His real name was Lucien Varenne, and that evening he stood on the steps of Harbridge Police Headquarters, waiting to lie to the one person who had never lied to him.Zara came through the glass doors with her coat over her arm and a folded sheet of paper in her hand. She walked like someone stepping off a ride that hadn't quite stopped spinning, and when she saw him she held the paper up between them. "Counsellor of the Valmorran Crown," she read. "Lucien, I couldn't find Valmorre on a map.""It's in the mountains," he said. "Between three bigger countries.""That's not an answer." She came down the last steps and lowered her voice as a patrol car rolled past. "A woman in a coat put a folder on the table, and the detective looked like he was going to be sick. Twenty minutes later I'm walking out the front door. Why would a country I've never even visited make me untouchable?""I have no idea."He said it evenly and held her eyes while he did, which was the mistake. Zara had spent yea

Zara had not answered her phone in nine hours.Lucien had called her back the moment he read her message, while the jet was still rolling toward the runway, and the call went straight to voicemail. Aurelio reached the security officers on the second ring. They were already running for their car, four minutes from the garage, and when Lucien told the pilot to turn around, Aurelio laid a hand on his arm and said quietly that four minutes was four minutes, and that his grandfather might not have four hours. So the jet climbed. Somewhere over the ocean the satellite link dropped, and Lucien spent the rest of the flight staring at a phone that refused to ring.Valmorre rose out of the mountains in white stone and glass, lit from within against the dark, a city stacked along the cliffs so that every window seemed to hang above the valley. He had not seen it in two years. A car met him on the airstrip and carried him up the switchback road to the palace, and the guards at the gate saluted a

Zara could not sleep.By two in the morning she had stopped pretending. The clip from the summit was still playing on every channel, and somewhere across the city a warrant was being typed up with Lucien's name on it. She sat on the edge of her bed with her bandaged hand throbbing and took the royal decree out of her coat pocket, where it had stayed folded since the night it set her free.She had read the words a dozen times by now. Counsellor of the Valmorran Crown. Full diplomatic immunity. Effective immediately. Tonight she looked only at the signature.It was a single name in a looping hand, so tangled with flourishes that a stranger would see little more than a long, slanting L and a sweep of dark ink. Zara was not a stranger. She tilted the page toward the lamp, the way she had tilted a thousand whiteboards toward the light to make sense of his scribbles, and the name came apart into letters she knew.Lucien.She told herself she was exhausted, that plenty of people wrote an L l

"There's an easy way out of this," Detective Pasco said.It was past one in the morning, and the interview room smelled of burnt coffee and old paint. Lucien sat with his wrists cuffed to the steel rail on the table. Pasco sat across from him with his sleeves rolled up and a thin file he had not bothered to open, and the red light on the camera in the corner blinked steadily above them both."I was at the airport, Kerrigan," Pasco went on. "I saw that old man bow to you. I heard what he called you." He leaned forward. "So here's how this goes. If you really work for Valmorre, the embassy can confirm it. One phone call, one word from you, and the whole thing goes away. You walk out of here tonight."Lucien looked at the camera, then back at Pasco.He could end it in one sentence. He knew exactly which one. My name is Lucien Varenne, and I am the reigning Prince of Valmorre. The words were right there, as easy as breathing, and they would open every door in the building.But the moment

His grandfather was waiting by the window.Lucien had walked there with the note folded in his fist, through corridors where the palace was only beginning to wake. Servants hurried past with fresh linen for the Council chamber. Somewhere a clock struck six, and a guard straightened as he passed and did not dare meet his eyes.Prince Florian sat in the same chair as before, wrapped in a grey blanket, and behind him the sun had cleared the peaks so that the whole range blazed white against the sky. The chessboard was gone from the table at his elbow. In its place lay a heavy leather household book, the kind Aurelio kept locked in a cabinet below stairs, open to a page of narrow columns in faded ink.Lucien knew the name at the top of the page before he was close enough to read it. The Chamberlain, written in the same faded ink as everything else on the page, as if it were nothing more than another household expense.He stopped in the middle of the room. For a long moment neither of them