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DAYS
    I am not a slave. The Abbot, in this one thing, was wrong: I have never thought myself a slave.
    But I was born to a crown. I was born to a fate defined by my bloodline and by the forces of history. I was born to a duty that I did not choose, and cannot set aside.
    I was born to be a hostage.
    I was very young when the king my grandfather died and the queen my mother ascended to the throne. Like many other royals, my mother had made a dynastic marriage young—just out of the Precepture. She had been sure to have a child—me—while young. She had known she would not be eligible to hold a throne until she had a hostage child to turn over to Talis.
    So she had me. She took our throne. And she turned me over.
    On the day of my mother’s coronation, I was made Her Royal Highness Greta Gustafsen Stuart, Duchess of Halifax and Crown Princess of the Pan Polar Confederacy. The next day, I became one of Talis’s hostages. I was five years old.
    Of my time before the Precepture I mostly have bits and pieces. But I remember the day of my mother’s coronation—the sea of little flags in the fists of the crowd, the sway of the formal carriage, the diamond pins in my mother’s hair—and I remember the day after. I remember how the ship came, and how the two Swan Riders stepped out of it.
    They were two huge men with huge wings. My mother’s sharpened, painted fingertips bit into my shoulders. She held me fiercely and then—
    Then she let me go. She let me go, and she gave me a little push between the shoulder blades. She pushed me away. I staggered for a second. Then I walked to the Swan Riders because my mother wanted me to, and because if I had clung to her, I would have been torn from her arms.
    Even then, I knew that.
    The boy with bound hands: Who was he, that he did not know what I had known at five? Who was he that he did not know that resisting Talis and his Swan Riders is futile? (That was in fact exactly how Talis put it, in the Utterances. Resistance is futile. )
    My mother had not had a choice. Like me, she’d never had one. Like me, she’d been born to a crown. Like me, she had her duty. She too had been a hostage. And her father before her. And before that, and before that—for four hundred years.
    In the Dark Ages of Europe, kings had exchanged their own children as hostages to secure treaties. Each king knew that if they broke the peace, their own sons would be the first to die.
    The royal hostages of those ancient days were raised in enemy courts. In the Age of Talis, we are raised in a handful of Preceptures, scattered around the globe. We are raised together equitably, and we are educated impeccably, and we are treated as well as can be managed. And if war comes, we are still the first to die.
    And therefore, war does not come.
    Or not so often. Talis made many changes to the world, many things that pushed war toward ritual. The Children of Peace are only part of it, but we are the keystone. Between us and the orbital weapons, the great AI keeps things pretty well in line. What wars occur—perhaps two or three a year—are symbolic, short, and small-scale. Global military casualties per annum are normally in the low thousands, civilian casualties almost nil. This is the treasure and crown of our age: the world is as peaceful as it has ever been.
    The world is at peace , said the Utterances. And really, if the odd princess has a hard day, is that too much to ask?

    There followed, then, a series of hard days.
    The boy with bound hands was, we were told, from a new state called the Cumberland Alliance. We knew better than to ask anything more, even when the boy did not immediately appear. We did not discuss the boy, or what might be keeping him. But of course there was nothing out of line in discussing geopolitics, so we talked Cumberland to death.
    Sidney’s nation had won the war that killed him, which I suppose would have pleased him. The Cumberland