Loyal To No Crown

Karis' POV* I knew, before I ever left home, that the king who invited me would be dead by the time I arrived. It wasn't a guess or a rumour. It was handed to me flatly, in the same room where I was handed the letter, delivered the way other people mention rain. *Cassian will not survive to sign anything.* I nodded and folded the letter into my sleeve, and I didn't ask how he could be so sure. So when the funeral banners came into view over the capital's gates, black cloth hanging heavy in windless air, I felt no surprise. Only the small, cold satisfaction of watching a prediction come true. I stepped down from the carriage as Lady Karys Veyran, envoy of a house that had never existed, coming to discuss grain with a king who could no longer discuss anything. "Lady Veyran." The steward at the gate had my name ready before I offered it, which unsettled me more than I let show. I had expected to arrive a stranger. "We received word of your visit weeks ago. His Majesty had hoped to greet you himself. I'm afraid the timing is... complicated." "My condolences to the kingdom." "The new king has been told of the arrangement. He asks that you stay for the coronation." The steward hesitated. "He asks it rather firmly." "Then I'll stay." I let him lead me inside and kept my face pleasant. Pleasant was a tool, and I had been taught to use it like a blade. --- The east corridor was empty, which is why I took it. I'd been given an hour before the ceremony, a servant to unpack my trunks, and a wing of the palace that smelt of beeswax and grief. The palace wasn't as grand as the stories had promised. I had not been given a reason to wander, but I did anyway, because the first thing I ever learned about walls is that they talk, if you stand close enough. I turned a corner and nearly walked into a man standing very still. He wore a plain dark coat, no crown, no chain of office. His hands were braced against the sill of a tall window, knuckles pale, shoulders locked like he was holding the building up. He didn't turn. "If you're here to tell me it's time to go," he said, "don't. I already know that." I stopped. I knew who he was. I'd read his name in the letter. Prince Lucien, the second son, who had spent his whole life swinging a sword in the shadow of a brother born to wear the crown. I'd pictured someone softer. He was not soft. He was tall, taller than I'd expected, with the broad shoulders you only get from years in a training yard rather than a council chamber. Dark hazel-brown hair fell over his brow in a swoop, and the hands gripping the windowsill were broad, scarred across the knuckles, a swordsman's hands. "I wasn't going to say that." He didn't shift his gaze to look at me, but he furrowed his eyebrows. "What were you going to say?" "That I'm sorry for your loss, Your Highness." I said it gently, with the right small catch of breath, the words laid out neatly like cutlery. "Your father was a great man, and the kingdom will feel his absence for years." Silence. Then he turned his head, and I saw the face that went with those hands: a strong jaw shadowed with stubble, a mouth pressed into a line, and grey eyes rimmed red with exhaustion. Grief had hollowed him out, but it hadn't dulled the structure underneath. *Handsome,* I noted. "Thank you." He said it like a man who'd heard it a hundred times, and then rubbed a hand over his face. "Forgive me. I'm not fit company today. You're the grain envoy?" he asked, giving me a once-over. "Lady Karys Veyran." "Ah." Something shifted in his expression, a weighing, like a man checking the edge of a blade he hadn't decided to trust. "My father spoke of you. Said yours was the first sensible offer the northern holdings had made in years." A tired breath that wasn't a laugh. "He didn't live to see it, and now I'm told I'm supposed to fix the rest." "I'd be glad to help." "Everyone would," said Lucien, very quietly. "It's all anyone's said to me since—" A bell began to toll somewhere below, slow and heavy, and he stopped. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, the tired man at the window was gone. The king had put himself together over the wreckage like a bandage over a wound. "We have somewhere to be," he said. "Enjoy the ceremony, Lady Veyran. Pavion is rarely this quiet." He walked away. I stood in the empty corridor with my smile still fixed in place, long after there was anyone left to see it. --- For a coronation, it was long, loud, and sorrowful, and I remember very little of it. I remember the incense, thick enough to taste, and the crown settling onto his head, a fraction too loose, sliding when he turned. I remember the court bowing in rows like wheat in a wind, and how he stood through all of it without once looking down. Straight-backed, jaw set, carrying a kingdom's weight on a body that had been trained for a sword, not a throne. And I thought, with an odd, practical clarity, *that* is what stands between me and everything I was sent for. Not the man. The crown. The ring of gold sliding on his brow, the throne beneath him, the whole fragile kingdom of Pavion balanced on one grieving second son who hadn't been raised to hold it. If I wanted to be close to the crown, I would have to be close to him. There was no other door. --- The door at the end of the servants' corridor was exactly where I'd been told it would be. The room behind it held a single candle, burnt low, set well away from the man in the chair so that his face stayed in shadow. I could make out the shape of his shoulders and the glint of his blue eyes whenever he blinked. "You arrived right on schedule," he said. "Cassian is dead, the coronation is done, and the court is too grieved to ask questions. You have a foothold most people spend months building." "I met the king." A pause. "And?" "He's tired. Guarded." I kept my voice even. "He's not as soft as the reports suggested." "Then you'll have to be better." He said it without heat, flat and certain, the way he said most things. "Get close to him, Karis. A council has no patience for a young king alone. They'll push a wife on him within the month, and you will be the wife he chooses. Whatever it costs." I didn't ask what *whatever* meant. I never do. "Yes, sir." He was already leaning back into the dark when he added, almost as an afterthought, "And don't fall in love with the part you're playing." I nearly laughed. I was halfway to the door, one hand on the latch. "I never do." I said it easily. I had said it a hundred times, to a hundred mirrors, and it had never once been a lie. It wasn't until I was back in my rooms, alone, unpinning my hair in the dark, that I noticed my hands weren't quite steady. And that this was going to be a tad more complicated than I'd thought.