“Prince Elliott, thank you so much for this!”
“It was nothing, Margaret. I’m happy too, to be able to see you dressed up so beautifully.”
With his beloved clinging to his arm, Elliott had his head in the clouds...for all of a few seconds until the next words out of Margaret’s mouth ruined it.
“Okay! I’m going to go brag about this to Miss Rachel! I’ll tell her how nice you’re being to me!”
Elliott was less than keen on the idea. “Margaret,” he said, “you don’t have to go out of your way to show her...”
“But, Prince Elliott, Miss Rachel’s holding an event of her own, so I wanted to crash the party in my dress and let her know who it is you really love!”
“I wandered by on my way to the castle, and there were all these guests in fancy outfits heading down to the dungeon.”
As soon as Margaret finished telling them that, Elliott and the others rushed to the scene.
“Damn! I should have noticed this afternoon,” Elliott chided himself on the way.
“Yeah, you really should’ve,” Sykes agreed. “I mean, when does any of the weird stuff Miss Rachel pulls not have a negative impact on you?”
“How is that any basis for deciding what is notable?!”
When they arrived at the prison, they found the door wide open. Dazzling lights poured out of the doorway along with pleasant chatter that could be heard all the way in the rear gardens.
“Damn it! What kind of idiot hosts a party in a dungeon?!” Elliott bellowed.
“Well, it is Miss Rachel,” Sykes offered.
George added, “It is my sister...”
When they reached the bottom of the stairs, they found a wide chandelier lit up, making the room as bright as day. It was all a touch rough to call it a soiree, but the ladies and gentlemen were reasonably well dressed. A number of tables that weren’t supposed to be there were lined up, and boys were serving dish after dish. And in the corner was the prison guard, wearing a bow tie with his usual squalid work clothes and serving wine from a barrel.
The prison guard...
“Hey, you!” Elliott shouted.
“Oh, if it isn’t His Highness.”
“Don’t you, ‘Oh, if it isn’t His Highness,’ me! What are you doing down here?!”
“Serving alcohol. I took a drink for myself, and the white and the red are both great. We have rosé too, but it’s bottled and we only have one case. If you don’t get some early, it’ll all be gone.”
“That’s not the problem here, okay?! You’re supposed to be managing the prison! Why didn’t you stop these people before they came in?!”
The prison guard looked around. “Uh, isn’t it obvious? With all these big shots showing up in groups, one after another, who was I to tell them they couldn’t come in?”
“It’s your job to tell them exactly that! Just run them off!” Elliott demanded.
“But they pushed past me, saying they had invitations. And a lot of them had heavy accents too.”
“Huh?!”
Working his way through the excited crowd, Elliott finally reached Rachel, who was carrying on a pleasant conversation.
“Hey, Rachel! What is all this ruckus about?!” Elliott asked.
“Hello, Your Highness,” Rachel greeted him.
Rachel was all dressed up too. She wore a deep blue evening dress—different from the one she’d been wearing when they jailed her—and some understated pearl jewelry. There was no way she’d had something like this prepared inside her cell. She must have brought it in at some point.
Elliott shot Rachel a glare that could kill, but she spoke to him in a slow, relaxed tone, like one you’d normally use with an acquaintance.
“When I got to thinking about it, I hadn’t thrown a moving party yet,” Rachel commented.
“A moving party?!” Elliott screeched.
“But you know how my position is right now?”
“So you hadn’t forgotten that...”
“I thought it might be difficult for nobles and politicians to come to the party, out of deference to Your Highness, so...I restrained myself and instead limited the invites to foreign ambassadors, men of the cloth, and the merchants I do business with.”
“What kind of half-hearted attempt at being considerate is that?!”
When Elliott turned and surveyed the crowd, he realized that while he certainly did recognize the people there, they weren’t his countrymen. There were even priests in their formal garb. Some people were dressed for a normal soiree and speaking the language of the kingdom, but he didn’t recognize any of them, so they must have been merchants. If they were purveyors to the ducal house, they all must have been fairly wealthy.
By the look on George’s face, he evidently recognized them.
Elliott desperately resisted the urge to call George over as Rachel went on exchanging pleasantries with her guests. She was the life of the party. No one seemed to mind that she was the only one behind a set of iron bars. Elliott and the others felt so left out that they might as well have been on the other side of the horizon.
“Damn Rachel!” Elliott scoffed.
The guests were all either foreigners, business people, or religious officers. In other words, the prince couldn’t silence them using his authority. He couldn’t even blame the guard for letting them force their way in.
When the guests saw the state of things, it was clear who they would side with. Rachel was skillfully using the party to make her position known, and if Elliott wasn’t careful how he responded, it would make things worse.
As Elliott ground his teeth so hard it was almost audible, Rachel chatted with some white-haired old fart in a language Elliott didn’t understand.
Rachel and the old man clinked their glasses together happily.
“Prison, yay!”
“Yay!”
When Elliott heard their energetic cheers, he couldn’t stop himself. He lunged at them and said, “Hey! What’s so fun about prison?! Huh?!”
“Wait! You can’t do that, Your Highness!” George yelped, desperately trying to drag the prince back. “That man is an archbishop! You can’t fight with him!”
Elliott finally relented. “Damn it. Is there no way to convince these people Rachel is in the wrong?” he said, crying bitterly.
“We’ll have to send people to explain our position to each of them later. Still, with so many of them here, will we be able to remember them all?”
While Elliott and George hid behind a wine barrel in the corner to discuss strategy, Margaret jumped to her feet, her nostrils flaring.
“Prince Elliott, I’m going to go explain to them!” she announced.
“Margaret?!”
“I mean, this is all crazy! You’re righteous! We can’t let the evil Miss Rachel outdo you like this!”
“Outdo me...” Elliott murmured. It was the truth, but hearing Margaret say it hurt.
George hurriedly tried to help Elliott recover, while Margaret walked purposefully to a box at the edge of the crowd and climbed on top of it.
“Everyone, listen to me!” Margaret shouted, sounding out of place. This drew the attendees’ attention, and all eyes gathered on her. “I don’t know what you people were told, but Rachel’s the bad one! Prince Elliott risked putting his fiancée in jail in order to save me! Don’t let her deceive you!”
The room went quiet. Margaret thrust out her meager chest with pride, a smug look on her face. The sound returned...but not in a way that Elliott welcomed.
“Ha ha ha ha ha!”
“It’s a nice joke!”
“Prison, yay!”
The drunk guests assumed this was some sort of entertainment and applauded her. The way Margaret went around bowing her head to each of them after that only made her less convincing. By the end, she’d gotten caught up in the excitement and was sharing a toast with the rest of them too.
“Prison, yay!” Margaret cheered.
“Yay!”
Margaret came back with a mountain of food on her plate and a sparkle in her eyes. “I did it, Prince Elliott!” she trilled.
“Yeah, you sure did...”
Elliott crumpled. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that she’d had no effect whatsoever.
Margaret looked at him with confusion as she stuffed her cheeks with food.
Suddenly, George noticed something.
“Huh? Where’s Sykes? He came here with us,” he wondered aloud.
The prison guard pointed to the center of the room as he poured George a fresh glass of wine. “If you’re looking for the knight guy, he’s been livening up the party since the moment he got here.”
Having missed out on the delicious food and wine earlier that afternoon, Sykes was excitedly chatting with some old man he didn’t know.
“This is nice. I wish we could do this every day,” Sykes said.
“Ha ha ha! Me too!” the old man agreed.
“Me three!” the ambassador of a neighboring country chimed in.
Sykes clinked his glass against the ambassador’s.
“Prison, yay!”