Rejected by His Heir, Chosen by His Crown

Wren was seven the year the throne stopped being a feeling and started being a job.

She was, by then, entirely her own small person, and not one bit the thing the tunnels wanted her to be, which was the only mercy I had. She was practical to the point of rudeness. She loved the water-works with a passion that would have alarmed me if I hadn't known exactly where it came from — she'd inherited her grandfather's obsession with how everything actually functioned, the valves and the gradients and the pressure of it, and she'd follow a main half a mile in the dark to find out why a cistern ran slow, and she asked why about everything until grown adults fled. She hated being fussed over. She hated being watched, though she couldn't have told you why, only that certain rooms made her shoulders go up. And she thought the annual remembrance was, in her exact words, "the boring festival where everyone looks at me and I don't get to do anything," which was the most clear-eyed thing anyone in that city had ever said about it, and I never told her she was right.