[ The Duke ]
The road to Eden was four hours of dust and bad decisions.
I left the dukedom at the third bell — before dawn, before the staff, before the entirely reasonable suggestion from my house captain that perhaps the Duke of Adelheim should travel with a proper escort rather than riding ahead of his delegation like a man with no enemies and no sense. I thanked him for the advice. I ignored it completely. I had been ignoring sensible advice for sixty-seven years and I was not about to start listening now, not on a morning when the air was cool and the horse was fast and my grandson was waiting in a castle that I had never liked and would never stop visiting.
The horse was mine — Alden, a grey stallion with a foul temper and an excellent sense of direction, both of which I respected enormously. I had named him after my great-grandfather, who had also possessed a foul temper and an excellent sense of direction, along with the distinction of being the man who had told the fourteenth emperor of Nimorlin to go to hell during a trade negotiation and lived to tell the story. Family tradition was important.
The road from Adelheim to Eden crossed through three of the empire's eastern provinces — rolling hills, farmland, the occasional village that still flew the mountain-and-stars alongside the storm-eye, a subtle declaration that they remembered which house kept them fed and which house merely kept them governed. The distinction mattered. It had always mattered. The Nimorlin emperors built walls and raised armies and sat on stone chairs. House Adelheim built roads, dug wells, maintained granaries, and made sure that when the winter came — and the winter always came — the people who lived on our land did not starve.
That was the difference between the crown and the dukedom. The crown demanded loyalty. The dukedom earned it. I was biased, obviously. I was also correct.
I had made this ride perhaps two hundred times in my life. Every season, sometimes more. When Edrin's mother was alive — Lady Renata, my daughter, the brightest thing in any room she entered and the quietest thing to leave it — I came to see her. After she died, I came to see the boy. After the Emperor assigned Sebas at my request, I came to make sure the assignment was working. And it was. Sebas Orthen was everything I had hoped — disciplined, patient, lethal when necessary and gentle when possible, a man who understood that raising a child was not fundamentally different from commanding an army. Both required strategy. Both required sacrifice. Both required the willingness to endure defeats that felt permanent in pursuit of victories that took years to materialise.
And both required getting up before the sun.
I rode through the eastern gate of Eden as dawn broke — golden light spilling over the walls, catching the banners that had been strung along every street and balcony. The capital was dressed for celebration. Gold and white everywhere — the Nimorlin colours, the storm-eye on every flag, the entire city draped in the imperial brand like a shop window displaying its most expensive wares.
My stomach turned. Not at the pageantry — I enjoyed pageantry, when it was honest. What I didn't enjoy was the particular quality of pageantry that served no purpose other than to remind people who was in charge. The crowning was necessary. The celebration was expected. But the scale of it — the weeks of preparation, the expense, the disruption to the city's normal functioning — spoke to something that had less to do with honouring a prince and more to do with demonstrating power.
Cassian's fingerprints were on every banner. The man couldn't crown his son without turning it into a lecture.
I passed through the castle gates without stopping. The guards recognised me — not from my face, necessarily, but from the fact that I rode alone, without escort, directly at them, at speed, with the casual confidence of a man who had been entering this castle since before most of them were born. One of them started to raise a hand. The other stopped him. Smart lad.
The stables were already busy — horses from the arriving delegations, carriages bearing the crests of the Twenty-One Houses, the organised chaos of an empire's aristocracy converging on a single point. I handed Alden to a stable boy who looked terrified, which was unnecessary — I was not a terrifying person. I was a cheerful person. I had simply lived long enough and held enough power that my cheerfulness had acquired a certain… weight.
"Treat him well," I said to the boy. "He bites, but only if he likes you."
The boy nodded very quickly and took the reins with hands that trembled slightly. I made a mental note to find him later and give him a coin. Terrified stable boys deserved compensation. It was basic management.
The castle corridors were already alive — servants moving in formation, officials checking lists, the particular hum of institutional preparation that sounded like efficiency and smelled like anxiety. I moved through it all with the ease of long practice, nodding at servants who bowed, greeting officers who saluted, being generally impossible to ignore, which was, I had learned, the most effective way to gather information. People told you things when you were loud. They told you more things when they were trying to get you to move along.
I found Sebas in the eastern corridor, standing outside my grandson's door like a monument to patience.
"Sebas."
He turned. His face — that remarkably composed, militarily precise face that betrayed emotion the way a stone wall betrayed wind — showed the faintest flicker of something. Relief, perhaps. Or the resignation of a man whose siege was about to receive reinforcement from the least predictable ally imaginable.
"My lord. You've arrived early."
"I always arrive early. It keeps people honest." I looked at the closed door. "He's still in bed."
"He is."
"How long?"
"I have been outside this door for forty-three minutes."
Forty-three minutes. I felt a swell of pride that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the boy behind the door. Forty-three minutes of sustained resistance against the most disciplined soldier in the empire. At ten years old. The child had the defensive instincts of a fortified garrison.
"Has he eaten?"
"He has not. The honeyed milk is cooling."
"Then it's time for the heavy artillery," I said.
I reached into my satchel. The leather bag was battered, old, stained with road dust and what might have been horse saliva — Alden had a habit of investigating bags for food. Inside, wrapped in cloth that still held a trace of warmth from the bakery oven, were the honey cakes.
Maren's bakery. Lower city, near the south gate, between the cobbler and the chandler. The finest baker in Eden, a woman of sixty-two who had been making the same honey cakes with the same recipe for thirty-seven years and who greeted me, every time I visited, with the words: "You again, my lord? The usual?"
I visited every time I came to Eden. Without fail. Without escort. The Duke of Adelheim, walking through the lower city streets at dawn, buying pastries from a woman who called him "my lord" the same way she called everyone "my lord" — not with deference but with the particular warmth of a woman who liked her customers and didn't care what they ruled.
Edrin loved those cakes. More than any food the castle kitchen produced. More than the honeyed fruits and spiced meats and imported delicacies that the royal table offered. He wanted bread and cheese from a stable boy and honey cakes from a lower-city bakery, and this preference — this stubborn, instinctive gravitation toward the ordinary, the human, the real — was one of the many reasons I had decided, years ago, that this boy was worth more than the empire that had produced him.
I looked at Sebas. He looked at me. Between us passed the particular understanding of two men who had spent years caring for the same child and who had developed, through proximity and shared purpose, a working relationship that transcended the considerable gap in their backgrounds, temperaments, and opinions about appropriate wake-up times.
"Shall I?" I asked.
"Please," Sebas said, and in that single word was the accumulated exhaustion of forty-three minutes, four years, and one very persistent prince.
I opened the door.
"MORNING, MORNING, MORNING!"