The Crown Prince Chose the Size 18 Commoner, and the Palace Can't Stop Him novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Votes

There were twenty-one councillors, and Lucan had a paper with every name on it.

He had marked six as friends, nine as Gresham's, and six with a question mark.

"I need eleven," he said at breakfast. "I have six. Two days ago I had five."

"Who are the question marks?"

"Men who vote with whoever scares them last."

"Then they need dinner," I said.

The queen gave it that night, in the small banquet hall, for the whole Council and their wives.

Lucan had expected her to sit.

Instead Ottoline Ardenne came down the stairs in black silk, took the arm of the oldest councillor, and asked after his gout.

She remembered the name of every grandchild.

She laughed at a joke from a baron who had spent thirty years afraid of her.

Gresham, at the far end of the table, watched her with his lips thinning.

Princess Ilse sat at the foot of the table beside her envoy, eating her fourth tart.

"What has she done to her face?" a countess whispered across from me.

"She's smiling," her neighbor whispered back. "Is that allowed?"

I was seated in the middle of the wives, where Gresham's clerk had put me to be stared at.

He had meant it as a punishment.

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