Maxence chuckled, his stomach bouncing under his fingers. “None that we know of. Anybody who went there was probably smart enough to hide the body or had security henchmen to bury it for them.”
“Okay, fine. Did any murders ever happen in Monagasquay?”
Ah, she wanted a Monagasquay story.
Maxence considered what to tell her. Lots of murders had happened in the history of his small country, and he was quite sure his cousin had murdered a man. He wasn’t entirely sure about the whole story, however.
Instead of telling Dree a highly conjectured version of what might have happened with Alexandre, Maxence said, “There’s a rumor that floats around Monagasquay that one of the princes was kidnapped when he was a small child.”
In the dark, her sweet little voice rose in excitement. “Oh, a kidnapping story. That sounds good. I’m in the mood for a thriller. Wait, was the little prince rescued? Or is it like the little princes in the tower in England, where they never found their bodies? Because I can’t handle it if he doesn’t make it.”
A shiver ran through Maxence. “He survived.”
“Okay, then tell me the story,” she said.
Maxence breathed in a deep breath, feeling the cold air all the way down into the base of his lungs.
The problem was the dark. He couldn’t see, and he couldn’t ground himself with his sight.
Instead, he concentrated on the warmth of the sleeping bag around his arms and legs. A scent like a peach and citrus-flavored alcoholic drink on a cypress dock over the Mediterranean Sea puffed out of his sleeping bag as his body warmed the remnants of his cologne.
Curls of his hair traced lines on his forehead and near his ears as he breathed.
His riding gear piled at the base of his sleeping bag emitted a leathery whiff into the air.
As Dree breathed, her breath whirred in the dark, and the nylon of her sleeping bag creaked.
His abdominals were lumps under the soft cotton of his shirt where he rested his fingertips. His mouth still tasted like mint from his toothpaste.
The ground was hard under his back and heels.
The very apex of the tent was a faint, yellow-gray smear of a line against the blackness surrounding him.
Maxence stared at the yellow-gray smear. His ears filled with the tiny whoosh of Dree’s breath and the rustle of her bedroll.
Breathe.
He could breathe.
If he could breathe, he could speak.
Maxence said, “Once upon a time, there was a little prince of Monagasquay. He wasn’t a very handsome little prince and he was second in line to the throne after his older brother, so nobody cared about him very much. He was just the spare in case something happened to the older prince, and he expected to have a very quiet life, which was just fine with him. As his older brother was not particularly kind to him about his extraneous status, the young prince made himself scarce as often as possible, which was probably why no one noticed for a week when he went missing.”
“Wait,” Dree said. “How old was the kid?”
“Nine years old,” he said.
“And how long ago was this?”
“Years and years ago. Lifetimes,” Maxence sighed.
“And nobody just went, ‘Hey, where’s the other kid?’”
“Evidently not.”
“Who kidnapped him? Does Monagasquay have a rival, an ancestral enemy, like England and France were always fighting with each other back in historical times?”
Maxence chuckled. “Monagasquay is too small to have any real enemies. If we had an enemy, they would simply squash us. Back in medieval times, the nobles who ruled the Italian cities squabbled with each other with their tiny little armies. Whenever France got pissed off at us, they just overran us and stole all the art and jewelry from the fortress-turned-castle.”
