THE VIRELLE HERALD, morning edition: "TOURISM BOARD TO HEAR FOREIGN CONSULTANTS AS REFERENDUM LOOMS. Also inside: Maypole Festival begins today; Weather Service warns of 'wind.'"

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There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of catastrophe in the life of a crisis publicist: the kind one is paid to manage, and the kind one personally causes in front of forty thousand people and a prince.

Tara Sharma had, by the age of thirty-one, developed an unblemished record of the first kind. She had talked a boy band out of an international incident involving a llama. She had once rewritten an oil executive's apology so thoroughly that two newspapers accused him of being ghostwritten by a poet. She was, professionally, the person you called when the building was on fire and you needed the fire to seem like a bold new approach to heating.

It is therefore with regret that the record must show what she said, at 9:47 a.m., to the assembled Tourism Board of the Principality of Virelle.

"The problem," said Tara, gesturing at a slide that was — and this becomes important — the wrong slide, "is that nobody under fifty knows your country exists, and the ones who do think it's a font."

Silence of the high Alpine variety settled over the room. Somewhere, a clock ticked with the smugness of a clock made locally.

The slide behind her, which should have read VIRELLE: EUROPE'S BEST-KEPT SECRET, instead displayed the internal notes she had typed on the plane, which read, in seventy-two-point font: MONARCHY = MUSEUM WITH A PULSE? Don't say this out loud.

A board member put on his glasses. Another took hers off. Herr Doktor Fenn, the chairman, a man whose mustache appeared to be load-bearing, read the slide twice and said, "A museum."

"With a pulse," said Tara, because when a ship is sinking one may as well conduct the band.

Tara is fine, she narrated internally, in the third person, as she always did when the floor was dissolving. Tara has been in worse rooms. Tara once explained a llama.

"Miss Sharma," said Herr Doktor Fenn, "you are aware that in ten weeks this nation votes on whether to keep its royal family?"

"I am."

"And your professional counsel is that our monarchy is a museum?"

"My professional counsel," said Tara, abandoning the deck with the serenity of a woman stepping off a cliff she had personally built, "is that a museum is only a dead thing if nobody's story is in it. You have a twelve-hundred-year-old crown, a prince people describe using the word 'reliable' — which is what you call a dishwasher, incidentally, not a man — and a referendum you're currently losing. You don't need better photographs of mountains. Everyone has mountains. Switzerland is right there, showing off. You need someone in that palace to be a human being in public, on purpose, before the tenth of June. That's my counsel. It comes with a discount, because I can see from your faces that I'll be leaving through the gift shop."

There was a pause of some length.

"Thank you, Miss Sharma," said Herr Doktor Fenn. "We will be in touch."

They would not, Tara reflected in the corridor, be in touch. The Virelle account — the account that was going to rescue Sharma & Nair from the specific financial condition their accountant described as "pre-owned" — had lasted eleven minutes. She had flown two hours and a funicular for this. She had ironed.

Her phone buzzed. Priya. The text read: How did it go? Do NOT say the museum thing.

Tara put the phone away with great care, as one inters the dead.

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Outside, Sankt-Aurel was committing festivity.

It was Maypole Day, an occasion on which the entire principality — population forty-one thousand, disposition medieval — gathered in the Marktplatz to raise a ceremonial pine the height of a respectable steeple, garlanded with ribbons, pretzels, and, for reasons no two locals explained the same way, a small brass duck.

Tara moved through the crowd with her suitcase, a wheeled object that had chosen this day, of all days, to develop opinions about cobblestones. The air smelled of cinnamon and impending folk dancing. Children wore hats of alarming traditional correctness. Somewhere a brass band was playing what was either the national anthem or a polka about cheese; the two, she would later learn, share a chorus.

And at the center of it all, on a small platform, stood the dishwasher himself.

Crown Prince Leopold of Virelle was taller than his photographs and precisely as warm. He stood in a charcoal suit amid an explosion of ribbons and gingerbread like an undertaker at a birthday party, hands clasped behind his back, expression suggesting a man silently conjugating verbs in a dead language. The crowd adored him with the anxious devotion of people who had read the polling. He waved as though the gesture were being invoiced.

That, thought Tara, with the full weight of her professional expertise, is the most expensive publicity problem I have ever seen.

She was still looking at him — this matters to the physics — when the wind arrived.

The Weather Service of Virelle had warned, in its morning bulletin, of "wind." What descended upon the Marktplatz at 12:03 p.m. was less a wind than an editorial: a single Alpine gust with a running start off the glacier, funneled down the valley, and delivered into the square with the force of a verdict.

The maypole — twenty-eight meters of ceremonial pine, raised by tradition and eleven strong men, secured by ropes that had been blessed but not, crucially, tightened — began, with tremendous medieval dignity, to fall.

It is worth pausing here to note what forty thousand people did, which was: gasp, as one, and take out their phones.

It is also worth noting what Crown Prince Leopold did, which was: nothing. He was looking at a child who had dropped a pretzel. He was, witnesses would agree, entirely unaware that twelve centuries of tradition were descending upon him at an accelerating rate, garlanded with ribbons and one small brass duck.

And it is worth recording, for history keeps such accounts, what Tara Sharma did.

She let go of her suitcase.

She crossed eleven meters of cobblestone at a speed unrecorded in her medical history, shouted a word that would require asterisks in the papers, and tackled the Crown Prince of Virelle clean off his platform — one arm around his waist, one hand fisted in his lapel — carrying them both into a pyramid of festival cheese as, behind them, the maypole met the platform with a sound like God closing a piano lid.

Silence. Ribbons drifted down like confetti at the world's most confusing wedding.

Tara opened her eyes.

She was lying on top of the Crown Prince of Virelle in the wreckage of a cheese display. Her bun had fully deployed; her hair curtained them both. Her hand was still gripping his lapel. His hands, by some royal reflex of etiquette or terror, had caught her — one at her waist, one between her shoulder blades — with the correct form of a man who had taken dancing lessons at gunpoint. Their faces were four inches apart. He smelled of cedar and alarm.

At close range, his eyes were grey-green and enormous with shock, and a single lock of hair had escaped his side part and fallen across his forehead, insubordinate.

"You," said the Crown Prince of Virelle, in flawless, frostbitten English, "are crushing my sternum."

"You're welcome," said Tara.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The maypole," said Tara, "attempted regicide. I objected. You're welcome."

He turned his head. He observed the maypole lying across the splinters of the platform on which he had been standing. He observed the brass duck, which had rolled free and come to rest, gleaming, beside his ear. He performed, visibly, the arithmetic.

"Ah," he said.

"'Ah,'" agreed Tara.

It was at this moment — with her hair falling around his face, his hand at her waist, both of them flushed, disheveled, and lying in cheese, gazing at each other from a distance more commonly associated with either dentistry or matrimony — that forty thousand raised phones went off at once.

The photograph that would appear on the front page of every newspaper in Europe by suppertime, under headlines ranging from WHO IS SHE? (London) to THE PRINCE FINALLY FEELS SOMETHING (Paris) to SHAMELESS (Virelle, letters page), did not show a rescue.

It showed a kiss. Anyone could see that. It showed a mysterious dark-haired woman lying in the arms of Europe's most reliable prince, both of them electric with adrenaline that the camera, a notorious liar, developed as desire.

"Miss," said the Crown Prince, with the calm of a man reading his own obituary, "I am going to require your name."

"Tara Sharma," said Tara. "Crisis publicist."

He closed his eyes.

"Of course you are," he said.

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THE CONTINENTAL INQUIRER, evening edition, front page: "SAVED BY LOVE?! Mystery beauty sweeps Prince Leopold off his feet — LITERALLY. Palace declines to comment. Referendum officials decline to comment. The cheese guild, reached for comment, said it was 'mostly Emmental.'"