[ Edrin ]
The trick was the service stairs.
Most people in the castle — by which I mean everyone who mattered and a significant number of people who only thought they mattered — used the main staircases. Grand, wide, lined with torches and guards and the occasional tapestry depicting some ancestor doing something impressive with a sword. The main staircases were designed to be seen on. Every step was a performance. Every descent was an entrance.
The service stairs were different. Narrow. Unlit past the third landing. Used exclusively by kitchen staff, laundry workers, and one ten-year-old prince who had discovered, at the age of seven, that the castle's architects had built an entire parallel network of passages for the people who actually kept the building running, and that these passages connected to a small door in the eastern wall that opened onto an alley behind the garrison stables that led, if you turned left and followed the cobblestones past the farrier's shop, directly into the lower city.
Sebas knew about the service stairs. He knew about the door. He knew about the alley and the farrier's shop and the specific route I took when I escaped the castle, because Sebas knew everything, because knowing everything was what Sebas did, and because on one memorable occasion he had followed me at a distance of approximately forty paces for the entire afternoon without my noticing, which I only discovered later when Marten mentioned that "the tall scary man in black" had been standing behind a market stall watching us eat roasted chestnuts.
Sebas allowed these excursions. That was the word — allowed. Not approved. Not encouraged. Allowed. The way a general allows a calculated risk — with full awareness, constant monitoring, and the understanding that the value of the intelligence gained outweighed the danger of the operation.
I didn't think about it in those terms. I was ten. I thought about it in terms of chestnuts and fire-eaters and the fact that the lower city had a puppet theatre near the south gate that told stories about dragons, and the dragons always lost, and the crowd always cheered, and nobody in the audience cared whether you were a prince or a pig farmer because everyone was equal when the dragon showed up.
Today, I had approximately two hours before the ceremony preparations would begin in earnest — before Sebas would shift from patient to insistent, before Grandfather would expect me dressed and presentable, before the castle would close around me like a fist and hold me in place for the rest of the day.
Two hours. In the lower city. On the biggest festival day of the year.
I was already on the service stairs.
The route was familiar — down four flights, past the kitchens where the morning bread was baking and the air was thick with yeast and warmth, through the storage corridor where the wine barrels were stacked, past the laundry where two women whose names I knew — Bettina and her daughter Mara — were sorting linens and didn't look up when I passed because they were used to me and had stopped being surprised approximately two years ago.
"Morning, Bettina."
"Morning, love. Your grandfather's in the castle, you know."
"I know."
"You'll be late."
"Probably."
She shook her head. Mara smiled without looking up. I kept moving.
The door in the eastern wall was small — designed for supply deliveries, not for princes — and it opened with a specific creak that I had memorised and calibrated. A slow push produced a low groan that blended with the general sounds of the garrison yard. A fast push produced a sharp squeal that attracted attention. I pushed slowly.
The alley was cool and dim. The morning light hadn't reached it yet — the garrison buildings on either side were tall enough to block the sun until midday. I could smell horses and iron and, underneath it all, the distant, complex, unmistakable smell of the lower city — smoke and cooking and humanity and life.
Marten was waiting by the farrier's shop.
He was twelve — two years older than me, which in the hierarchy of the lower city meant he was practically an adult. Brown hair, quick hands, a face that was permanently dirty in a way that suggested industriousness rather than neglect. He was the son of the garrison farrier, which meant he spent his days around horses and metal, and his evenings running errands for the merchants in the market quarter, and his nights in a small room above the shop that he shared with his father and two younger sisters.
I had met him when I was eight. I had been exploring the stables — not the royal stables, the garrison stables, which were larger and noisier and smelled significantly worse and were therefore more interesting — and Marten had been mucking out a stall with the grim efficiency of a boy who had been doing this since he was old enough to hold a shovel.
"You're not supposed to be here," he had said, without looking up.
"Why not?"
"Because you're wearing silk and this is a horse stable."
"So?"
He had looked up then. And instead of the startled recognition that most people showed when they realised who I was — the widened eyes, the sudden stiffness, the recalibration of behaviour that came with discovering you were in the presence of royalty — Marten had looked at me with the flat, practical assessment of a boy who judged people by whether they were useful and whether they were annoying.
"So you'll ruin it," he said. "Silk doesn't wash well."
"I don't care about the silk."
"Your butler will."
He was right about that. Sebas had opinions about silk. But in that moment, standing in a horse stall that smelled like everything the castle didn't, talking to a boy who didn't care about my name or my family or the storm-eye on my collar, I felt something that I didn't have a word for yet.
I felt normal.
We had been friends ever since. Not the kind of friendship that the castle recognised — not political, not strategic, not the carefully managed alliances between noble children that were really just treaties between their parents. Ours was simpler. We liked each other. He told me stories about the lower city. I shared my food. He showed me the places that no map recorded — the best rooftops for watching the sunset, the old well behind the tanner's shop where you could hear the underground river, the wall near the south gate where someone had carved the names of every person who had lived in that neighbourhood going back a hundred years.
He taught me things about Eden that no tutor in the castle had ever thought to mention — how the drainage channels worked, why the baker on Copper Street started his ovens at midnight, which merchants cheated on their weights and which ones gave extra to families who couldn't pay. He knew the city the way Haeren knew the council chamber — every detail, every rhythm, every unspoken rule that governed how three hundred thousand people lived together without killing each other.
And I taught him — well, I wasn't sure what I taught him, honestly. How to read, a little. Some numbers. The names of the stars, which my astronomy tutor had drilled into me and which I had retained only because the stories attached to the constellations were better than anything in my history textbooks.
"Festival day," Marten said as I emerged from the alley.
"Festival day," I agreed.
He handed me something — a cap, brown, shapeless, the kind that every boy in the lower city wore. I put it on. It was, objectively, the ugliest piece of headwear I had ever encountered, and I loved it, because wearing it meant I was not a prince. Wearing it meant I was just another boy in the crowd, unremarkable, unnoticed, free.
"The fire-eaters are setting up near the south gate," Marten said. "And there's a new puppet show — something about a sea monster. My sister saw them rehearsing yesterday. She says the sea monster eats a ship."
"Does the sea monster win?"
"The sea monsters never win. It's a puppet show."
We walked. Through the lower city streets that were already filling with people — merchants setting up festival stalls, families heading toward the Royal Way for the best viewing positions, children running in packs with the feral energy that holidays produced. The air smelled like fried dough and spiced wine and the particular electricity that came from thousands of people who had been given permission to stop working and start celebrating.
Nobody looked at me twice. The cap helped, but it wasn't the cap. It was the fact that I walked like Marten walked — loose, unhurried, with the easy familiarity of someone who belonged. People saw what they expected to see. They expected a prince to walk with guards and silk and the particular rigidity that came from a lifetime of being watched. They did not expect a prince in a shapeless cap, eating a fried pastry he had bought with a coin he had found in his coat pocket three days ago, laughing at a joke about a sea monster puppet.
This was the part of Eden that I loved. Not the castle, with its stone walls and political machinery and the constant, grinding awareness that every person you met was calculating your value. This. The streets. The noise. The beautiful, chaotic, unscripted mess of people living their lives without reference to the Twenty-One Houses or the storm-eye or the question of who sat in which chair.
Down here, a man was a man. A baker was a baker because he could bake, not because his grandfather had been given a title four hundred years ago. A farrier was a farrier because he knew horses, and his son was his apprentice because he wanted to be, and neither of them owed their position to a bloodline or a political arrangement or the accident of which bed their father had been in.
It was so simple. So obvious. So completely invisible to everyone in the castle.
We stopped at the south gate to watch the fire-eaters set up. Three of them — a man and two women, with the lean, scarred hands of people who had been working with flame long enough to have stopped fearing it and started respecting it, which was, according to them, much more dangerous. The man was practising a new routine involving two torches and what appeared to be a blindfold. Marten watched with his mouth open. I watched with the calm curiosity that came from understanding, even at ten, that bravery was not the absence of fear but the decision that something else mattered more.
"Your brother's getting crowned today," Marten said, not looking away from the fire-eater.
"Yeah."
"Big deal, right? For your family?"
"I guess."
Marten looked at me. The look — practical, assessing, unburdened by politics — that I had come to value more than any expression I encountered in the castle.
"You don't care," he said.
"I care about Aldric. I just don't care about the crown."
"What's the difference?"
I thought about that. The fire-eater lit his second torch. The flame caught the morning air and twisted upward, orange and gold, alive in the way that only fire was alive — consuming, transforming, turning everything it touched into heat and light and ash.
"The crown is a thing," I said. "Aldric is a person. Things don't need you to care about them. People do."
Marten was quiet for a moment. Then he shrugged — the shrug of a twelve-year-old who had heard something that either made perfect sense or no sense at all and had decided not to figure out which.
"The sea monster puppet show starts at the eighth bell," he said.
"I'll be in the ceremony by then."
"Too bad. The sea monster eats a whole ship."
"Save me a spot. I'll try to come after."
He grinned. I grinned back. And for a few more minutes, in the shadow of the south gate, with the fire-eaters practising and the city waking up and the bells of the ceremony still hours away, I was just a boy in a cap, watching flames.
It couldn't last. It never did.
But it was enough.