The palace is burning and filled with screams.
Caught between the treachery of the Stepnaya and the slaughtering fury of Johann's crimson-shirted revolutionaries, the Crown's loyalists are driven and scattered and brutally cut down. The Corgi, only one woman, can only dash past it all in the shadows and hope to remain unseen.
In the throne room where she first presented herself, so long ago, Tomas de Poodle lies bleeding, and the Princess stands, stiff and stern and unyielding still, at the tip of the blade that felled him. Some tedious Stepnaya elder, no doubt imagining he will walk out of their coup with the crown upon his head, is mid-spitflecked rant, snarling about her unfitness to rule, her weakness, the decay of the great institutions of state upon her admittance of one the lower orders to knighthood—
His continued talking allows the Corgi to crawl, unheard and out of sight, along the spectator seating, heavy brass candlestick clutched in her fist. He is winding up to the triumphant act of regicide when she judges herself sufficiently close; she sees his arm drawing back theatrically to thrust as she vaults the low wooden screen separating the seats from the chamber floor, her own weapon high and swinging with deadly practicality.
There's a moment of sick, confused terror when she's not certain she arrived in time, the Princess swaying a little on her feet; but the noble lies insensible, sword clattered far out of his hand, and the Princess is untouched. Only, the Corgi sees, unmoored by the same uncertainty of her survival, and with great dark unslept crescents beneath her eyes.
They stare at one another, and then there's a crash as doors fly open beneath Stepnaya boots, and the Corgi drops the candlestick, turning to look for the fallen blade; but before she can move toward it, the huge double doors opposite the oncoming flood of nobles' soldiers also burst apart, under an onslaught of steam and steel.
Johann's monster Armour shrugs through the splintered doorframe, raising its arm. The rotary apparatus spins to life, threaded with seething thistle-purple, and the Corgi snatches the Princess's hand and bolts into cover behind the throne as streaks of witchfire begin to spit across the room, and the screaming begins anew.
"I wasn't soon enough," the Corgi says feverishly. "I didn't— I'm sorry." The Princess is pressed to the dark wood of the throne's back, and the Corgi stands as if to shield her from hate and violence with her body, a hand planted either side of her. "I can't stop this," and the Princess shocks to her anguish, her sincere intent to uphold the core of oaths she was released from: protect.
Still knowingly running after the phantom thrown Orb of Royal approval, into the jaws of death itself.
"You can," the Princess says, and lifts shaking hands to fumble with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons at her throat. "You can. There's a way."
She sees the Corgi's gaze rivet to the exposed column of her throat, and
oh.
"The Crown was first forged in an alliance with this land's witches," she forces herself to say, head swimming, "whom we promptly betrayed. Ancient power, bound to the office—" and, unable to control the trembling of her fingers, yanks hard, scattering buttons, suddenly exposing her collarbones. She yanks again. "You know this—" and she grabs, unseeing, for the Corgi's wrist, leading her hand to skin.
"Oh," the erstwhile knight sobs, and the Princess's breath explodes from her.
For a moment it is as though they are standing on a bridge of rainbow light, blossom blowing around them, an instant of perfect silence and clarity with hearts in time; and then the Princess finds herself sliding bonelessly down the back of the throne to the floor, l'épee au coeur, the ancient blade of starlight, drawing smoothly from her breast.
"Oh," the Corgi sobs again, holding it aloft, soft light spilling onto her face; and the Princess reaches out to shakily tug at the hem of her tunic.
"I am not your Princess," she says through a choked throat. "You are not my knight. Save yourself," and the Corgi looks down at her and reaches out a hand to pull her to her feet.
"I didn't come here for the Crown," she says, eyes brimming, but fierce. "I didn't come here to win. I came here for you," and she tugs the Princess close, face pressed to the Corgi's shoulder; holding the sword out like a promise of free passage as the punishing barrage of the Revolution's Steam Armour finally rips the wood of the throne apart.
The Princess can feel every hex as it falls on them, jolting through the Corgi's body, and clings to her as she begins to tremble and pant; and yet they do not die. She turns her face, away from its soft haven of cloth and closeness.
A rolling tide of witchfire is breaking around them on a soap-bubble barrier of starlight, the Corgi shuddering with effort as the sword protects them. The Steam Armour is advancing on them, bodies under its clawed steel feet; under the magical onslaught, their shield is slowly but steadily creeping inward on them.
The Princess thinks: there are so many things she could have said, when there was time. She slips her shaking hands beneath the hem of her last and only knight's tunic, palms to skin.
"I missed you," she says with tears in her eyes, and the starlight blade rings with a glassy note and pours with colour. The Corgi's arm around her shoulders tightens, and the bolts of purple death do not simply break upon the barrier, but begin to ricochet; and when the Corgi finally swings the tip down to rebuke their attackers, it flings the killing magic straight back into the Steam Armour's teeth.
The obliterating thunderbolt of a steam-boiler explosion blows off the entire roof.
Loyalists are the first to find her, in the wreckage, and spirit her away ahead of the arrival of more Revolutionary troops; carrying with them, on her iron insistence, the greviously wounded Goodboy de Poodle and the unconscious form of her knight. Proper treatment is a luxury they cannot pause for; a hasty carriage steals them out of the city, toward some — she hopes — sympathetic country estate.
Not many hours into the journey, the starlight blade evaporates, and the Princess clutches the sudden cold within her chest and wonders if some People's Flag now flies over the remains of the palace, if the ancient bloodsoaked power of the Crown has been put to some real rest.
She holds the Corgi's hand, and stares at nothing until she wakes, and when she does they look at one another for a long, silent time.
"I commanded you, once, to fetch for me. To win for me," the Princess says. "I cannot command you any more. You are under no oath to me, never again."
The Corgi smiles a little, brushes her thumb over the Princess's knuckles.
"I can only ask you this," the Princess says. "Stay?"
