22

Shalmali took her leave at last and Karnaet crossed the courtyard to stand beside Vehase, watching the two of them go.

"Did you give him permission already?" Karnaet asked.

"Aye," Vehase said, his eyes were still fixed on the carriage being readied nearby.

"And what of His Majesty?"

"Another matter entirely," Vehase said, "and one where I shall need you again, sooner rather than later."

Karnaet stared at him a long moment and Vehase raised an eyebrow.

"Sometimes," Karnaet said at last, "I wonder if I am underpaid for this particular position."

Vehase smiled at that, entirely unrepentant, the kind of smile that had talked lesser men into far worse arrangements than the one Karnaet already suspected was coming.

"Would His Majesty agree to it," Karnaet pressed, "whatever it is you are already quietly setting into motion?"

Vehase turned the question over himself for a moment longer than Karnaet expected, some flicker of genuine uncertainty crossed behind his composed expression before he could fully smooth it away again.

"My brother gets what he wants," he said simply, the sentence alone had never once needed further justification in all the years Karnaet had known him. "No matter what he wants," he reached out and patted Karnaet once upon the chest, and then he turned without waiting for further argument.

Karnaet watched him go, and then he turned his own attention instead toward the carriage rolling through the courtyard gates, Valere was still visible a moment longer through its narrow window, Ryska was seated close beside him.

No matter what he wants. Karnaet turned the phrase over in his own mind, and memory rose to answer it, a hunting party and a huntsman's son who had been given the honor of walking beside Valere that day, to carry Valere's own bow. The boy stumbled crossing a stream, the bow slipped from his grip and cracked against a stone and Valere's temper flared at once.

And the huntsman was dismissed regardless, his decades of loyal service was erased entirely, the family turned out from the cottage they'd called home for three generations, far beyond anything Valere had asked for, or would likely have wanted, had he understood the true weight of what his careless demand would become in his brother's hands.

Karnaet remembered asking Vehase, whether it had truly been necessary. He remembered Vehase's answer, that Valere had wished the boy punished, and so it was done, and that the particular shape the punishment took mattered rather less than the fact that his brother's demand, however small, however thoughtlessly spoken, had been fully and completely honored.

Karnaet had said nothing further at the time but now he understood the truth of it fully, that Valere's cruelty had only ever been the careless, unthinking kind children so often carried and outgrew. It was Vehase who had taken that careless spark and built an inferno from it, every single time, long before Valere ever learned to temper his own wanting into something gentler.

How did Valere turn out the way he did? That mystery alone had eluded Karnaet longer than any other riddle this court had ever posed him. A boy so thoroughly indulged, so entirely accustomed to having every careless demand honored without question or consequence, ought by all reasonable measure to have grown into precisely the kind of man his childhood had been shaping, cruel by habit if not by intention, hollow beneath whatever charm he wore, indifferent to the cost others paid for his comfort.

And yet the man who had emerged instead bore almost no resemblance to that boy at all. Gentle where he might have been careless. Considerate where he might have expected deference as his due. Willing, even, to burn his own comfort entirely for the sake of a woman the whole court had told him he could never have.

Was it armor, then, Karnaet wondered and he recalled the way Valere had looked at her across that hushed and hostile chamber, he remembered that look, it was not the careful or a measured concern a prince might offer a woman he merely admired, but something far older, far hungrier, something closer to hunger itself dressed thin in the language of devotion.

The man wants her, Karnaet thought, far too fiercely, and far too completely, for a boy who had learned that wanting alone was sufficient reason to act, had grown only into a man who wanted with the same absolute and unquestioning hunger, save that now the want wore a woman's shape instead of a broken bow's, and the world, softened by love's old and forgiving mythology, called it romance rather than tyranny.

The boy who had screamed for a huntsman's ruin over a splintered bow, and the man prepared to defy his own father, his own crown, an entire council's careful strategy, for a woman he loved, were driven by the very same entitlement, just that the demand had shifted, from a broken toy to a beating heart, and only that the shape of it had softened into something closer to devotion rather than tyranny.

Perhaps that is it then, Karnaet thought, a tyrant whose hunger had finally found something worth burning for, that the world could forgive him for demanding, Karnaet could not say with any certainty, and suspected, watching Vehase now with fresh and troubled eyes, that neither brother had ever truly asked themselves the question either.

What would Valere do if he did not get her? Karnaet wondered, he would fight the world for her, but what if the fight was never truly meant to be the world at all? What if the very obstacle standing between Valere and her was not a father's cold decree, nor a wary council's caution, nor even a war but Ryska herself, and whatever will of her own she might one day choose to set against his?

Would he learn to lose gracefully, the way a better man eventually might? Or was he still, beneath every gentled edge the years had worn smooth into him, the very same boy he had always been underneath it all, the child who had never once been taught that simply wanting a thing did not, by itself, entitle him to have it, whatever the cost, whatever the casualty, however far the reach required to secure it?