Setting aside the crown prince and the princess, I'd never met the Second Prince. Hilda was the only one of us who was acquainted with him. The Second Prince was famously in poor health and rarely showed himself at official functions.
The elderly attendant politely requested that I accept the Second Prince's invitation to lunch tomorrow. And he was inviting Hilda along too. From my perspective, however, there was no reason to accept an invitation from the Second Prince when he wasn't even the crown prince.
Not all royals are the same. Plenty of high-ranking nobles looked down on the Second Prince. On top of that, his faction was made up mostly of outsiders in noble society, so its influence was negligible.
A sudden invitation at this point—there had to be something behind it.
