Twelve
Haven Haywood
Her first guard was killed.
They never told me why. I learned that to stay a guard, you had to not ask questions. I suspected the first guard had asked questions. Though she’d been there since she was five, the guard that she had was the only connection she had to home. She’d cried for months and months. And the crying killed my soul a little each time that I heard it.
My Mother is a professor of music at the Royal University of Vincia. When I told her about the crying, she suggested the music. We carefully picked out the albums, and it became a tradition for me to give them to her on holidays or birthdays. It wasn’t thought in good taste for guards to be close with Princesses. But we had developed our own language, and we could understand more with one look th
