wasn't sure what could possibly affect a mammal's mind so greatly while still leaving them more or less normal. If Bogo had drank to excess, or consumed one of the plants that were said to provide visions from the gods, he would have been different, but in a predictable way. Babbling and slurring his words, his eyes dilated and his movements unsteady, all of the things she had read about but never experienced. Bogo's mind falling apart with age seemed closest to what Isabel had observed, but from what she had been told of Grandpapa Mateo it had been a slow and gradual decline for him, not something that had come on instantly. What that left Isabel wasn't quite sure, but it did leave her with another paranoid fear.

What if the same thing was happening to Totchli?

Perhaps Isabel had been reading too many romances—they were her guiltiest and most secret pleasure—but she thought there had been something between the fox and the bunny. Something more than just friendship; the way they looked at each other had called up long-buried memories of how her parents had looked at each other. There was a fondness there, and something else she couldn't quite describe. A hunger, perhaps? As though if she hadn't been there they would have embraced each other, pulling together into a kiss that never—

Isabel shook her head, her ears flushing with embarrassment. She wasn't doing anything but distracting herself from her task, her mind wandering away from the tedious job of removing all of the many screws. Why'd they have to be so long, anyway? Her paws were cramping up and she stretched them as best she could, her claws going in and out as she did.

When the throbbing went down to a more manageable level, Isabel set to work again, deliberately focusing on nothing but the screws. She tried to push all of her worries—about what she was doing, about her mother, about Bogo, about Totchli, about Nicholas—aside and keep her mind blank. Eventually, with a sound of triumph that was somewhere between a bleat and a growl, the last screw came free

Isabel took a moment to examine her appearance in the mirror before moving onto the next stage of her plan, trying to cast a critical eye over what someone else would see. There was no avoiding the fact that if someone examined her too closely, it was obvious who she was. She felt almost as if she was wearing an enormous sign, with giant letters made of alchemical torches, saying, "I'M PRINCESS ISABEL!" but she tried not to focus on that.

If someone else saw her from a distance they hopefully wouldn't notice. Hopefully. With so much of her body covered by the borrowed City Guard uniform, and with the ill-fitting clothes hiding the shape of her body, it really came down to if someone would notice her face. There was, unfortunately, little she could do about that—the standard City Guard uniform didn't include a conveniently face-concealing helmet. It had been one of the reforms to the uniforms made long before her own birth, a way of making the guardsmammals appear more approachable and less threatening. Isabel had always thought it was a good idea, but now that she needed something to disguise herself she was wishing that it hadn't been made.

Her eyes wandered the room, searching for anything she could use to change her appearance even a little. If there had been a pair of scissors, perhaps she could have tried trimming her woolly fur, which was so unlike any other mammal, but there didn't seem to be any. But then her eyes fell upon the small case of a writing set she had recently used for another part of her plan and an idea occurred to her.

Working carefully, trying to avoid getting any on her clothes, Isabel used the ink pot and started blackening the tawny parts of her head. It definitely wouldn't pass close inspection—there hadn't been enough ink to make her fur pitch black, and from a few inches away the lighter coloration would have surely been visible—but Isabel didn't think she'd call attention to herself from a distance. With a grimace, Isabel tucked her tail up against her back, hiding its unusual length and coloring as best she could, and then examined her reflection again as she belted a sword to her waist under her cloak. It'd have to do, at least until she got to where she wanted to go.

When Isabel removed the bars from the window, which came off easily with nothing holding them in place, she had a heart-stopping moment as she thought she saw someone watching her. But it was only a shadow, and she cursed her jumpiness as she waited for her heart to slow down. If the heroes of stories had been afraid of shadows, it certainly never made it into those stories.

With the moment passed, Isabel lowered herself out of the carriage as quickly as she could, desperately saying a prayer in her head that no one would notice. She had chosen the window on the opposite side of the door, where she knew a guard was stationed. There hadn't been any guards facing the window, but that, at least, had not been sloppiness on Bogo's part. The guards were alert for something coming towards the carriages, not from the carriages, and Isabel crept quietly away. Her heart was pounding louder than ever, but she had almost done it. She was—"Hey!" an unfamiliar voice barked, "What are you doing so close to the princess's carriage?"

Isabel spun, dread filling her heart, and faced a burly wolf in a lieutenant's uniform. "I— I was supposed to go to one of the supply carriages, sir," she managed, trying to give her voice a deeper and huskier tone.

The lieutenant huffed, rolling his eyes. "Well this isn't it," he said, "They're that way."

He pointed with the tip of his spear, and Isabel snapped a sharp salute. "Thank you, sir," she said, and the wolf nodded dismissively.

It was all Isabel could do not to break into a run or stagger as she walked away, amazed at her luck. The wolf had, it seemed, barely paid any attention to her, but she supposed the saying she had heard really was true. The clothes made the mammal, and confronted with a deferential mammal in a City Guard uniform heading away from the direction of the royal carriage, she must have been much less suspicious than she had thought.

Still, she didn't want to wait long enough for anyone to notice her absence, and quickly made her way to to where she had been heading all along, keeping her head down and stepping aside to let other mammals pass. At last, she made it to the deep chasm that surrounded Phoenix and, more importantly, to where Commandant Totchli had descended into the darkness. The rope the bunny had used was still there, guarded by a rather bored-looking pair of mammals who threw glances of longing at the soldiers briskly ordering themselves into columns near the repaired bridge.

As she approached, Isabel withdrew a piece of parchment and flashed it at them. "I've got orders to go after the rabbit," she said, her voice surprisingly steady to her ears even with her heart in her throat, "Signed by—"

The taller of the pair, a heavily built female ox, snatched the page from Isabel's paw and started examining it. She was nearly as worried about the letter passing inspection as she had been about leaving her carriage; although she had had the right paper and seal to make something look as though it came from an official source, she had been forced to try forging the signature from memory. "Bogo himself," the ox said, her voice surprisingly high-pitched and feminine for so large a mammal.

She shook her head, exchanging a glance with the male bison at her side, who couldn't have been more than two or three inches shorter. "Better you than one of us," she said, and the bison chuckled his agreement, adding, "What'd you do to piss him off?"

"I— Uh—" Isabel stammered, floundering for words.

Why hadn't she considered what she'd do if they tried making conversation? Or at least forged a set of orders from someone lower on the chain of command? "Dropped his best breastplate," Isabel improvised, unable to stop her voice from rising at the end and making it sound like a question.

The pair of guards winced with identical expressions of sympathy. "Well, good luck ensign," the ox said, shaking her head again, "Waiting at the bottom of a pit for the rabbit to show up sounds like loads of fun."

She had put a slightly cynical spin on Totchli's species, and Isabel couldn't help but feel a touch offended on her behalf. But she was in no mood to give the guards an opportunity to realize she wasn't just a luckless officer drawing a punishment assignment and she started for the rope. "Hey, ensign?" the bison asked, and Isabel turned to him, trying to keep her expression neutral.

Had he noticed the sword she had hidden under her cloak? Or the gleam of her platinum torc? Her heart pounded louder than ever, and Isabel could feel her limbs trembling even as she tried forcing them to stop. "Now, maybe this is rude, but I ain't never seen a mammal like you. What's your species?"

"Chicimazatl" Isabel invented wildly, and the bison nodded.

"Never heard of that," he said cheerfully, "Take care down there, ensign!"

The ox and bison both gave Isabel a lazy wave, and just like that, she was lowering herself into the bowels of the ruins under Phoenix.

Author's notes:

Going to Isabel's perspective is something I've looked forward to doing; hopefully you also found it interesting.

This chapter contains a somewhat oblique reference to chapter 14; King Oveja IV's descent into paranoid madness is described there, and this chapter indicates King Oveja V had the difficult job of restoring order and stability following his father's purges. This does also indicate that King Oveja IV's brother, who took the throne after King Oveja IV abdicated it, didn't have his own child become ruler. Princess Laila's condition is intended to be suggestive of hemophilia, which was extremely common in the royal families of Europe in the 19th century.

Chapter 12 is where the great golden doors inscribed with the royal family tree is mentioned; as described there, the portraits are only engraved either after the member of the family reaches age 20 or dies, whichever comes first.

Screws were probably first used in wooden screw presses sometime before the first century BCE, but what we consider modern metal screws likely didn't appear until about the 15th century, and remained quite rare until industrial processes for rapidly and cheaply machining screws appeared in the 18th century. However, the existence of alchemy in this setting does mean that such fasteners could be very easily made by even a relatively unskilled alchemist; a single "perfect" screw could be endlessly replicated. The fact that the princess can use a flattened spoon to remove the bars from the window suggests that it's either a flathead screw (the first common type) or a relatively wide Philips-head.

"Chicimazatl" isn't a real Nahuatl word, but it'd mean "dog deer" in English.

As always, thanks for reading! If you're so inclined as to leave a comment, I'd love to know what you thought!