“You didn’t have it easy.” Sorrow wells in me. It’s as though I’ve finally penetrated through the overwhelming wall of permafrost that surrounds this man and caught something real, something warm—pain. “You couldn’t go out. You were the heir from the moment you were born and groomed as such. Your father was in a complicated situation between your mother and his queen. Being between him and her and Alice couldn’t have been easy—”
“Alice was my savior,” he interrupts. “Without her, I would’ve gone mad.”
“Oh.” All his past mentions of Alice take on new meaning.
“She was good to me. My mother knew that I was destined to be king and that destiny would take me from her. From the moment I was born she handed me off to the wet nurses and washed her hands of me. I do understand the part where sh
