I could not return to the village. I could not face his parents. I could not bear to live among the memories. I had brought very little money with me, but I never so much as considered going back to collect the rest.

A lower-class woman's opportunities for employment in the city are profoundly limited. I know you catch my meaning; don't laugh, it is a serious problem. But I was prideful, though I no longer had any justification for it, and I did not sink so low. Instead, I disguised myself as a boy and went in search of an apprenticeship. I started with the butchers, since I had some experience in preparing meat already, but was turned away when they found out I had no father to pay my board. "I'm not looking for charity," I told them. "I'm looking for work."

"You and every other country bumpkin driven from their farm," was the gist of their usual response.

Growing desperate, I began to branch out, applying to everyone from tanners to bakers to blacksmiths. At last I found a printer who, when he heard my story, seemed to have some sympathy for me.

"You're a very serious young man, aren't you?" he asked. Yes, sir. "Are you a quiet young man as well?" Yes, sir. "How quiet?" As quiet as you like, sir. "And patriotic?" Sir? "You heard me, boy: do you consider yourself a patriot?" I love my country, sir. "And your queen?" As much as she loves her subjects. Sir.

That satisfied him. He clapped me warmly on the back and hired me on the spot.

The printer was a kind master. He fed me well, kept me decently clothed, and, most importantly, respected my privacy. What's more, I soon discovered his reasons for imposing such an odd interview. Certain publications of his, printed on the sly and distributed in secret, were dangerously subversive in nature. As I set the type on them, I was frequently struck by a sense of quiet dread. I pretended to believe this sense was a premonition of martyrdom, and carefully nursed it into pure, agonizing terror. At times I managed to work myself into such a state of agitation that I could hardly think through the fear pounding in my head. Those were the times I was happiest; at others the illusion would grow unsustainable and come crashing down around me, and I had to drink to forget how outrageously untroubled my life had somehow become.

Every month or so, my master would travel to our kingdom's western neighbor, Midori, to meet with a group of like-minded Kiiroans without fear of being caught. I was sometimes brought along to serve him, sometimes left behind to tend the shop. When I did have the opportunity to go, I paid closer attention than any of those good men realized. Their philosophies fascinated me, as did their knowledge of politics and royal affairs.

It was on one such occasion that I first learned the story of the boy I had wounded. Though he was, quite obviously, the twin brother of the queen, he was not, as I had originally assumed, a prince. The old king, in his last fever-addled days, had disinherited him for some slight or other, probably fairly minor, possibly entirely imagined. His sister had rescued him from banishment by taking him on as a servant, and now, title or none, he answered only to her. "Royal caprice at its finest," one of my master's comrades called it.

These meetings were hosted in the home of a Midorian merchant sympathetic to the cause. To this day I do not understand why a foreigner should have been so interested in Kiiroan politics. At first I assumed he was simply good friends with one or more of the conspirators. That was before I learned, as you soon will, just how personally invested, even obsessed at least one member of his household was. There must have been bad blood of some sort between his family and the Kiiroan royals, perhaps one of those generation-spanning grudges that only grow more vehement as time wears on and the origins are forgotten. I doubt I or anyone else will ever know, now that all of them are so long dead.

The merchant had a daughter. I often worked side by side with her at the meetings, serving the men drinks and cleaning up after them. She was perhaps two years younger than I, and beautiful in all the ways I never had been: delicate, dainty, soft and fair in her features. Her dresses were all verdant in hue, though they varied in shade: emerald, forest, olive, sea green. She was quiet, demure, often feigning blushes at me the first few times we met; she could not have known then how very little effect they had. I thought her sheltered, naïve, and perhaps a bit dim. If you read or listen to histories, you by now have probably guessed her identity, and I'll wager you thought much the same when you first heard her story as it is usually told.

"Did you know," she said to me one day as we were mixing punch in the kitchen, "that the Queen is engaged to the younger brother of the King of Ao? Prince Kaito, his name is."

"Hm," I replied.

"I suppose you did. I see quite well how you like to listen. But here's something you perhaps didn't know: he doesn't love her at all."

"That's hardly surprising," I said. "Marrying for love is the one luxury the lower classes have that the upper ones lack."

The merchant's daughter smiled secretively. "Ah, but there's a complication! She does love him. As much as a creature like her can love, I mean."

"Mhm. And how, exactly, would you know all this?"

Her smile grew. "He told me."

I nearly dropped the glass I was holding. "You don't mean..?"

"I do! I've met him traveling incognito through this very town!"

"Be careful with him," I told her. "Maybe you don't know what boys — even princes, I'd imagine — are like. They'll say all kinds of things, if they think it will help their case."

"I am not as simple as you suppose. I can tell the difference between false love and true."

"Can you?"

"Oh, yes! False love is marked by passionate declarations of affection, sugary sonnets, expensive gifts, and moonlit serenades."

"I see," I said, beginning at last to suspect that she was not quite as foolish as I had originally thought. "And true love, I suppose, does not require all that?"

"True love is incapable of it," she replied. "True love is a state of abject helplessness and vulnerability."

I didn't answer. How could I? Love and helplessness! It struck a nerve.

"And now," she continued after a moment's silence, "I must ask of you an awfully big favor. I'm going to meet him this evening. Will you see to it that we are… ah… compromised?"

With my mind so far off elsewhere, it took me a moment to register the oddity of what she'd just said. "Surely you mean that you aren't compromised?"

She gave an embarrassed laugh. "Oh dear! You must have thought I loved him back. No, I mean you must have us discovered, and by the right people."

I stared. "What exactly do you think that will accomplish?" I blurted out, horrified.

"Oh, any number of things!" she replied cheerfully. "At the very least, it will place her right in the middle of a most inconvenient scandal."

"And what," I asked, "if she decides to take it out on you?"

Her smile withered like dry paper set to a candle's flame. "All the better," she said, and there was no more laughter in her voice. "Won't a man avenge the girl he loves, whoever her persecutor may be?" For the second time that conversation, I was struck dumb. "That gentlemen's club out there," she went on, gesturing towards the wall separating the kitchen from the parlor, "how serious do you think they are? Will they ever do anything but talk, and talk, and publish pamphlets that only they ever read? Building themselves up so that they can feel like men… Oh, I can't bear it! That it should fall on the shoulders of girls like us..! Ah!" She covered her mouth with both hands and looked at me guiltily. For a long time I did not respond. When I did, it was only to agree to help in her plot.

What can I say for myself? I was thrown off by how unexpectedly sharp she had revealed herself to be, but not so much that I failed to recognize it was a desperate, foolish plan. It was also the only plan I had. I could have done nothing and waited for a more opportune time to act. I could have waited my whole life, and who can say how many lives would have been better or worse, longer or shorter for it? But if we are helpless in the grip of love, what are we in that of hatred? And what when we are seized by both?

Still, I have no excuse.