Word travels fast in a market, but it turns out word travels even faster once a prince has been spotted in it wearing a hat that fools nobody.
“How bad is it,” I ask Tan the next morning, watching him hover at the gate with the specific posture of a man delivering news he’s already braced himself for me to hate.
“Not catastrophic,” he says.
“Yet.
The apprentice who recognized him mentioned it to two people.
Those two people mentioned it to a few more.
By tomorrow it’ll be common gossip among the market regulars, though it hasn’t reached anyone official.
Yet.”
“That word’s doing a lot of work in this sentence.”
“I’m trying to be optimistic.”
“Try harder.” I pace the length of the garden, already turning the problem over the way I turn over everything these days, weighing angles like I’m sizing up terrain before committing to a route.
“Okay.
We need to get ahead of this before it calcifies into something we can’t spin anymore.
What’s the story right now, as far as the gossip goes?”
“Mostly just that Prince Casimir was seen buying vegetables at a market stall.
Nobody’s connected it to you specifically yet.”
“That’s something, at least.” I stop pacing.
“Right.
New plan.
We don’t deny he was there.
Denying gives it more weight than it deserves.
We just make the reason for him being there so boring nobody wants to keep talking about it.”
Casimir arrives twenty minutes later, having apparently heard the same news through his own channels, and finds me mid rant to a chicken, which is not, admittedly, my finest strategic moment.
“You’re talking to Duchess about damage control,” he observes.
“She’s a good listener.
Better than most of the court, probably.” I turn to him properly.
“Okay.
Here’s what I’m thinking.
We lean into the crown business cover story, but we make it aggressively dull.
You’re not sneaking around a market in disguise for anything interesting.
You’re personally verifying the quality and fair pricing of goods sold near the palace, as part of your ongoing oversight of the disgraced empress’s activities.
Nobody gossips about boring bureaucratic nonsense.”
“That’s a remarkably specific cover story for something you invented thirty seconds ago.”
“I’m very good under pressure, this is a documented trait of mine.”
He considers it, something reluctantly impressed flickering behind his usual composure.
“It could work.
It’s dull enough to be believable, and it doesn’t contradict anything already said.”
“Great.
Glad we agree.
Now we just need to plant it in the right ears before the gossip finishes writing its own, more interesting version.”
Planting a boring rumor turns out to be a genuinely strange skill to develop, mostly because it requires the exact opposite of everything I’m naturally good at.
I’ve spent years making things interesting for an audience.
Making something deliberately forgettable is a whole different muscle.
“You have to undersell it,” I tell Mei, coaching her through the delivery like we’re rehearsing lines for the world’s most tedious play.
“Don’t make it sound like a secret.
Secrets are interesting.
Make it sound like something you’d rather not be talking about because it’s genuinely tedious.”
“I don’t know if I can sound bored on command.”
“Everyone can sound bored on command, Mei, it’s the easiest emotion to fake.
Think about court etiquette lessons.
Think about listening to Lord Xu discuss his estate’s drainage system for forty minutes.”
Something in her face shifts into perfect, glazed disinterest.
“The prince has been overseeing market quality standards.
It’s very tedious.
He checks the vegetables personally.”
“Perfect.
Exactly that.
Deploy it exactly like that.”
She heads off to test the story on her usual kitchen maid contact, and I turn my attention to Tan, who’s proven himself to be our most reliable channel for getting information quietly moving through the right unofficial circles.
“You’re annoyed about it, actually.
Complain about how thorough the prince has been about market inspections lately, more paperwork for everyone, very inconvenient, you wish he’d just let people sell their vegetables in peace.”
“That’s oddly specific.”
“Everything about a good cover story is oddly specific, Tan, that’s what makes it believable.
Vague stories invite questions.
Specific, boring details close them off.”
He nods, apparently convinced, and heads off to complain about excessive market oversight to anyone who’ll listen, which I suspect he’ll actually enjoy, given how much he’s grumbled about actual palace bureaucracy over the past few weeks.
By evening, the story’s made its rounds, and judging by the general tenor of what’s filtering back through our small network, it’s landed about as well as I could’ve hoped.
A few people found it mildly annoying, a few found it mildly amusing that a prince cared so much about vegetable quality, but nobody’s connected it to anything more interesting than exactly what we wanted them to see.
Boring.
Forgettable.
Filed away and moved past.
“I think we’re clear,” Casimir says, arriving as the last of the evening light goes gold over the garden.
“For now.”
“For now,” I agree, “being the operative phrase, since apparently nothing in this life stays solved for very long.”
“You’re getting good at this.”
“At what, specifically?”
“Managing perception.
Turning a real problem into something forgettable before it becomes dangerous.” He says it with something like genuine admiration, warm and a little surprised, like he’s still cataloguing new things about me every week and hasn’t run out of room to be impressed yet.
“It’s not a skill most people have.”
“I spent years making mundane things look exciting for an audience.
Turns out the reverse skill’s just as useful, if slightly less fun to practice.” I sit down on the crate beside him, close enough that our shoulders brush, and neither of us moves away from the contact this time, some old instinct to keep a careful distance finally starting to wear thin between us.
“Though I could do without the part where every solved problem seems to reveal a slightly bigger one underneath it.”
“That does seem to be a pattern.”
“A concerning pattern.”
“An informative one, at least.” He glances at me, something quiet and warm in his expression that he’s stopped bothering to fully hide these days.
“We keep finding our footing, regardless of what gets thrown at us.
That’s not nothing.”
“No,” I agree, watching the last of the light fade gold over the garden, over the fence we built, over the whole stubborn, strange life we’ve somehow assembled out of scraps and spite and, apparently, an increasing number of very boring cover stories.
“It’s really not.”