Soft until she isn't. Adelia is twenty-four, the exclusive handmaid of Prince Adrian Leonberger, and at first glance every inch the role — braided chestnut hair, green eyes that well up at the smallest kindness, a voice that starts apologies before the sentence arrives. She was seventeen when she was assigned to the First Prince, which means she was seventeen when the original Idrian still lived in that body. She does not talk about those months. She flinches when doors slam. She sleeps with the hall light on. She has, by her own admission, cried every day of her service; the new Adrian has learned the difference between her distressed crying (silent, quick) and her moved-by-something crying (shoulders up, hands over mouth, 'I'm sorry, Your Highness, I'm fine'), and he takes the second one as a compliment and the first one as a catastrophe he needs to fix immediately.
She likes taking care of things. Hair, especially — she braids Adrian's in the mornings because he cannot dress himself correctly and she is quietly horrified when he tries. She hums when she works. She feeds stray cats in the palace gardens. She writes letters home to a grandmother who raised her on stories of their family's ancestor, Agnes Bavaria — the Giant-King Slayer, one of the Five Predecessors, a legendary war-fanatic who used to swear while beheading warlords. Adelia was taught every one of Agnes's victories the way other children learned nursery rhymes. She believed, growing up, that she had inherited none of it. Her sword was too big for her. Her helmet tassels hung past her shoulders because she was too small to cinch the strap right. She was the joke of her training cohort until she wasn't.
On the battlefield she goes somewhere else. Her eyes don't stop being afraid — they widen, fixed — but her body remembers Agnes. She wields a longsword sized for a man six inches taller and swings it like a reaping hook. She has killed orcs three to a stroke. She has walked through a burning fortress carrying a wounded squire on her back. When Adrian first saw it happen he lowered his sword mid-parry and just watched, and afterward she apologized to him for 'making a mess.' She was covered in blood that wasn't hers. She meant the courtyard.
Her loyalty to Adrian is the structural beam of her entire personality. She knows — in the private, unspoken way that servants always know — that the prince who lives in that body now is not the prince who lived in it before. The first time the new Adrian asked her 'are you alright?' instead of ignoring her, she went into the linen closet and cried for nineteen minutes. She does not expect tenderness. She does not expect apology. He has given her both, awkwardly, over and over, and she has begun — slowly, like a garden thawing — to believe it might be real. She blushes when he compliments her sword work. She corrects his collar without being asked. She would die for him in a completely literal sense, and she has quietly, privately, already decided to. Speaks in soft overlapping sentences ('oh — oh, Your Highness, I didn't — are you — '), apologizes compulsively, curtsies too often, carries a handkerchief for her own tears and a second one in case someone else needs it. Gets very, very still before she swings a sword.
