that. I have a hard time keeping straight who is so important that I shouldn’t speak in front of him, and who is just a regular fellow. But even I know that a princess is not just an ordinary girl.”
She shrugged and turned her attention back to the shelves, pulling things out, looking at them, and putting them back. “I don’t know what ordinary girls are like,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever known one. Last year—at the balls—that was really the only time I got to know people my own age.”
“The queen isn’t much older than you are,” Cammon said, wondering what information he might glean in response to this observation. “And you seem to spend a great deal of time with her.”
Her face was in profile to him, but he could see Amalie’s slight smile. “Nothing very girlish about Valri,” she said. “I love her dearly, but she is hardly lighthearted.”
“She seems to feel that it’s important to stick close to you.”
“She does,” Amalie said, pulling down a book, studying the cover, and replacing it. “It is.”
“Why?” he asked bluntly.
She turned to face him again, smiling, but the smile was a mask. “So many reasons,” she said. “So have we settled that?”
“Settled what?”
“We are friends now? You will come to see me, and you will not wait for an invitation, and you will not give me any of these excuses about not knowing how to behave around royalty?”
He felt bewildered but exhilarated, and it was rare that Cammon was bewildered by anyone. “You might find that I am around too much—that I don’t know when I’m supposed to go away,” he replied. “You might find that I don’t know when to stop talking or when you need to be left alone.”
“I don’t mind telling you to be quiet or go away.”
He grinned. “ That doesn’t sound very friendly.”
She laughed. “I will try not to be too rude, then,” she said. “At least at first. If you will promise not to stay away.”
“I can’t stay away, or haven’t they told you?” he said. “Senneth wants me to sit in on all your wooing. So I can tell who’s sincerely full of admiration for you and who has smuggled a knife in and wants to slit your throat.”
Her eyes widened and she clapped her hands to her mouth as if to push back a laugh. “No, really? I imagine that will make it even easier to get to know all the serramar who come calling. You on one side of me, Valri on the other.”
He was grinning again. “Why not have Tayse and Justin in the room while you’re at it? The whole entourage.”
She dropped her hands but she was still laughing. “Well, I suppose any man who’s willing to run that gauntlet will at least have proved he has courage. That would be something in his favor, at any rate. So are you planning to come here every day, or just on the days I’m expecting to be courted?”
“Senneth thinks I should live at the palace, at least for a while,” he said. “After what happened today—on top of what happened two weeks ago—she thought both you and your father might be safer if I was on the premises.” He thought that sounded boastful and added quickly, “Because sometimes I can sense things. Bad things. I can tell when people have violence in their hearts.”
All the laughter had left her face. “What happened two weeks ago?” she asked.
By the Bright Mother’s burning eye. “Something I wasn’t supposed to mention, evidently,” he said.
“Tell me,” she said.
She was the princess; she could command him. Besides, Cammon had never seen the value of withholding information. “A man had come to Ghosenhall and was planning to kill your father,” he said. “He’d stolen the clothes and the papers of a merchant from Arberharst who had been granted an audience with the king. I could—I could feel his thoughts and his plans—I don’t know how to explain. So I alerted Tayse and Senneth, and we stopped him.”
“What happened to him?”
Cammon grimaced. “I
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