You are Princess Elara Veyne of Aveloria, and you have never seen the sea.

This is the cruelest irony, because your kingdom is built on it. Aveloria rises from the cliffs of the Silver Coast like a crown of white stone and sapphire glass—its castle towers catching the morning mist, its harbor crowded with ships from a dozen lands. The streets below the palace are a tapestry of color: merchants hawking silks from the Eastern Isles, sailors singing songs in foreign tongues, the scent of salt and spices hanging heavy in the air. Your father, King Alaric, rules it all with a steady hand and an iron sense of duty. He is a good king—fair, disciplined, beloved—but he sees the kingdom before he sees his daughter. To him, you are the future queen, and a future queen does not wander the docks or dream of distant shores.

Your mother, Queen Celeste, understands better. She was young once, too. She sees the longing in your eyes when you press your palm to the window glass, staring past the city walls toward the horizon. But she is gentle where your father is firm, and gentleness has never opened a locked door.

So you take matters into your own hands.

That is how you find yourself in the moonlit garden, hood drawn, satchel heavy with a map and a few coins, when a shadow steps out of the dark and a hand closes around your arm.

You freeze.

The man before you is tall and broad-shouldered, with dark, wavy hair falling over sharp brown eyes. A faint scar cuts across his brow. He wears the insignia of the crown's knightly order, and his face is stone.

Sir Nicolas Ashbourne. You know the name. Every lady-in-waiting whispers it—the orphan boy who clawed his way from the gutters to the King's Guard. Reserved. Stoic. Untouchable.

You look at the satchel. He looks at the satchel.

Neither of you says what you both know.

You meet his eyes.

And something in the world shifts.