The next day crawled by. Junipers plan took shape slowly in her mind, growing more defined with each passing hour. Everything hinged on the all-important first step: her requestand its answer.
Her father had invited her to dine with him that night, just the two of them. Ive started to forget the shape of your face,” hed grumbled playfully, then had called to Lefarge, Have a buffet set up for the rest of the court. Ive got a date with my daughter.”
It was a rare treat, and Juniper enjoyed it to the fullest. She also kept a sharp lookout for the right moment to ask her question.
Sitting across the long mahogany table from her father, she waited out the cheese puffs, and the aubergine bisque, and the crispy oven-roasted root vegetables with thin-sliced pheasant breast in a mulled wine sauce. Her father should be comfortably full, she decided, before receiving any unexpected requests. And hers was as unexpected as they came. Finally, after the second helping of pheasant and roots but before the fig pudding, the gleam in her fathers eye as he stretched back in his seat told her that the time was right.
Juniper clasped her hands under the table. Papa,” she said. I have been thinking about my Nameday gift.”
Ah, excellent,” he said. It is one of the great pleasures of my year, and I have been awaiting this request with particular interest. It is your thirteenth, after all!”
Juniper nodded. It is an important year. And so I wondered . . .” She just had to come out with it. May I have a country for my Nameday?”
A country?” King Regis lowered his forkful of rutabagas and studied his daughter.
Yes! A very small country, but one thats all my own. I could find subjects to settle it, other kids probably, and I should rule it all myself. To practice being queen, dont you see? Ill get to make up my own rules and such.”
Junipers heart hammered out a galloping beat, but she kept her face smooth and focused on sawing the pheasant breast with her ivory-handled game knife, the very picture of a calm, unruffled royal daughter.
A very small country,” her father mused.
Ohwell, yes! If you have any to spare, that is.”
Just sort of lying around.”
Thats it exactly!” Juniper opened her mouth to say more, to tell him of her wishes and longings. Then she stopped. How could she put any of that into words, here in the formal dining room, over rutabagas and roast? She settled for a tentative smile. I could set up court there over the summer. Think of all the time youve spent instructing me in rulership! This could make a grand sort of test, to see how well Ive taken to it.”
Sensing shed given her father enough to think about, Juniper picked up her gold-hemmed napkin and dabbed at her lips. She glanced around. Three staff members stood at attention at the edges of the room, ready to leap to any dinner-related assistance. The first two looked suitably blank and disinterested. The third was a tall, wispy girl with a turned-up nose and bright, smart eyes. This girls eyes were wide with excitement, and her fingers, when she refilled Junipers goblet, trembled just a little. The kings attention seemed to have been equally captured by her request; Juniper soon realized that she wouldnt get much more conversation out of him this evening.
If I may be excused, Papa dear?” she murmured, and he nodded absently. This was the time to give him plenty of thinking space. Shed planted the idea seed and now he would go about watering, pruning, and harvesting it into a perfectly executable plan. Or so she hoped, anyway.
Meanwhile, she had her own planning to do. A great deal of it.