"...wasting our time bothering with some idiot prince."

"He is a potential ally and he is no idiot."

"He is a fierce negotiator, that much he has already made clear. What will he do now that we are no longer the ones in power? He is cut from the same cloth as everyone else who wears a crown. I don't trust him as far as I can throw him."

"You just saved his life. At the very least, he owes us the chance to explain our cause."

"He is slowing us down, Frederico. We cannot afford that."

"He stumbled, poisoned, all the way to my rooms. We are the only allies he has left in the entire country..."

Stars twinkled overhead, the tranquil sound of a fire crackling somewhere nearby. Crickets chirped, undisturbed by the voices that had roused me from my sleep.

Sleep. Was it really sleep?

My throat burned as I swallowed, a foul, tinny aftertaste lingering on my tongue. My mind wouldn't orient itself, skidding from one thought to the next, unable to string them together. As I stared up at the stars, I kept remembering an opulent dining room. A free fall into the darkness. Screams and chaos as the king splayed out on the table. The clop of horse hooves and quiet Ardal voices...

"How do we know he wasn't coming to finish you off?"

"You're being ridiculous."

"No, you're the one being ridiculous, forcing me to help some pathetic, hapless Pretanian when I should have been saving the little ones. Now they're stuck with that tyrannous wench for a queen and-"

"That's enough. I made my decision and you will respect it. Dulciana will not hurt the little ones, but she would have killed him."

"She certainly tried her hardest. On multiple occasions, too," I said in perfect Ardal.

The conversation went quiet as I struggled to push myself up. Clearly Frederico was the one making the decisions, since I wasn't tied to the tree behind me as if I were an untrustworthy prisoner. Instead, they'd laid me out in the hollow between the roots, a blanket spread over me and a rolled cloak tucked under my head.

Nice enough, especially for people who considered me a dead weight that was slowing them down.

"He can speak Ardal?" demanded the woman with the scarred face from Frederico's chambers, appropriately shocked. I only wished my vision would focus properly so I could've appreciated the expression on her face.

Her face...

My thoughts skidded and spun as I attempted to focus on her, on what I knew about her. I knew her voice. The penchant for cursing. Her familiarity with the crown prince...

She was Beatriz.

"I told you he wasn't an idiot, sister."

I was still staring at the unveiled princess when Prince Frederico came into focus as he knelt before me, inspecting me as he offered me a waterskin. My hands were clumsy as I took it from him, spilling water all over myself in my haste to drink. Behind him, Beatriz had risen, unfurling herself from where she'd been seated beside a modest campfire.

"At least he isn't a dead idiot," she muttered. Silhouetted as she was against the fire, I couldn't make out her face, but visions of scar tissue danced across my addled mind.

Beatriz was scarred. That was why she'd worn the veil. But before my mind could seize on that thought, it skipped away to other memories, memories of bitter vials and hushed hiding places and shouting guards.

"How are you feeling?" Frederico asked in Pretanian, when I finally lowered the waterskin.

"Like I've been trampled by a stagecoach," I said, "Though I suppose thanks are in order."

"Don't thank us yet. We are hardly out of hostile territory," Frederico said.

"Then why, might I ask, did you light a fire?" I replied.

"Look at him, thinking he's so much more clever than us," Beatriz huffed, crossing her arms.

"Because without a daily dose of antidote, you and I are as good as dead," Frederico said, "And you cannot cook an antidote without a fire."

Touche.

"For the record, I fancy myself quite clever," I said, turning my attention to Beatriz.

"I'm sure you fancy yourself quite a many things," she muttered, turning her attention back to the skewered animal roasting on the fire.

"What happened to your veil?" I asked, my head throbbing as I pushed myself upright. But before I could rise to my feet, Frederico rested a hand on my shoulder, keeping me in place.

"Now is not the time for questions," he said, something firm and unrelenting in his gaze. When he was sure his point had been made through the fuddled haze of my mind, he reached into a pocket to produce a pair of vials like the ones Dulciana and her sisters had swallowed at dinner. I squinted at the vial he'd handed me while he tipped back the contents of another.

"How long will we be needing this?" I asked. Frederico chuckled as he stood.

"That all depends on how heartily you drank to my sister's toast," he replied returning to his place by the fire, "And how heavy-handed she was with the poison in the first place. A week, perhaps two?"

The amber liquid sparkled in the firelight. Something important was lurking in Frederico's words, something my mind would have seized onto and filed away if it had been in proper working order. Something that kept skipping just out of reach...

I popped the cork topper from the vial, wrinkling my nose at the smell of it.

"It helps if you block your nose," Frederico said, visibly fighting a smirk.

"Only children block their noses to swallow antidotes," Beatriz muttered from where she'd crouched by the fire to prod at the contents of a suspended pot.

My eyes on her hunched form, I poured the amber liquid down my throat.

But rather than swallow it with little more than a wince like Frederico, I coughed and sputtered as it seared its way down my throat. Beatriz tossed an amused glance over her shoulder, a smirk to mirror her twin's illuminated on the unscathed part of her face.

"It gets more palatable with time," Frederico said as his sister pulled the roasting animal from the fire. He tore some meat from the carcass, passing it to me on a banged up tin plate. "Eat up and get some rest, we'll be riding early and far tomorrow."

His mention of riding finally had me noticing the pair of horses just out of the circle of firelight, tethered to one of the many trees surrounding us. As the poison cleared, it was as if the world were coming back into focus, one piece at a time.

"Where?" I asked, not bothering to inspect the meat before devouring it. It tasted about as bad as I expected, but then I hadn't expected much. Food was food, especially for fugitives like us.

"Don't let spill every one of our secrets, will you?" Beatriz said, interrupting her brother before he could speak. She held his gaze, something unspoken passing between them.

"I can understand you, you know," I pointed out, which earned me a flash of a grin from Frederico and an annoyed grumble from Beatriz.

"I liked him better when he didn't speak Ardal," she said, taking an irritated bite from her own plate.

"We're going somewhere safe. That's all you need to know for now," Frederico said.

"I can be of help to you, if you'd trust me," I said, monitoring the look that the pair of them exchanged. Not exactly suspicion, but most definitely not overt trust.

They still didn't know what to make of me, but at least they were plying me with antidotes and food.

"And so the negotiation begins. Don't say I didn't warn you," Beatriz muttered to her plate, earning a sigh from her brother.

"I'll repeat myself in case my Ardal wasn't up to snuff last time: I can understand you, you know," I said.

"I feel compelled to warn you that you are getting on my last nerve," Beatriz said, fixing me with a firelit glare, once again the scarred part of her face bathed in shadow.

"How terrifying," I said, unable to fight my smirk.

"Beatriz," Frederico said, a warning in his tone as she set down her plate, pivoting around to face me. She was dressed much like her brother, in dark travelling attire that consisted of pants rather than a skirt. She leaned her elbows on her knees, tilting her head as she studied me. She said nothing, instead waiting for me to break the cricket-chirping silence between us.

It wasn't a tactic that I hadn't encountered before, but somehow, with her face flickering with dancing shadows from the fire, an utter lack of amusement in her eyes, I felt myself longing to fill the silence, to spew some arch comment about her missing veil. Perhaps it was because I knew that I was annoying her, but as my mind slid from one thought onto the next, I realized that I was enjoying it.

And that posed a problem.

I dropped my gaze to the battered plate in my lap, focusing on choking down the barely edible meat of some poor forest creature. I didn't have to choose a princess any more. For all my family knew, I was as good as dead, poisoned in the coup that had delivered Dulciana's long-awaited crown. To say the treaty was nullified would be the world's greatest understatement. The moment my father learned of Dulciana's plot, even his stubborn drive to keep to his word would break. Country always came before family for him, but a strike against me was a strike against Pretania. He would make Dulciana pay, dearly.

And that meant that I was free. Free of the mess I'd mired myself in to allow my brother to marry the woman he loved. Free to return home, to flee the shores of this forsaken country and its venomous, poisoning court. Free to choose anyone as my bride, not just a member of the Ardalonian royal family.

Free because a crown-prince and his twin had hauled me out of the palace and through darkened city streets while I was no more than an unconscious sack of flesh.

Lost in thought, I hadn't noticed that Beatriz had turned back around until she and Frederico resumed their conversation, in barely audible whispers now. As they spoke, their lilting accents tugged at something in my mind, something I'd overheard before I'd fully awoken.

You just saved his life. At the very least, he owes us the chance to explain our cause...

I massaged my temples, hating how sluggish my thoughts were. It had come back to me, but it had been an effort. It was even more of an effort to attempt to puzzle out why I'd thought such a comment was so important in the first place. Of course I owed them my life, but what I could offer them kept eluding me, the pounding of my head settling squarely behind my eyes.

Setting my plate aside, I leaned back against the makeshift pillow they'd created out of a rolled cloak, staring up at the stars. At least there I could latch onto something familiar, the constellations I'd learned to identify during my time in Relizia. They twinkled overhead as if nothing had changed since the last time I'd stared up at them, when Ardalone was ruled by a king and I was still attempting to navigate my way around a betrothal agreement.

As if the tides of power hadn't shifted so drastically, so unexpectedly, that I'd almost died in their wake.

My last thought was of the revenge I'd wreak on Dulciana for almost killing me, twice, before sleep reared up and seized me.

**A/N: (Nov 15 2017) I know it's been way too long a hiatus, but unfortunately life has gotten in the way and will likely continue to get in the way until after the holidays. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to those of you who sent thoughts and prayers my way - my grandmother is doing much better and we're hopeful that she'll keep improving as the holidays approach. To those of you who have been following along, my wedding is happening in January, so unfortunately planning and arranging all the details is where I'm focusing my time now. I will try to keep updating regularly, but with work and the holiday rush and visits to grandma and fittings and tastings and florist consults...you guys see where I'm going with this. I wish writing was my full time job so that I could spend my days creating for you, but unfortunately I still need to work to get the bills paid. 

Finally, in all the kerfuffle of the past month, I completely forgot to thank you all for your wonderful votes in the Fiction Awards for The Heiress Queen! I finally added the badge to the cover, so it's only appropriate to shout a big THANK YOU your way for all your votes and support! The win wouldn't have happened without you and I am so, so appreciative of everyone who took a moment (or several) to cast a vote (or several haha). You guys are the best!! ❤️ **