Chapter 4 What The Crown Can't Fix

The bad news arrived by way of a treaty.

It sat on the long council table the next morning in a stack of heavy parchment, weighted at the corners with silver inkwells, and every man around it looked as if it might bite. The Seatopian envoy, Lord Tavish, stood at one end in his sea green coat and explained, with enormous courtesy, that his king wished to revise certain terms.

“Revise,” said Lord Rowan. He was a heavy, careful man who had served three kings and liked people to remember it. “You mean raise.”

“I mean adjust, my lord.”

“Upward.”

“In the direction of fairness.”

Someone coughed. Someone else shuffled papers. King Jeremy, at the head of the table, drummed his fingers on the wood. Beside him sat Queen Elizabeth, and at the far end, a little apart, sat Adrian, with Athalia at his shoulder, where a betrothed lady had no strict right to be. Nobody had objected. Nobody objected to Athalia lately. She had a way of arriving in a room as if she had always been expected.

“The harbour tariff alone,” Maeron said, scanning a page, “would cost us four in every ten ships’ worth of profit.”

“The harbour is Seatopia’s,” Tavish said.

“The trade is ours,” said Rowan.

“The mountain passes are ours,” snapped General Marrick. “Without which your king’s silks rot in his warehouses.”

Tavish smiled thinly. “Then perhaps both kingdoms have something to lose. I confess I am here only to relay my king’s wishes.”

The argument rolled on. Voices rose. Rowan accused Tavish of piracy. Tavish accused Rowan of provincialism. Jeremy slapped the table and was ignored. Adrian sat with his hands folded, listening, and said nothing, because he had never in his life interrupted anyone.

“If I may,” said Athalia.

The room paused.

She had not raised her voice. She had simply spoken into a gap, and the gap had made space for her. “Prince Adrian has spent three months reading the ledgers of the western passes,” she said. “I believe he has something to say about the tariff. He is too modest to say it, so I am going to be immodest on his behalf.”

Adrian turned to stare at her.

“The harbour fee is not the real issue,” she went on, calmly. “The real issue is the salt. Seatopia needs mountain salt for its fishing fleets, and Arrandelle controls the only road that carries it. If the tariff rises, the road price can rise to match. Prince Adrian prepared a table last week showing that Seatopia would lose more on salt than it gained on harbour fees.” She looked at him. “Adrian?”

He blinked. Then, slowly, he reached into the folder at his elbow and drew out a single page, written in his small, square hand.

“It is, ah, here,” he said.

Tavish took the page. His eyebrows rose, then rose further. “This is accurate,” he said, after a minute, in a voice with all the starch gone out of it.

“I check my sums,” said Adrian.

A short, astonished silence. Then Marrick barked a laugh, and Rowan grumbled something into his chin, and the king, who had been scowling at the table, looked down the length of it at his elder son with an expression Adrian could not read.

“Well,” Jeremy said. “That is something.”

It was the closest thing to praise Adrian had ever heard from him.

Afterward, in the corridor, Adrian caught Athalia’s wrist.

“Why did you do that?”

“Because it was true.”

“I did not ask you to.”

“You would never have.” She looked at his fingers on her sleeve, and he let go at once. “Adrian, you prepared the better argument. Nobody was going to hear it. I only opened a door.”

“You made me look good.”

“I made you look like what you are.” She said it lightly. “It is not a hard thing to do. You should try it yourself sometime.”

He opened his mouth to answer. Then the doors at the far end of the corridor slammed open, and a page came pelting toward them, white faced, waving a letter.

The Seatopian king was dead.

He had collapsed at a banquet three days before, they said, with a goblet in one hand and a toast half finished. Heart, the physicians thought. Quick. The kingdom was in turmoil, and the heir, a young man named Corin, had summoned his allies to witness his coronation in the capital, eight days hence.

“Allies,” said King Jeremy, in the council chamber, an hour later. “Meaning us.”

“Meaning all of us, Majesty,” Maeron said. “To refuse would be an insult. To send only a delegation, a weakness. I would advise the whole court.”

“The whole court. For a coronation. Gods.” Jeremy rubbed his face. “Fine. Pack the wagons. We sail in two days.”

That evening, in the east wing, Adrian walked the long gallery alone. The torches had been lit, and the portraits of the old kings watched him pass with the heavy dignity of men who had never had to ask anyone’s permission.

He found his brother sitting on a windowsill at the end of the hall, throwing a walnut up and catching it.

“Heard the news?” Fredric said.

“Everyone has.”

“Strange business. Healthy man, drops dead mid toast.” Fredric tossed the walnut again. “I suppose it happens. Gods, I hate sea travel.”

Adrian did not answer. He stood beside the window with his arms crossed, watching the lamps come on across the city.

“Fred.”

“Mm?”

“Do you ever resent me?”

The walnut stopped in midair. Fredric caught it and looked, at last, at his brother. “What?”

“I resent you.” It came out quietly, and Adrian was almost surprised to hear it. “I have wanted to say it for years. I do not know why I am saying it now. Maybe because I am about to marry a woman I barely know, in a country I do not care about, for reasons that are all about you.” He let out a breath. “I resent you. Not for anything you did. For being easy. For being someone people want to give things to.”

Fredric was silent for a long while.

“That is the most honest thing you have ever said to me,” he said.

“I am sorry.”

“Do not be.” Fredric slid off the sill. He put a hand on his brother’s shoulder, and held it there, and Adrian let him. “I have envied you my whole life, you know. You think I do not notice how Father looks at you? Like he is looking at a wall that will never fall down. Nobody has ever looked at me like that. I am a good time. You are what lasts.”

Adrian stared at him.

“We are idiots,” Fredric said. “Both of us.”

“Probably.”

“Come on. I will lose to you at chess and let you gloat.”

Adrian laughed, short and rusty, and let himself be pulled along down the gallery.

Neither of them saw the figure standing in the shadow of the last pillar. Athalia had been there for some time, with her hands folded and her face unreadable. She had heard every word.

She waited until their footsteps faded. Then she walked out into the lamplight and followed Adrian’s route to his door. She caught him there, alone, a few minutes later, as he turned to go in.

“You heard,” he said, without turning around. “I can tell by how quiet you are.”

“Some of it.”

“Then you know I am not a good man. I resent my own brother.”

“You are a man who is tired of being invisible.” She reached up and laid her palm against his cheek. It was the first time she had touched him with anything like tenderness, and he went very still. “That is not a crime, Adrian. You are allowed to want to be seen.”

“Am I?”

“Yes.” Her voice was low and warm and absolutely sure. “I see you. And we are going to stop apologising for what we deserve. We will take what is already ours.”

His eyes searched her face. For one raw second, he looked like a man who had been given a lifeline in open water.

“What is ours?” he whispered.

She smiled, and it was the tenth smile, the one she had practised until her hands stopped shaking.

“Everything,” she said.