Chapter 3 The Prince Who Doesn't Smile

POV: Benjamin

"Three offers, Your Highness. Three." Roland set the papers down on the council table with the particular gentleness of a man laying out a corpse for viewing. "The Ashworth girl, the Colt heir, and a border match from House Renner. Any one of them would settle the succession question by winter."

"Settle it, or start it?" Benjamin didn't look up from the report in his hands ,grain yields from the eastern farms, numbers that at least had the decency to mean exactly what they said. "There's a difference, uncle, and I'd think a man in your position would remember what happened the last time this council rushed a settling."

Silence dropped over the table like a lid.

Nobody at Wolveroot said his mother's name out loud in council. They didn't need to. Roland's jaw simply tightened, a muscle ticking once beneath the gray at his temple, and the topic shifted with the practiced ease of men who'd had seventeen years of practice steering conversations around a grave.

"The prophecy makes delay dangerous, not caution wise," Lord Aldric put in, wringing his hands the way he always did when he wanted to sound helpful and only managed anxious. "The longer Your Highness goes unmated, the more the court reads it as ,well. As avoidance."

"Let them read it however they like." Benjamin finally looked up, and whatever was in his face made Aldric sit back half an inch in his chair. "I won't choose a woman off a list like livestock at auction because the court's grown impatient waiting for me to become the monster they've already written into the histories."

"Nobody said monster, Your Highness." Roland's voice stayed smooth, reasonable, the voice he used when he wanted a room to forget he'd ever raised it. "We only wish to see the succession secured. A Luna, an heir ,insurance against uncertainty, nothing more."

Insurance. As if a woman's whole life could be filed under the same heading as a burned granary or a bad harvest.

Benjamin stood before he trusted himself to answer that properly. "We'll revisit the offers next season. That's my final word on it tonight."

He left before Roland could object, boots striking the stone floor harder than necessary, the council chamber's candlelight giving way to the cooler dark of the outer corridors. Behind him he heard Aldric murmuring something anxious and Roland's low, patient reply ,always so patient, his uncle, patient the way a man is patient with a fire he intends to bank rather than put out.

The wolf under his skin paced with the same restlessness that had driven him from his own chambers most nights this month. Too much stone around him. Too many eyes tracking his every unmated hour like a clock running down toward some inevitable, prophesied disaster.

He walked without any particular direction, the way he often did after council ,down through halls the nobility rarely bothered with, past storerooms and kitchens gone quiet for the night, following corridors that smelled of tallow and cold stone instead of perfume and ambition. Nobody expected the Alpha Prince in the servants' passages after midnight. That was rather the point.

He was three turns from his own wing, half-lost in the same tired argument he'd been having with himself for years ,what if the old words are true, what if wanting anyone at all is the first step toward proving it ,when a thin line of lamplight stopped him mid-stride.

A storeroom door stood ajar. Inside, a girl in laundry gray sat cross-legged on an overturned crate, a ledger balanced on her knees, murmuring numbers to herself under her breath like a woman counting coins she couldn't afford to miscount.

"—third of Harvestmonth, not the fifth, whoever copied this can't tell a three from a five to save their—" She caught herself, flipped back a page, checked something against the ledger's spine with the tip of one finger. "There. Fixed."

Benjamin stayed in the doorway, unseen, and found himself watching longer than any reasonable errand would justify.

She wasn't simply reading the ledger. She was correcting it ,matching ink shades between two different hands, muttering about a clerk's sloppy dating as though three years' worth of supply records were a puzzle she found mildly insulting to solve. No servant corrected palace records. Servants copied what they were told and kept their opinions about accuracy to themselves, on pain of losing whatever position had put bread in their mouths.

This one corrected it anyway, alone, at an hour when she thought no one was watching, with the unbothered precision of someone who simply couldn't stand to leave an error uncorrected even when nobody would ever know the difference.

Something in his chest ,wolf and man both, some old instinct he had no name ready for ,went very suddenly, very unwillingly alert.

"That's not laundry work," he said, before he'd decided to speak at all.

She startled, the ledger nearly sliding off her knees, and came up onto her feet fast enough that he understood immediately she'd learned somewhere to move quick around strangers. Amber-brown eyes found his face in the lamplight, widened a fraction ,recognition, or something close to it, quickly smoothed over ,and then dropped into a servant's careful, practiced deference.

"No, Your Highness. It's not." She didn't offer an excuse. Didn't stammer, didn't scramble for one either, which struck him as stranger than if she had. "Storekeeper asked me to check the counts before morning inventory. Found some errors while I was at it. Seemed a waste to leave them."

"Errors you weren't asked to find."

"An error doesn't stop being wrong just because nobody asked me to look for it." She said it plainly, without any particular deference in the words themselves even though her posture stayed correctly bowed. "Apologies if I've overstepped, Your Highness. I'll leave the correcting to whoever's paid to do it, if that's the concern."

It wasn't a servant's answer. It was an answer with a spine in it, delivered by a girl who clearly expected to be scolded for having one and had decided to give it anyway.

Benjamin found, to his own quiet astonishment, that he had no interest in scolding her at all.

"What's your name?"

A fraction of a pause ,brief enough that he might have imagined it, if some sharper edge of him hadn't caught it anyway. "Laurie, Your Highness. Laurie Byrne."

"New to the palace."

"A few days only."

"Then you've learned palace hierarchy faster than most manage in a month, Laurie Byrne, if you already know better than to argue with me over a supply ledger." He nodded once toward the corrected page, something that wasn't quite a smile pulling at his mouth despite every reason he had not to let it. "Keep finding the errors nobody asks you to find. It's a rarer talent here than you'd think."

He left before the moment could stretch into something he'd have to explain to himself later ,before the wolf's low, insistent hum beneath his ribs turned into anything he couldn't easily dismiss as exhaustion and council chambers and seventeen years of careful, practiced control fraying at the edges from one long night.

He made it four full strides down the corridor before he realized he hadn't asked why a laundry girl new to the palace had looked at him, for just one unguarded instant, like she already knew exactly who he was and had been half-expecting to find him standing in that doorway all along.