Promised to His Shadow

Chapter Two

What a Crown Costs

Gabriel's POV

Gabriel had buried men before. That was supposed to count for something. Six years on the northern border had taught him how to stand at a graveside without his face giving anything away, how to let the chaplain’s words wash over him while some other, colder part of his mind catalogued the things that still needed doing — supply lines, troop rotations, a letter to a widow he’d never met.

None of that training was worth anything today. Today the body on the ground was his brother’s, and Gabriel stood at the edge of the Valmonde crypt in his dress uniform with his hands clasped behind his back and discovered that twenty-five years of being the disciplined one, the steady one, the second son who never embarrassed anyone, had not prepared him for this at all.

The chaplain was still talking. Something about Adrien’s kindness, his patience, the way he’d listened to every petitioner who came to court, no matter how small their grievance. All true. All useless. Gabriel kept his eyes fixed on the stone lip of the family vault and waited for the part of the service where he was allowed to stop performing grief and simply have it.

He was aware of Elianne three feet to his left, swathed in unrelieved black, her spine so straight it looked painful. He had not let himself look at her properly since the clearing. He told himself this was respect. He suspected, in the small honest corner of his mind, he tried very hard not to visit, that it was something closer to cowardice.

"The Crown Prince of Valmonde," the chaplain said, "beloved son, beloved brother, beloved of his people —"

Beloved. Gabriel turned the word over and found, underneath it, an old splinter he’d never managed to dig out. He had loved Adrien. That was not in question, would never be in question, no matter what ugly thing also lived in his chest alongside it. But beloved had always come easily to Adrien in a way it had never once come to Gabriel, and some petty, twelve-year-old part of him had resented that for the better part of two decades before he’d had the decency to bury the resentment somewhere that couldn’t embarrass him.

He had not expected to dig it up again standing at his brother’s funeral. Grief, apparently, did not observe decent boundaries.

* * *

His father found him afterward, in the narrow stone corridor outside the crypt where the cold air at least gave a man an excuse for the redness around his eyes.

The king of Valmonde was sixty-three years old and looked, in that moment, every one of those years and several more besides. He had not slept, Gabriel suspected, since the messenger arrived. There was a tremor in his hands that Gabriel had never seen before, not even during the worst weeks of the border campaign when half the council had quietly begun discussing succession in case the king did not survive a winter that nearly killed him.

"You understand what this means," his father said. No greeting. No room for one.

"I understand my brother is dead." Gabriel kept his voice level with an effort that cost him more than he wanted to admit. "If you mean something else, you’ll have to say it plainly. I find I have very little patience today for things that aren’t plain."

His father studied him for a long moment — the particular look he reserved for council sessions, the one that weighed a man’s usefulness before deciding how much truth he deserved. Gabriel had hated that look his entire life. He hated it more now, aimed at him over his brother’s grave.

"Castelane will not honor the alliance without a marriage," the king said finally. "The duke has made that much clear already, and I cannot say I blame him. His daughter buried a betrothal today. He will not let his house be made a fool of twice."

"Then find her another match. There are unmarried lords enough in this kingdom who would crawl over broken glass for the honor."

"There is one match that secures the treaty without renegotiating eleven years of border concessions, three trade corridors, and a naval agreement your brother spent the better part of a year drafting." His father’s voice did not rise. It never needed to. "You know precisely which match I mean, Gabriel. I would rather you hear it from me than from the council."

Gabriel said nothing. The stone corridor seemed, for a moment, to tilt very slightly beneath his boots.

"You will marry Lady Elianne before the season turns," his father said. "I am sorry for the manner of it. I am not sorry for the necessity."

* * *

He found her an hour later in the small garden behind the chapel, the one nobody used in winter because the roses had nothing to offer but thorns and dead stems. She was sitting on the stone bench with her hands folded in her lap, looking at nothing in particular, and she did not turn when his boots crunched against the frost-hardened path.

"If you’ve come to offer condolences," she said, "I’d rather you didn’t. I’ve had a great many today and none of them have helped."

"I haven’t come to offer condolences."

That got her attention. She turned, finally, and the look on her face — raw, exhausted, braced for one more blow she hadn’t yet been told about — nearly undid the careful speech he’d rehearsed on the walk over.

"My father means to announce the betrothal within the week," he said. There was no gentle way into it. He’d tried to find one on the walk from the corridor and failed every time. "Yours and mine. To preserve the treaty."

For a long moment she only looked at him. He watched the information land, watched her face do several things in quick succession — disbelief, something that might have been fury, and then, worse than either, a kind of flat exhaustion that suggested she’d half expected this and simply hadn’t had the energy left to dread it properly.

"Of course," she said. "Of course he does."

"Elianne —"

"Don’t." Her voice cracked on a single syllable, and she pressed her lips together hard, visibly forcing it back under control. "Don’t say my name like that. Like you’re sorry. You’re not sorry, Gabriel, you’re relieved, because it means the treaty survives and the council stops looking at your father like he’s already half in the grave himself."

"I am sorry." He heard his own voice come out rougher than he’d meant it to. "I buried my brother three hours ago. I am not relieved about anything today."

Something in his tone must have reached her, because the anger in her face softened into something more complicated — not forgiveness, not yet, but a kind of weary acknowledgment that he was, in fact, also a person currently drowning. She looked down at her folded hands.

"I don’t want to marry you," she said quietly. "I want you to understand that clearly, before any of this becomes official. It isn’t about you specifically. I simply don’t want to be handed from one Valmonde prince to the next like a piece of furniture nobody bothered to ask."

"I know."

"Then why does it feel like you’re going to let it happen anyway?"

He didn’t have a good answer for that. The honest one — that he had wanted her near him for longer than he was willing to examine, that some shameful, undisciplined part of him had heard his father’s decree and felt something other than dread — was not an answer he could give her today, standing three hours out from his brother’s funeral, in a garden full of dead roses.

"Because the alternative is war along a border that has already cost this kingdom enough men," he said instead, which was true, and which was also, he knew even as he said it, a coward’s kind of truth — the kind that hid behind duty so it never had to answer for desire.

Elianne studied him for a long moment, and something in her expression told him she’d heard exactly what he hadn’t said.

"You should go," she said finally. "Before someone sees us out here and decides we’ve already started behaving like a betrothal."

He went. He told himself, walking back through the frost toward the house, that the unsettled feeling in his chest was grief, nothing more than grief, complicated by the day’s news and his father’s coldness and the particular ache of watching a woman he’d had no right to want look at him like he was one more thing she’d have to survive.

He almost believed it.

* * *

That night, alone in his own chambers with a fire he hadn’t bothered to tend properly, Gabriel allowed himself, for exactly as long as it took the candle on his desk to burn down an inch, to remember the first time he’d truly noticed her.

It had been at Adrien’s betrothal dinner, of all places — a detail he’d spent two years trying very hard to forget. She’d said something dry and unexpected to a visiting ambassador who’d clearly underestimated her, some small, perfectly timed correction that had left the man flustered, and the table quietly delighted, and Gabriel had laughed before he’d had the sense to stop himself. Adrien had glanced over, pleased, assuming the laugh was for him — for his clever choice of bride. Gabriel had let him believe it.

He had spent two years since then perfecting the art of not noticing her at all. He had told himself it was respect for his brother. He had told himself a great many things.

Tonight, with Adrien three hours in the ground and a marriage contract already being drafted in his name, Gabriel finally let himself admit, in the privacy of a room no one else could see into, exactly how badly he had failed at not wanting her.

It did not feel like relief, the way she’d accused him of feeling. It felt like a debt coming due that he had never agreed to owe — and one he suspected, with a grim, guilty certainty, he was about to spend the rest of his life paying.

* * *

End of Chapter Two