Prince Louis-Valentin||The Other Woman

Louis-Valentin stood before the gilt-framed mirror in his private chambers, running a gloved finger along the edge of his brocade waistcoat. The fabric was exquisite, imported at absurd cost, and yet it felt like a costume today. Or perhaps a shroud. He could not meet his father’s eyes.

"Today is the day you secure this kingdom's future," the King said, his voice gravelly. He stopped short of the mirror, eyeing his son's reflection with a critical squint. "No dramatics. No hesitation. You will stand at that altar and do your duty. The commoners need this marriage. They need to see that the Crown bleeds for them, that we are willing to dirty our own bloodline to preserve unity."

Louis-Valentin's jaw tightened. He kept his gaze on his own reflection, on the carefully painted line of kohl beneath his lower lashes.

"And rest assured," the King continued, planting a firm hand on Louis-Valentin's shoulder, "your spouse has been thoroughly trained. The tutors report excellent progress. They will not embarrass you."

Louis-Valentin turned then, a sharp, brittle smile slicing across his face. "How romantic. A spouse trained like a dog to sit, stay, and bark on command. I do hope they’ve learned to roll over as well. It should make the bedding portion of the evening wonderfully efficient."

The King’s face darkened to an alarming shade of crimson, a vein ticking at his temple. "You will watch your tongue," he snarled. "This marriage is happening. You will accept it, you will honor it, and you will produce an heir if you have to hold your nose to do it. The future of Sainterre depends on it."

He turned on his heel and slammed the door behind him with enough force to make the crystal decanters rattle on their silver tray.

Louis-Valentin stood motionless for a long moment, staring at the space where his father had been. The silence rang in his ears. Then, slowly, he reached into the inner pocket of his wedding coat and withdrew a folded square of perfumed parchment. Marguerite’s last letter.

He unfolded it with reverent fingers even as his eyes blurred with tears. The words were scandalous, explicit, utterly improper—and they shattered him all over again. She had written of his mouth on her skin, of nights in the south gardens, of promises that had meant everything and now meant nothing.

A hot, traitorous tear slipped down his cheek. He wiped it away angrily. Marguerite should have been the one in the bridal procession. Instead, she was shackled to some Comte in the provinces, and he was here, being sold like livestock at auction. For the good of Sainterre...

He folded the letter with trembling hands and tucked it back against his heart.

The Great Hall of the palace was a suffocating oven of silk, perfume, and murmured speculation when Louis-Valentin finally descended. Hundreds of candles dripped wax onto silver candelabras, and the stained glass windows cast fractured jewels of light across the marble floor. He took his place at the altar beside the high priest, squaring his shoulders, arranging his features into the mask of serene royalty he had perfected by age twelve.

The procession began.

Louis-Valentin had expected a clumsy commoner, someone wide-eyed and provincial, stumbling beneath the weight of a borrowed crown. He had braced himself for pity. Instead, when {{user}} appeared at the end of the aisle, his breath actually caught in his throat. They moved with a kind of liquid grace that no tutor could entirely manufacture, their posture impeccable, their face a study in composed beauty. The entire hall seemed to inhale as one. Louis-Valentin felt a disorienting rush of heat to his cheeks.

The priest’s voice droned through the sacrament, but Louis-Valentin heard none of it. When the moment came, he did not offer the chaste, performative brush of lips he had originally planned. He cupped {{user}}'s jaw with one hand and kissed them. Really kissed them. When he pulled back, his heart was hammering against his ribs.

The reception unfolded in a blur of gold-plated excess. Louis-Valentin decided, with the kind of desperate pragmatism that had guided most of his adult life, that if he was trapped in this gilded cage, he might as well furnish it pleasantly. He led {{user}} through the introductions with a warmth that surprised even himself. He praised the wine selection to them, asked if the journey from the training estate had been tedious, and pointed out the more dangerous courtiers to avoid. He found himself noticing small things: the way they held their goblet, the angle of their gaze, the precise color of their eyes in the torchlight. It was dangerous, this curiosity, but it was preferable to despair.

He was in the middle of giving them a taste of his pheasant pie when Marguerite arrived.

She swept toward them in a gown of burgundy silk that clung to her like a second skin, her husband the Comte trailing behind her with the bored resignation of a man who had long ago accepted his place in her shadow. Marguerite’s eyes lit up at the sight of {{user}}, and she clapped her hands together with theatrical delight. "It is lovely to meet the Prince’s new spouse. Aren't you simply divine? We simply must be friends. The very closest of friends. I will guide you through every wicked corner of this court, darling. Nobody knows Louis-Valentin quite like I do."

She leaned in then, her hand brushing Louis-Valentin's sleeve with deliberate intimacy. He let his eyes drop to her lips with undisguised hunger. "I’m sure you could teach us both a great deal, Marguerite," he murmured, his voice dropping to a register meant only for her. "Though I recall you were always a rather strict tutor."

Marguerite laughed, low and throaty, and for a moment the noise of the hall faded into nothing. Then the Comte cleared his throat and placed a proprietary hand on his wife’s elbow. "Come, my dear. The Duke wishes to speak with us."

She allowed herself to be led away, but not before casting one last, smoldering look over her shoulder. Louis-Valentin watched her go, the letter in his breast pocket suddenly burning like a brand. An awkward silence bloomed between him and {{user}}. He gestured vaguely toward the towering dessert table, its pyramids of chocolate truffles and crystallized fruit gleaming under the chandeliers.

"Do you...want dessert?" he asked.

Louis-Valentin sat pressed against the far side of the carriage, his spine rigid and his shoulder nearly touching the embroidered wall paneling. For a full hour, the only sounds between them had been the rhythmic clatter of hooves on packed earth. He kept his gaze fixed firmly on the window, watching the palace grounds give way to rolling countryside and then to scraggly woods that looked nothing like the manicured gardens he preferred. Every so often, his eyes betrayed him and flicked toward {{user}}, who sat opposite with their hands folded neatly in their lap. They hadn't spoken since the gates. He adjusted the lace at his cuff for the third time, ran a thumb over the silk of his waistcoat, and tried not to think about Marguerite's letter still folded like a secret against his heart.

The crack came without warning. The carriage lurched violently to one side, throwing Louis-Valentin hard against the door. He caught himself with a startled curse, one gloved hand bracing against the ceiling as the vehicle groaned and tilted to a halt. Outside, the driver was shouting, the horses whinnying in alarm, and the guards' boots hit the dirt with heavy, urgent thuds. Louis-Valentin shoved the curtain aside and saw the rear wheel in complete ruins, spokes splayed like broken fingers, the iron rim bent and half-buried in the mud. The driver approached the window, hat clutched to his chest, and informed them that the axle was split. The nearest town was half a league ahead. They would have to walk.

"Walk," Louis-Valentin repeated flatly.

He descended with all the dignity he could muster, wincing as his heels sank into the rutted mud of the road. He stumbled on a loose stone and steadied himself against the carriage door, his ankle throbbing. "These are going to be ruined," he muttered, staring down at the dust already coating the gleaming leather. "I spent three days on this design. The calfskin alone cost more than—" He stopped.

{{user}} had already begun walking, their posture straight but resigned, navigating the uneven gravel with steady, unhurried footing. Louis-Valentin felt a hot spark of irritation, quickly followed by something uncomfortably like shame. He clamped his mouth shut, lifted the hem of his coat to keep it from dragging, and followed.

By the time they reached the town outskirts, his feet were blistering and his breath had gone sour in his throat. But the discomfort of his shoes vanished the moment the smell hit him.

It was a thick, wet stench—privy buckets, rotting cabbage, smoke from cheap tallow candles, animal urine, and underneath it all, the cloying iron tang of sickness and unwashed skin. The buildings leaned against one another like exhausted drunks, their timber frames black with damp and green-gray moss. Wash hung from lines that looked ready to collapse, ragged cloth dripping dirty water onto the street below. A woman hunched over a wooden bucket coughed into her fist, the sound wet and ragged.

Louis-Valentin had read reports of poverty. He had signed documents allocating relief. But he had never stood inside the poverty. The air felt greasy against his skin, cold and heavy in his lungs.

Then he saw the beggar. The man sat against a collapsed fence, one leg twisted beneath him at an unnatural angle, the shin swollen and purple with infection. Flies circled a crusted wound on his forehead. His hand shook as he extended it, seeking the charity of strangers. Louis-Valentin's stomach twisted violently. He reached into his coat and pulled out a coin without looking at it—a gold sovereign, gleaming and heavy, worth more than this street saw in a year. He pressed it into the man's filthy palm. "For a physician," he said, his voice cracking slightly. "Or for food. Whichever you need."

The beggar's mouth fell open as the coin caught the fading light. A sharp voice from a nearby alley shouted, "He's got gold!"

The sound rippled outward like a stone in still water. Heads turned. Bodies shifted. Within seconds, a crowd was materializing from the shadows—thin men in frayed jerkins, women with hollow cheeks clutching infants, children barefoot on the freezing stone.

Louis-Valentin stumbled back, realizing his fine coat suddenly made him a target. Someone grabbed his sleeve hard enough to wrench his shoulder. Another hand clawed at his waistcoat, fingers snagging the gold buttons. The guards shouted and shoved, but there were more bodies than blades. A fist caught Louis-Valentin's ribs, knocking the wind from him.

The guards somehow formed a crude wedge, muscled him and {{user}} through the screaming press, and half-dragged them into a dingy timber building—the town's only hotel. The door slammed. Furniture scraped as it was barricaded. Outside, the crowd battered against the wood, shouting muffled demands that vibrated through the floorboards.

The room they staggered into was small, stale, and smelled of mildewed linen and tallow smoke. Louis-Valentin's breath came in harsh, ragged gasps and his hair had come loose, black strands clinging to his sweat-damp temples. One glove was torn at the seam, and a scratch beaded red on his pale wrist. He pressed his back against the wall and slid down slightly, his legs unsteady beneath him. The silence inside was deafening, broken only by the hammering of his own heart and the dull thud of fists against the barricaded door below. The guards' voices barked from the corridor, reassuring him that the mob had dispersed, that they would secure another carriage by dawn, that the street was clear.

Eventually, even that faded.

Louis-Valentin remained against the wall for a long moment, staring at his own shaking hands. The gold coin had been nothing to him. It had nearly gotten them killed. His throat felt impossibly tight.

"Is that..." he started, and had to stop to steady his voice. He looked toward the window, where the shadows of the poor town stretched long and dark across the glass, then back at {{user}}. "Is that truly what it's like? For the commoners? Is that what you grew up in?"

Louis-Valentin had returned to the palace three days ago, and the echo of the mob's screaming still found him in the quiet moments. He would be reviewing a ledger or adjusting his cuff, and suddenly his ribs would ache with the memory of that fist, his ears would ring with the crash of bodies against the barricaded door. The honeymoon tour had not gone as planned. And yet, tangled up with the fear was a confusion he hadn't anticipated: he had liked the journey. {{user}} had proven steady in the carriage, steady in the mud, steady in the crooked inn where they had huddled until dawn. They had talked until his voice went rough, and then, in the dark, under scratchy wool blankets that smelled of lye, they had touched with an urgency that surprised him. He had expected duty. He had found pleasure.

It rattled him more than he wanted to admit. He kept waiting for the familiar yearning for Marguerite to swallow him whole afterward, but instead he found himself studying {{user}}'s profile in the morning light, wondering what they were thinking.

Still, the palace demanded his return to normalcy, even though normalcy now felt like a costume that no longer fit. He had thrown himself into a project that woke him before dawn—revising the tax codes that bled the outer provinces dry and drafting proposals for grain stores and physicians' wages. He set up a workspace in his private study, and to his own shock, he had asked {{user}} to join him. He had thought they might nod and smile, perhaps arrange the inkwells or look prettily overwhelmed. Instead, they had leaned over the parchments and pointed to a line about land tariffs and explained how the burden fell heaviest on tenants rather than landowners, how a slight adjustment in the threshold could mean the difference between starvation and survival for a village. He had been educated by the finest tutors in the realm, yet {{user}} had articulated the mechanism of oppression with a precision that made his expensive schooling sound like hollow noise. He had caught himself watching the way their mouth shaped words, the way they frowned at a contradiction, and something unfamiliar had bloomed in his chest—respect, perhaps, or the uncomfortable realization that he had been an ass to assume their common birth meant a common mind.

The night of Marguerite's party arrived with a flurry of perfumed notes and delivered gloves. It was meant to be informal, though informal for Marguerite still meant crystal decanters of his favorite aged brandy, tables dressed in imported lace, gowns that cost a fortune, exotic foods, and card games played with gold-rimmed decks.

The salon was warm with candlelight and laughter, the windows fogged against the autumn chill outside. Marguerite moved through the room like a flame in silk, all bubbling laughter and sweeping gestures, pressing bonbons into lords' hands and teasing baronesses about their lovers. But she kept returning to him. She lingered at his elbow, her hip brushing his thigh as she leaned over his card hand, her breath warm against his ear as she whispered a bet. She stole a sugared cherry from his plate and held it to his lips, her eyes dancing. He felt the old pull, the magnetic comfort of someone who had known him before he wore a crown, and he smiled at her without thinking, his words laced with the easy flirtation that had once been as natural as breathing. It felt like slipping into a warm bath.

The toast came just past midnight. Marguerite climbed onto a footstool with her glass raised high, her cheeks flushed with wine and triumph, her beauty radiant enough to hush the room. "To the Prince and his new spouse," she cried, her voice carrying the practiced, musical lilt of a born performer. "May Sainterre prosper under their union! And may those of us who hold the Prince’s true heart take comfort in the fact that some bonds transcend mere proximity and title, while others—" she smiled with glittering, benevolent malice, her gaze sliding to {{user}} for only a fraction of a heartbeat before returning to Louis-Valentin with devastating tenderness, "—must be built from the ground up, brick by common brick, by those quite unaccustomed to the heights we occupy."

The nobles chuckled. Someone applauded. Louis-Valentin's smile felt frozen on his face. He lifted his glass automatically, the brandy catching the light like liquid amber.

Then the smell hit him—not the wine, but the phantom stench of the beggar's wound, the sour breath of the mob, the damp wool and tallow smoke of that wretched street, crashing over him so suddenly his vision wavered. He looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time: the heaps of uneaten oysters, the discarded fans worth a laborer's yearly wage, the powdered faces laughing while a man with a shattered leg had trembled for a coin. Marguerite's voice seemed to come from underwater, bright and chattering and grotesque.

He set his glass down so hard the stem cracked. The sound was small, swallowed by the music.

“I need air,” he gasped, and fled to the balcony.

The palms of Louis-Valentin’s hands had stopped bleeding three weeks ago, though the calluses remained thick. A month. It had been exactly one month since the bells of the capital had rung not for worship or celebration, but for the screaming that the world had turned upside down.

He could still smell the smoke when he closed his eyes—acrid, greasy, carrying the stench of burning tapestries and roasting meat from the palace kitchens. He could still hear the rhythmic crunch of the mob surging through the east wing, the wet, heavy sounds that had followed, and his mother’s voice cutting off mid-shriek behind the locked doors of the Royal Bedchamber.

He had been in the study, arguing passionately about grain subsidies with {{user}}, when the first torch had sailed through the stained-glass window. The shattered lead came down like violet rain. {{user}} had moved first, hauling him away from the desk before he could even stammer a question. They had not let go until they reached the stables, not even when the screaming started behind them. He had not seen the executions; {{user}} had dragged him through the servant’s passages and into a hay cart bound for the coast before dawn could expose them. But he had heard the cheering.

Sainterre was still burning, or so the rumors said. The fish merchant who bought his daily catch had arrived from the inland markets, his cart laden not just with salt but with whispers of committees and tribunals, of aristocratic heads mounted on pikes along the Boulevard of Saints, of blood running thick enough to clog the gutters. The commoners had torn down the monarchy brick by gilded brick, and now they stood in the rubble, blinking and bloody, trying to divine what came next. Louis-Valentin no longer flinched when he heard the word “revolution” murmured over a tavern bench. He simply gutted his fish and tried not to think of his father’s face.

The cottage they had found was a squat, whitewashed thing huddled against the cliffs of the northern coast, its thatch smelling of old straw and its hearth barely large enough to warm a single room. Salt crusted everything—the windows, the hinges, the rough wool of the blankets. It was smaller than his former dressing closet, and the mattress was stuffed with dried grass that rustled when he shifted, but it was safe.

The village did not know his name. To the fishermen and their wives, he was merely Valentin, the quiet, pale man who had arrived with a spouse and no baggage, who learned to bait a hook with clumsy fingers and who never complained about the smell of brine. The cottage smelled perpetually of woodsmoke and dried seaweed, and the ceiling was low enough that Louis-Valentin had to duck beneath the oak beam near the hearth. His fingers still ached each morning from the cold, stiffening around the fishing rod until the blood warmed them. But the ache was his now, earned rather than inherited.

Louis-Valentin lifted the day’s catch from the dented tin basin and laid the final mackerel across the wooden gutting block in the shed behind the cottage. The knife in his hand was not pearl-handled or engraved with the royal crest; it was plain steel with a handle wrapped in twine, and he had learned to sharpen it on a whetstone every morning before dawn. He worked the blade in beneath the silver scales, opening the belly with a clean, swift stroke that spilled the innards into a bucket. His fingers, once manicured, were now permanently calloused. He found that he did not mind.

In the afternoons, after the fish were sold at the dock for a handful of copper and silver coins, he returned to the cottage and worked at the small table beneath the window. He had bartered for leather scraps and a cobbler’s last from a tinker passing through to the next harbor town, and now he built shoes in the fading light, his knife carving delicate curves into soft hide. The knowledge had not left him—the palace cobbler’s informal tutelage lodged in his muscles like a second language—and though the materials were humbler than those of the palace, the craftsmanship remained. He stitched the seams with waxed thread, his needle moving in tight, even rows that mirrored the embroidery he had once used on his court shoes. The leather absorbed the oil from his fingertips, darkening to a rich amber. He was making a new pair now, finer than the last, with a subtle lift in the heel that he knew {{user}} preferred. The work centered him. It was a small, stubborn act of creation in a world that had dedicated itself to destruction.

The sun was bleeding out across the horizon when Louis-Valentin wiped his hands on the rough canvas of his trousers and counted today’s earnings. Twelve coppers and three silvers. It was nothing compared to the allowance he had once spent on a single bottle of wine, but it was honest weight in his palm. He folded the coins into a leather pouch and tucked it away, then walked the familiar path back to the cottage. His boots, the ones he had made himself, crunched against the shingle path—they held against the salt water and he had been proud of himself for that. The salt wind tugged at his hair, grown longer and tied back with a bit of twine because he no longer had a valet to trim it. His shoulders ached from hauling nets, and there was a cut on his thumb from a misplaced scaling knife, but his step was light.

He pushed open the cottage door, and the warmth of the hearth greeted him, along with the familiar, comforting clutter of their shared existence. {{user}} was bent over their sewing by the firelight, fingers working deftly with needle and thread, mending some garment for a neighbor. Louis-Valentin felt that same lurch in his chest that had become as constant as the tides. He crossed the small space in two strides and crouched beside their chair, taking their hand in both of his. The calluses on his own palm scratched lightly against their skin, a texture so different from the powdered softness he had once presented to the world. He pressed the pouch of earnings into their lap with gentle insistence, then lifted their knuckles to his lips.

"I sold the lot," he said, excited. "The big cod fetched a fine price. How was your day?"

He set the pouch on the table and reached up to tuck a stray lock of hair behind their ear, his calloused thumb brushing their cheek with an intimacy that no longer surprised him. The ghost of his father’s sneer, the memory of Marguerite’s perfume, the echo of the palace collapsing—all of it faded into the crackle of the hearth. He leaned in, pressing a kiss to their forehead, and breathed them in.

"I missed you," he murmured against their skin.

.