Alas.
All my beautiful dreams popped like a soap bubble.
No baron.
No keep.
No guest chambers with embroidered cushions I could morally appropriate.
No kitchens to infiltrate.
No discretionary purse to "borrow."
Her Highness did not get domesticated.
Her Highness got shipped.
To a convent.
I remember staring at the shepherd who told us, waiting for the punchline.
There wasn't one.
"Nope," he said. "Not married. Wrapped."
Wrapped.
And before you get ideas — no.
Not even a nice, horny temple like the one I got educated at.
No incense.
No silk.
No priestesses teaching sacred bodily devotion.
No gentle chanting that slowly escalates into profitable evening rituals.
Nope.
This one was basically cold storage for inconvenient women.
Stone walls.
Charcoal wraps.
Barefoot year-round.
Porridge.
Silence.
Three hundred days of not speaking or your progress resets like you're some kind of holiness abacus.
I looked at the Dragon.
He looked at me.
"Well," he said carefully, "that is significantly less monetizable."
"Shut up."
"They shaved her, I assume."
"Shut up."
"They counted her breaths."
"Shut up."
He paused.
"You are about to do something extremely disruptive, aren't you."
I cracked my knuckles.
"Who dares lock my princess in a linen coffin."
He sighed like a scholar watching a tavern brawl unfold in slow motion.
"You only call her that when you're about to commit structural heresy."
"Good," I said, already turning north toward the cliffs. "Then you know what's coming."
Because baronial infiltration I can do politely.
But cold storage?
Cold storage requires blasphemy.