SCHEDULE — Miss T. Sharma. 14:00: Deportment & Protocol (Salon Vert). 15:30: Biography Alignment (Library). 17:00: First Public Appearance — Funicular Centenary (duration: 40 min; smiling: continuous).

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"Girlfriend lessons" turned out to mean three hours of being corrected by committee.

In the Salon Vert, a protocol master named Herr Adler taught Tara the Virellian curtsey (shallow, brisk, "we are Alpine, madam, not Habsburg"), the order of precedence at table, and the correct way to accept a bouquet from a child (kneel on one knee, never two — two knees, he said darkly, was Denmark). Ilsa Brandt sat through it all with a legal pad, making notes Tara was not permitted to see but could feel.

The biography session was worse, because it was fiction workshop with lawyers.

"You met," said Ilsa, reading from the approved document, "eight months ago, at a conference on heritage tourism in Geneva. You were introduced by a mutual acquaintance. You bonded over a shared interest in—" she consulted the page "—'sustainable regional development.'"

"No one has ever bonded over sustainable regional development," said Tara. "Marriages have ended over sustainable regional development."

"It's plausible and boring. Boring doesn't get fact-checked."

"Boring gets invented over. If you give the press a vacuum, they fill it with a better story than yours, and then you're chasing corrections for a romance you didn't even get to enjoy." Tara leaned forward. "You don't need plausible. You need tellable. Give them one detail so specific it feels stolen. Not 'a conference in Geneva.' Say I argued with him before I knew who he was. Say I told a tall rude stranger in the hotel bar that his country was a font."

From the window, where he had been standing with his hands behind his back radiating supervised patience, the Prince turned.

"You did tell the Tourism Board my country was a font."

"And they'll have leaked it by Friday, which is my point. The best lies are load-bearing truths." She spread her hands. "I insult you in a bar. You, being you, correct my geography. Sparks. It's tellable, it's checkable in the only ways that confirm it, and it explains the single thing your version can't."

"Which is?"

"Why a woman who'd met you eight months ago would break her own body launching you out of the path of a maypole." She said it lightly. The room went un-light anyway. "People run toward strangers on instinct or toward someone on feeling. Your Geneva story makes me a stranger. So make it feeling."

Ilsa's pen stopped. Rewind, review, and then — Tara clocked it, filed it — the first faint pulse of respect.

"Amend the document," Ilsa said to Dr. Kessler. "The bar. The font. The argument."

"May I ask," said the Prince, dry as the salon's sherry, "what I say in this bar of yours, since I appear to have been given dialogue?"

"You'd have said—" Tara put on a frost that was, everyone present understood at once, an impression of him "—'Virelle has been sovereign since 1191, madam, which is more than can be said for your argument.'"

Ilsa wrote it down verbatim. The Prince opened his mouth to object, then visibly recognized the sentence as one he would in fact have said, and closed it. He exhaled through his nose and looked at the ceiling, and Tara awarded herself the point.

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The Funicular Centenary was, as first missions go, gentle: ride the hundred-year-old funicular up the Aurelberg with the Prince, wave at the summit, accept flowers from a child (one knee), descend. Total exposure: forty minutes, one carriage, eleven photographers on a rota.

The carriage was the problem. It was original 1926 rolling stock, lovingly restored, and sized for the physiques of 1926. Tara and the Prince stood at the front window shoulder to shoulder because there was no other way for two adults to stand.

"You will take my hand at the summit," he said, low, eyes forward, in the tone of a man reading weather coordinates. "There will be a crowd at the viewing platform. Ilsa's brief specifies hand-holding at minute twenty-five."

"Romance by the minute. Very Virelle. Do you also kiss on the timetable?"

"There is no kissing in the brief."

"There's a brief."

"Miss Sharma, there is always a brief."

The funicular groaned into motion. Sankt-Aurel dropped away below them, red roofs and the silver coin of the palace lake, and despite everything her breath did the thing honest breath does at altitude and beauty. He noticed her noticing. He shifted, minutely, so his shoulders stopped blocking half her window. It was nothing. It was the most polite thing anyone had done for her in a year, and it was for an audience of nobody, which was the part she couldn't file.

At the summit, minute twenty-five arrived. He took her hand.

Here is what the eleven photographers captured: a prince and his rumored love, fingers laced, framed against the glacier.

Here is what actually occurred inside the frame: two professionals executing a deliverable with such stiff, catastrophic formality that his hand held hers the way one holds a fish one has been asked to appraise, and she, rattled by the dry heat of his palm and furious about being rattled, gripped back with the confident pressure of a realtor closing on a duplex, and he murmured, "Is this a handshake?" without moving his lips, and she murmured back, "You're the one doing finger arithmetic," and the child with the bouquet chose that moment to ask, in ringing Alpine German, why the pretty lady looked scared of the mountain.

Tara knelt. One knee. She accepted the flowers, said her rehearsed sentence — "Danke schön, sie sind fast so schön wie deine Mütze" — the child glowed at the hat compliment, the crowd sighed like an orchestra, and eleven shutters drank it.

Beside her, the Crown Prince of Virelle watched her charm forty strangers in a language she'd learned phonetically on a plane, and experienced the professional recognition of one operator observing another. It was purely professional. He would be maintaining that position for several more chapters.

On the descent, the carriage empty of everyone but security and altitude, she looked at their reflection ghosted on the glass — the two of them side by side, her flowers, his frost — and said, "Notes on the hand-hold. Because that was a two out of ten and one of the points was the glove."

"I concur it lacked—" he searched, austere, "—fluency."

"We're supposed to have been mad for each other for eight months. Eight-month couples don't hold hands like a treaty signing. They do it without looking. Like it's not an event." She held out her hand between them, palm up, a workspace. "Again. And this time don't place your hand. Just leave it somewhere I happen to be."

He regarded her palm with the gravity of a man being offered either partnership or ordnance. Outside, the pines went by. Then, watching the mountain and not the workspace, he set his hand over hers — no arrangement, no appraisal, just weight and warmth and the loose interlace of a man thinking about other things — and every professional observation Tara had prepared left by the windows.

"Better?" he said, to the pines.

"It'll read fine," said Tara, to the pines.

Neither retrieved their hand. The funicular clanked down through the hundred-year-old dark of the tunnel, and in that minute of privacy, unphotographed and off the brief, the two of them stood holding hands like an eight-month couple, which was to say: without looking, like it was not an event.

It was, the record must observe, an event.

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THE CONTINENTAL INQUIRER: "HANDS-ON HEIR! Leopold and his maypole mystery woman, Tara Sharma, 31, London publicist, spotted 'completely at ease' at funicular centenary. Body language expert: 'You cannot fake that final photograph. The tunnel one. Trust me, this is my job.'"