Aldric woke at five.
Not because of noise.
Not because of anything in particular.
Just the body doing what the body did, surfacing from sleep at the same hour it always surfaced, regardless of whether the ceiling above it was the familiar low plaster of Cotter’s Lane or the high vaulted expanse of a palace guest room that was larger than most buildings he had ever entered voluntarily.
He lay still for a moment and looked at that ceiling.
Then he sat up.
The room was cold in the way of large rooms that held too much air for the fireplace to manage entirely, the fire had burned down overnight to quiet embers, the kind that gave light without heat.
He could see his breath.
He swung his legs off the bed and his feet found the floor and the floor was stone beneath the rug and cold through his socks and that, at least, was familiar.
Cold floors he knew.
Cold floors were not a palace thing or a village thing.
Cold floors were just mornings.
He stood.
Rolled his shoulders.
Looked at the room.
It was the same room it had been yesterday and the day before that — large, well furnished, the kind of space that communicated comfort without asking whether you wanted it.
The wardrobe against the far wall held the three sets of clothes he had brought, which occupied approximately one tenth of it and left the rest looking like a pointed comment on his situation.
The dark coat hung on the hook beside the door.
His boots were where he had left them, set neatly beside the chair the way Gibson had always kept his, a habit absorbed so early he no longer noticed doing it.
He dressed himself.
Plain trousers, a clean shirt, and a dark coat.
He had been told, the evening before, that palace attendants would come to assist him in the mornings, dressing, grooming, and the formal preparation of a man of his new station.
He had nodded when this was told to him and had privately decided to be dressed before they arrived, which he was.
A knock came at the door as he was pulling on his second boot.
He opened it.
A young man stood in the corridor, palace livery, perhaps eighteen, holding a basin of steaming water and a folded towel with the careful posture of someone who had been instructed to be useful and was committed to the assignment.
Behind him, slightly to the left, an older attendant with a pressed suit draped over one arm and a small leather case in the other hand.
They both looked at him.
Then at his clothes.
Then at each other, briefly.
“Good morning,” Aldric said.
“Good morning, my lord,” the younger one said, with the slight emphasis of someone deploying a title they were not yet sure about.
“We are here to help you prepare for the day.”
Aldric looked at the basin.
The towel.
The suit.
“I am already dressed,” he said.
A pause.
“Yes, my lord.” Another pause.
“The Queen has requested that you wear formal attire today. For your meeting.”
He looked at the suit on the older attendant’s arm.
Dark, well cut, considerably more formal than anything he owned.
He looked at it the way he had looked at the palace when the carriage came around the bend, acknowledging it, adjusting to it, deciding what to do with it.
“Right,” he said.
“Come in.”
✦ ✦ ✦
The formal attire fit well enough.
This surprised him.
He had expected something that needed adjusting, something that would sit wrong on shoulders that had been built by laundry work and odd jobs rather than by the kind of carefully tailored life that produced men who wore suits like this naturally.
But the palace tailors had apparently done their work in the days since his arrival, discreet measurements taken, he now realised, in the course of ordinary interactions he had not clocked as measurements at the time. New chapters come out on g.com first.
He stood in front of the mirror while the older attendant made small precise adjustments and tried to find himself in the reflection.
The grey hair was the same.
The eyes were the same.
The face was his face, familiar and inconvenient as always.
But the suit changed the frame of it, made him look, against his will and better judgment, like someone who belonged in a palace.
Which he did not.
Which he was not sure he ever would.
But the suit was making an argument and he did not yet have a strong enough counter argument to win against it.
The younger attendant, whose name was Pell, he had established, had brought a tray with breakfast on it.
Bread, butter, something hot in a small pot that smelled of coffee.
Aldric ate standing up, which appeared to cause Pell some professional distress, but the distress was managed quietly and without comment and Aldric appreciated that.
“The Queen’s study,” he said, when he had finished.
“Where is it?”
“I will take you, my lord,” Pell said, with the relief of someone who had been hoping to be useful and had finally found the opening.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Queen’s study was nothing like the receiving rooms.
Where the receiving rooms were designed to communicate wealth and stability outward, to visitors, to guests, to people who needed impressing, the study was designed for work.
The desk was large and covered in the organised density of someone who handled a significant volume of important things and had systems for all of them.
The shelves held documents and ledgers and the kind of books that were read rather than displayed.
The fire was properly built up, burning with the purposeful heat of a room that was used early and often.
Sarafinn was already at her desk when Pell showed him in.
She looked up, assessed his attire with a brief approving glance that she did not comment on, and gestured to the chairs arranged in front of the desk.
Sebastian was in one of them.
He looked up when Aldric entered and stood, the small formal habit Aldric had observed him do for his daughter, now extended to him, which landed somewhere he was not prepared for.
He sat quickly so that Sebastian would sit back down, which he did, settling back into his chair with the unhurried ease of a man entirely comfortable in his own skin.
“Aldric,” Sarafinn said.
“Thank you for coming.”
He sat in the remaining chair.
“You summoned me,” he said.
Then, because fair was fair: “But you’re welcome.”
Something moved at the corner of Sebastian’s mouth.
Sarafinn looked at him for a moment with the expression she sometimes wore, the one he had not yet fully decoded, that held more things in it than she showed.
Then she folded her hands on the desk and began.
✦ ✦ ✦
The duties of a crown prince, as laid out by Queen Sarafinn over the course of the next two hours, were extensive.
He had known, in the abstract, that the position came with responsibilities.
He had not known the specific shape of them — the council attendances, the correspondence, the formal representations at functions and ceremonies, the oversight of particular administrative matters that the Queen had apparently been waiting for the right person to hand to.
She laid it all out with the calm thoroughness of a woman briefing a new officer, which was more or less what this was.
He listened.
He asked questions when he had them, direct questions, specific ones, the kind that made Sarafinn pause occasionally in a way that suggested she had not expected direct specific questions and was recalibrating slightly each time.
Sebastian sat beside him and said less than the Queen but said it better.
Where Sarafinn gave him the document, Sebastian gave him the reality underneath the document, what the thing actually looked like in practice, what the traps were, what mattered and what was ceremony.
He did it quietly, leaning over occasionally to add something in a low voice, and Aldric found himself turning toward him more than toward the desk.
At one point Sarafinn stepped out briefly to speak with someone at the door and left them alone in the study.
The silence that followed was easy.
Not the silence of two people with nothing to say, the silence of two people who did not need to fill space.
“It is a great deal,” Sebastian said, after a moment.
“Yes,” Aldric said.
“It was for me too.” He said it simply, looking at the fire.
“I came here from nothing, more or less. Not a village, different circumstances. But nothing in terms of what this place expected.” A pause.
“The first year I got most of it wrong.” This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Aldric looked at him.
“What changed?”
“I stopped trying to do it the way they expected and started doing it the way I knew how.” He glanced at Aldric.
“You are observant. You are direct. You ask the right questions. Those things matter more than knowing which fork to use at a formal dinner.” A pause.
“You will learn the fork.”
Aldric said nothing for a moment.
Then: “Thank you.”
Sebastian nodded once.
They looked at the fire together until Sarafinn came back in and the briefing resumed.
✦ ✦ ✦
He was shown his office in the late afternoon.
It was on the second floor of the east wing, a proper room, not large but well appointed, with a desk and shelves and a window that looked out over the formal gardens.
A room that was going to be his.
Where he was going to sit and do the work of a position he had not been born to and had not asked for and was apparently going to do anyway because he was here and he was not going to do things halfway.
He stood in the middle of it for a moment after the steward left and looked at the desk and the shelves and the window.
He thought about the kitchen table on Cotter’s Lane where Gibson did his accounts in the evenings.
The small neat columns of numbers, the careful record of what came in and what went out, the quiet serious work of a man managing what he had with precision because there was no margin for error.
This desk was larger.
The numbers would be larger.
The margin for error was probably still not very wide.
He pulled out the chair and sat down and put his hands flat on the desk and looked at the window and the garden beyond it and thought, with the particular uncomfortable honesty that was simply how he operated, that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing.
And then he thought that he had felt that way before, at the start of every new job, every new arrangement, every new situation that his life had handed him without asking, and that not knowing what he was doing had never once stopped him from learning.
He stood up.
Straightened his coat.
And went to find his family for dinner.
✦ ✦ ✦
He noticed it at dinner.
Not dramatically.
Not all at once.
Just, different.
Her scent across the table was different in a way that his alpha instincts registered before his conscious mind did, a shift in it that was deeper and warmer and more urgent than anything the previous days had produced.
She was composed.
Her face gave nothing away.
She talked to Vivian about something he could not focus on because the scent was making focus difficult.
She did not look at him directly.
He looked at his plate.
He ate his dinner.
He said the right things at the right moments.
When the meal ended and she excused herself early, quietly, without explanation, Esther appeared at her side like a shadow, he understood.
He watched her leave and looked back at his plate and said nothing.
After dinner a palace attendant appeared at his shoulder and informed him, with careful politeness, that his presence in the west wing was not required this evening and that he should feel welcome to spend the evening in his rooms or the library or any of the east wing common rooms.
Not required.
He nodded.
Thanked the attendant.
Went to his rooms.
He sat in the chair by the window and looked at the dark garden below and felt the distance between his side of the palace and hers like something physical.
Like a hand pressed flat against a closed door.
He stayed in the chair for a long time.
He did not sleep for longer than that.