The Affairs of Princes explained (sort of)

Madeleine L'Engle is an awesome writer. One of her most heart-wrenching 
characters is Vickie, a young poet who feels very strongly for other people
and has a certain knack for getting them to feel for her in return.

In "Troubling a Star", Vickie gets the chance to visit Antarctica to see her
not-quite-boyfriend Adam, a biology student who is studying there. But 
Adam is actually involved in some pretty dangerous politics, and one thing 
leads to another, until Vickie witnesses a prince who is courting her shoot 
a man in her defense. The problem is, the man he shot was also a friend of 
Vickie's- and he wasn't actually threatening her (though his superior officer 
certainly was).

Vickie was, understandably, distraught. She wrote a poem for the man who 
was killed.

Otto, the prince, then asks half-jokingly (but rather sadly- he feels really bad 
about killing and about almost being duped into helping the other side) if Vickie 
could "write a lament for the killer." There isn't one in the book, so I took the 
form of the poem for the dead boy and wrote one.

Sometimes we forget that there are at least two broken people after every 
moment of violence- the victim and the perpetrator (not to mention the loved 
ones of both). Otto was a fool, but aren't we all at some point? And he really 
didn't know. So perhaps he grew up a little, and learned things that a prince 
should know, but one has to wonder occassionally if that should be necessary.

Is innocence really such a bad thing?