Chapter 1
Bryn is a very skilled scribe who will one day be known for his outlandish imagination and ability to weave a masterpiece from nothing. The treasury ledger, which is a complete and utter work of fiction, is a testament to this.
He knows the ledger is complete garbage because he's been the one writing it for the past six months, working with what they don't have and doctoring the numbers so the court doesn't know they won't be able to feed them come winter. The real figures, which are like a horrific campfire tale in their own right, live under a loose floorboard in his bedroom and only get brought out when he's alone, and the door is shut, and everyone else is asleep. The numbers paint a portrait so bleak they would make an executioner at the gallows weep. But no one asks the second son for the truth. No one asks the second son for much of anything.
Bryn closes the false ledger and presses the palms of his hands into his eyes until he starts to see spots dancing in the darkness behind his eyelids. The study smells of candle wax and mildew, but he’s been spending so much time there that it’s almoststarted to become comforting. Half of the tapestries that used to line the walls have been sold at market and the stone now shows pale rectangles of discoloration where they used to hang. He started hanging cheaper fabrics over the gaps so that it wouldn’t be so noticeable to visitors. Not that they get visitors anymore.
Further down the corridor, the king is in his cups. Bryn can hear it (probably all of the western kingdom can hear it). There’s the sound of tuneless singing, the crash of something breakable they won’t be able to replace, the crushing silence of servants hanging nearby with brooms and carafes to either clean up the wreckage or pour their king another glass. They, like Bryn, know better than to intervene at this point. King Viktor of Everen, beloved by absolutely no one who has ever met him sober, which at this point includes the stray dogs the cook keeps feeding with scraps they don’t have.
Bryn pushes his chair back from the aging desk and stands, cracking his neck. He’s barely been eighteen for three months and already he moves with the stiffness of a man thrice his age. There have been too many nights hunched over figures that will never add up to something promising. Too many mornings holding court in his father’s place while he sleeps off the wine with a courtesan under one arm. Far too many afternoons convincing creditors that the crown’s payment is forthcoming when the crown can barely scrape together enough to afford the wax it uses to seal its empty promises.
His older brother Alder would have been better at this. Alder was born to be king, golden and broad and easy with people in a way Bryn has never managed. Alder could always walk into a room and make everyone in it stand taller, take notice. Bryn walks into a room and people check to make sure they haven't misplaced a daughter.
But Alder has been dead for six years now. There had been a hunting accident, or so they had called it, and no one had everinvestigated that the arrow came from the wrong direction and from whom it had come. Bryn had been twelve when it happened and he had stopped being a child that afternoon and instead became whatever it is he’s playing at now. Something useful shrouded in anger and exhaustion that he doesn’t feel like giving a title to.
He leaves the study and takes the east corridor toward his mother's chambers. The door is opened by servants on most occasions, and by him on others, but never by her. He knocks on the door, two shorts raps, and presses his ear to the wood. He doesn’t hear anything, of course, because his mother hasn’t spoken to him in six years.
"Mother. It's Bryn."
Still nothing. He probably shouldn’t keep trying. He should just accept that he lost a brother and a parent both to that hunting accident. There’s been an impossible rift between his mother and him since that day Alder died. She won’t accept food if he brings it, and she won’t talk to him as long as the words come from him, because he’s wearing the wrong face and he has the wrong build and he should have been the one in the woods that day. She’s never said it aloud, of course. She doesn’t say anything to him at all.
He finds Mithri in the gardens, which is a generous thing to call it. They were once gardens, but to still refer to them that way is a stretch. Mostly they’re an overgrown tangle of dead rose canes and weeds that no one tends to any longer. Mithri is sitting on the crumbling stone bench with her embroidery in her lap and her golden hair catching the late afternoon light, and she manages to make even ruin look graceful. She’s his twin, younger by eight minutes. They have identical coloring, though she got the curves and he got the cheekbones. They’re both barely five foot seven, which is elegant on her and inconvenient on him.
“You look dreadful,” she says, not looking up from her stitching.
He wants to point out that they look the same, but even he knows that’s not true. Mithri always looks beautiful.
“Thank you,” he says instead. “I’ve been practicing.”
She glances up at him and smiles, not enough to show teeth but enough to make all the lies in the ledger and the sound of their father drowning himself in wine feel far away. It’s easily the best thing he’s seen all day, but that’s not exactly a hard title to earn when his days feel like he’s scrubbing the bottom of a chamberpot hoping to find gold.
He drops on the bench beside her and steals a glance at the embroidery she’s working on. It looks to be a songbird in blue thread. It’s infinitely better than the horrific creatures of last year’s attempts, when she had once forgotten how many ears a rabbit should have and finished Bryn a handkerchief with a three-eared monstrosity.
“Father broke the decanter,” she says after a moment. “The crystal one from grandmother. I know you were hiding it from him, but apparently he found it.”
Bryn makes a humming sound in his throat. That was the last piece worth anything. “Excellent news. I’ll alert the treasury that we are now fully divested of heirlooms.”
Mithri sets down her embroidery and looks at him without humor, which isn’t a good sign. He braces for whatever she’s about to say that he knows he doesn’t want to hear.
“You can’t keep doing this, Bryn.”
He inhales slowly. Exhales slower. “What exactly can I not keep doing?”
The look becomes exasperated. “Literally everything. You do everything.”
Maybe a year ago he would have had a clever answer for that, but he’s too worn down to think of one now. He picks ata loose thread on his sleeve instead to buy time. The fabric is wearing thin at the elbows, because he only owns a handful of garments and he’s darning it himself. There might be something deeply pathetic about a prince mending his own clothes, but the seamstress left two months ago for a household that actually pays its staff and it’s not like he’s ever shied away from practical work.
“Someone has to do it or it won’t get done,” he says finally, shooting for reasonable and landing somewhere near desperate.
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”
He does know it. Mithri means he can't keep running the kingdom from behind a curtain, can't keep covering for a drunk and a ghost, can't keep holding the walls up through sheer stubbornness while the foundation crumbles under his feet. She means he's eighteen and he looks twenty-five and he hasn't laughed, truly laughed, since he can't remember when.
She's right. But being right doesn't change anything, so he kisses her forehead and tells her the songbird is coming along nicely and goes back inside to figure out which of their remaining silverware he can sell without the cook noticing.
***
The summons arrives at dawn.
