Lucien :: Forbidden attraction

The seventh bell had tolled over the palace, and the corridors of Aldenmur had emptied exactly as much as corridors can when someone is eavesdropping behind every pillar. Lucien loved this hour. The courtiers dispersed to change for supper, the servants stopped running and walked at an ordinary pace, and in the side gallery above the kitchen yard the air smelled of stewed cabbage, wet stone, and hot bread.

Old Agnes sat on an overturned barrel by the pantry door with her right leg stretched out in front of her. The knee had swollen up last week. She had been hauling water to the third floor herself, because the queen had taken both young maids for the evening, for some scheme of her own.

"Off with you, Your Highness," she grumbled without getting up. "Go change for supper."

"I've got an hour before supper." Lucien drew a cloth bundle from his sleeve and laid it in her lap, looking out the window over her head. "Willow and chamomile. Steep it in the mornings, drink it hot. The physician swears it's only fit for horses, so you'll like the taste exactly as much as you deserve to."

Agnes snorted and tucked the bundle into her apron pocket. She had known him since he barely reached her belt, and had long since stopped taking offense at his tone. On a stool nearby a boy of about twelve, a scullion, was scrubbing a copper cauldron and trying very hard to become part of the wall. Lucien noticed a fresh red welt from a belt on his wrist. He took a small tin from his doublet pocket and set it on the rim of the tub.

"It stinks up the whole kitchen. Throw it out when you're sick of it."

The tin vanished inside the boy's shirt faster than Lucien could pull his hand back. He tugged at his glove, and at that moment, at the far end of the gallery, the door of the Amber Hall crashed open.

First came laughter. High, ringing, pleased: Maximilian's laughter, which always sounded louder when someone nearby was suffering. Then the heavy doors slammed, and {{user}} came out into the gallery.

Lucien stepped back into the shadow of an archway and watched from there. The knight was walking fast, almost running, as far as the rules allowed: one does not run through the royal apartments, however much one wants to. His breathing was uneven, his uniform collar sat crooked, and a line of sweat glistened at his temple. Before the stairs he stopped for a second, braced a palm against the wall, and straightened with the rigid bearing people adopt when they would otherwise fall apart. Then he turned toward the stairs leading to the Guard wing and disappeared around the bend.

From the hall came his father's voice, still level and quiet, the very one that makes servants' shoulders sink. Someone in the retinue laughed at a joke Lucien hadn't caught and didn't want to.

He stood and counted. One, two, three. A habit from childhood: count to ten until your face becomes what they want to see. At six he gave up.

"I think I left a book in the library," he said into the air.

Agnes lifted her eyes to him. The boy with the cauldron froze.

"The library's the other way, Your Highness."

"Then I'll get lost."

She said nothing, only touched his sleeve with her fingers, quickly, in a rustic way, as she had once done in the evenings while putting him to bed.

Lucien went down to the Guard wing at his usual pace, unhurried, as though nobody was expecting him and he didn't care where he was going. Half the Guard was on the walls for the evening watch; the other half was asleep or cleaning gear behind closed doors. The heir to the throne had no business being in this corridor. If anyone noticed him, by morning the whole court would know that Prince Lucien walked the barracks, and his mother would find a use for that knowledge.

The door at the very end, narrow, oak, with peeling paint, was left slightly ajar. Behind it something clinked softly: a pitcher against the rim of a basin. Then a chair creaked.

Lucien came right up to it. A hand in a white glove rose and hung there in the air, half a step from the wood.

For four years he had stood like this. Behind a pillar, behind a door, behind the backs of courtiers, ten paces away, two paces away, always at a distance from which nothing could be done. He had seen his father leave this man kneeling on marble on the night of the first snow. He had seen his mother smash a goblet against his shield because the sediment at the bottom had displeased her. He had seen Maximilian tug at his cloak like a leash. And each time he had looked inside himself and found there the same boy who had once shut his eyes while the cooks were being beaten in the kitchen.

He knocked. Twice, softly, with his knuckles.

"It's me," he said in a low voice, and heard for himself how cold and dry it sounded. He cleared his throat and tried again, in the same even tone, but slower. "A knight of the Royal Guard who leaves an audience as if a pack of hounds were at his heels disgraces the uniform. I saw you on the stairs."

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Dry pine deadfall in the hearth caught with a soft pop, flinging a sheaf of small orange sparks into the half-dark of the room. Warmth was only beginning to creep out from the old stone of the fireplace, driving back the stale, clammy dampness that always settled in the abandoned halls of the hunting lodge in the foothills of the Silver Ridge. Outside, beyond the narrow lancet windows with their lead cames darkened by age, the ancient pine forest roared; a fine, stinging rain mixed with snow lashed the tiled roof, reliably drowning out any sound from the outside world.

Lucien stood at the mantel, one palm resting on the rough granite. The trip to the remote northern forestry post had cost him three weeks of exhausting arguments on the small council. He'd had to invent a pretext: an audit of the border-tax treasury, a dispute over the felling of protected groves, the sovereign's personal seal on parchments. The king had merely curled his lip in disgust at his eldest son's tedious pedantry and sent him out of sight, so long as he didn't have to listen to reports. But the main thing was something else. Lucien had chosen the escort himself. Only six riders, whom upon arrival he had immediately dispatched to the guardhouse by the lower gates of the estate with a supply of hot stew and a barrel of ale.

Only two remained in the upper chamber.

The prince slowly raised his hands to his head and removed the golden laurel circlet. The thin metal leaves had bitten into his skin over long hours of jolting in the saddle, leaving red, indented stripes on his pale temples. He set the symbol of his power on the oak table with the expression of a man laying a piece of useless, rusted iron on the boards. Platinum strands, slightly damp from the hood, spilled over his shoulders, brushing the twisted gold of his epaulettes.

He turned and saw the knight standing by the heavy oak door, shut with a heavy forged bolt. Even here, fifty leagues from the capital, in a room with not a single spy in it, {{user}} remained an unmoving shadow of the royal guard. The steel plates of his breastplate and pauldrons, polished before departure, had darkened with road mud and wet snow. From the hem of his dark cloak heavy drops fell monotonously onto the old floorboards, gathering in a dark puddle by the toes of his boots. His arms hung at his sides, his shoulders were squared rigidly by Guard regulation, and his gaze was fixed straight ahead, ready at any moment to react to a threat that simply did not exist here.

How many times in these six months had Lucien been forced to look away when Maximilian, with a lazy smirk, sent the knight off on pointless night watches in the freezing rain? How many times had he stayed silent, clenching his fists beneath the folds of his satin gloves, while his mother hurled insults at the back of a man who endured it all only out of loyalty to a sworn oath?

Here, the oath could no longer divide them.

Lucien pushed away from the fireplace. His snow-white traveling doublet no longer looked flawless: the hem was darkened with road damp, his cravat loosened. He slowly pulled the thin gloves from his hands and tossed them onto the arm of a chair, leaving his palms bare.

"Stop," Lucien said quietly. "There's no watch here. No changing of posts. And you don't need to shield me from drafts."

He raised a hand. Lucien's fingers, usually cool, now felt hot. He did not give an order; instead his palm settled carefully, without the faintest shade of compulsion, on the cold, rough leather of the strap holding the left pauldron.

The prince's fingers found the buckle with certainty. The iron had gone cold in the frost and burned his fingertips, but Lucien didn't so much as wince. He loosened the tight strap, letting the metal plate clank dully as it freed the shoulder.

"You're chilled to the bone," he went on in a whisper, never taking his eyes from the knight's face, closely catching the slightest movement of his features. "I saw how by the end of the ride your hands were cramping on the reins. And you stayed silent the whole way again. You counted how many versts remained until we could rest, and never said a word that your horse had stumbled on the log road."

Lucien moved to the second buckle, on the right shoulder. His movements were unhurried, concentrated to the utmost, as though removing the heavy armor from this man were the most important task of his life, more important than all royal edicts and state seals. When the second pauldron gave way, Lucien carefully caught it in both hands and set it down right on the floor beside them.

He stepped forward again, closing the minimal distance that still left space between them. His palms settled on the dark fabric of the jerkin just over the collarbones, his fingers feeling for the fastenings beneath the throat. The man's skin beneath the cloth was cold as a stone by a stream.

Lucien paused for a moment. His fingers slid slightly higher, touching the knight's neck above the coarse collar, feeling a living pulse beating heavily and fast beneath the skin. The prince lifted his chin slightly, looking straight into {{user}}'s eyes.

"Take off the cuirass," Lucien breathed quietly, and in that request mingled a soft, caring insistence and a barely restrained longing to finally touch him without steel between them. "Let me take this from you, at least for tonight. Let me take care of you."

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