The Stand-In Princess

The summons came at midnight, in the undercroft laundry of Saltmere Palace, where Mia Carrow had washed the kingdom's linen for six years: You. Come with me.

One hour later she had been bathed, corseted, drilled in three curtsies, and handed a one-page contract with the word Voluntary printed above the signature line. The wage was eight hundred crowns. The term was three months. The job was impossible: Princess Vera of Virland has run away rather than sign the marriage clause hidden inside a treaty with the neighboring kingdom of Bellory, and the Compact talks open at dawn, and the crown needs a princess by morning. Mia has the face for it, or nearly. What she does not have is anyone to teach her how to survive what comes after.

Then there is Nicholas Vane, Master of Ceremonies, the Queen's nephew and the most dangerous man in the palace. On her very first night, at her very first state banquet, he covers her one mistake in public, leans close under the music, and tells her exactly how he knew her within an hour: a washerwoman's hands keep the water in the knuckles, and the contract he has read was signed the day before she was hired. He knows her secret from the first hour. What he does with that knowledge, and what she does with his, is the season's real treaty: a private alliance between two people who can each hang the other, built of dance lessons where his hands correct her frame and pretend that is all they are doing, midnight briefings over treaty drafts, a shared breath inside a linen press while an audit walks past the door, and a standing bargain neither of them will say out loud.

Mia is twenty-three and has been invisible her whole life, and it turns out she is very good at being seen. She plays the cold princess with a working woman's sense, asks questions no courtier would dare, wins the coast a public opinion rating no true princess ever held, and charms the press while she is at it. But the season has teeth. Princess Odile of the Harrowcourt branch is counting, politely, always counting, and a stolen ledger page, a forged signature, and a casino full of photographs are all drawing lines toward a single night: the signing banquet, where the question of the household will be answered from the dais, before two kingdoms, with Mia's true name on every table.

She took the crown's coin for nine hundred crowns' worth of her brother's surgery. Now the tide has turned, the noose is trimmed in silk, and the only paper that can save her is the one paper in the kingdom that can hang her. To survive the last bell of the season, the laundress of the undercroft will have to decide what she owes the woman whose face she wears, what she owes the crown that bought her, and what a working woman is allowed to keep for herself when she finally stands in the brightest room on the coast, in front of the one man who has known her, exactly as she is, since the beginning.