“You’re missing the wedding,” I murmur, nodding toward the altar.
“I’m attending the wedding. I’m simply prioritizing which view deserves my attention right now.”
“How does the queen’s husband still look so young?” murmurs some lady in a pew behind us. “Must be years of good living.”
I press my lips together to smother the laugh that threatens to ruin the ceremony. If only the woman knew what climbs into bed beside me every night. What comes out when the doors are locked and the family is shut away from gossip and minds that couldn’t fathom how the Reign of Rot ended.
Granted, having a perpetually handsome husband during official events has its benefits. Even if the truth behind the glamor would send the entire chapel screaming into the courtyard.
On Vale’s lap, Edmund fusses.
Our youngest is barely two. A late and deeply unexpected addition who arrived with the same furious wail as his sister and has maintained that volume ever since. He squirms against Vale’s chest, one chubby fist tangling in the collar of his father’s forest-green vest.
“Shh.” Vale bounces him with the practiced, absent rhythm of a man who has done this three times now and still hasn’t quite mastered it.
Edmund responds by shoving his fingers into Vale’s mouth. “Papa, leave!”
Vale removes the chubby fingers with the dignity of a god being publicly humiliated by a toddler. “Your son is bored.”
“He’s your son when he’s difficult.”
“He’s always difficult.”
“Wonder where he gets that from…”
Vale rolls his eyes. “Oh, I know the answer to that.”
Beside me, Rowan shifts in his seat. Eighteen, tall, dark-haired like his father but built like my side of the family—broad-shouldered, sturdy, the frame of a young man who spent his childhood helping the groundskeeper dig fence posts and haul stone. He doesn’t fidget out of boredom. He fidgets because sitting still in formal clothes makes him itch, and I know this because I still feel this way after two decades of being queen.
He’ll be king one day.
Not that Maren couldn't be queen; she certainly could. Brilliantly so, and everyone knows it. But when the question was put to her at sixteen, my eldest daughter looked at the uncursed, perfectly normal crown on my head, looked at me, and said, “No, thank you. I’ve seen what that thing does to a person’s privacy.”
And so…it falls to Rowan. Kind. Steady. Occasionally too earnest for his own good—qualities that will make him a great king, I’m sure of it.
“Stop fidgeting,” I murmur, nudging his shoulder.
He straightens, tugging at his collar. “The lace is itchy.”
“Rough cotton is worse.” I keep my voice low, my eyes on the altar where the priest is arranging candles. “Your grandfather shoveled dirt for a living, Rowan. Your grandmother still knits her own stockings. Where we come from, nothing was given. Everything was dug out of the ground with blistered hands. They ache for days, whereas the lace will only itch for another hour.”
Rowan glances at me, the fidgeting pausing. He has Vale’s eyes—that sharp, searching green—but the way he listens is all his father’s, too. Bored after all, perhaps.
“Once you wear that crown,” I continue, “you remember the people who dig. The ones who shovel and haul and bury theirdead with shaking hands. Their hardships. The dirt they stand in.”
“Like you did,” he says low.
“Like I still do.” My mouth curves. “I still know my way around a grave. Though my knees have strong opinions about it now.”
Rowan smiles. A small, real thing that softens the serious set of his jaw. “And if I forget?”
I lean closer, bumping my shoulder against his. “Then your father will remind you. Death runs in this family, Rowan. He’ll never let you forget.”
His gaze drifts to Vale, who is currently extracting Edmund’s fingers from his nose with an expression of regal suffering. Something warm and knowing passes through Rowan’s eyes.
He doesn’t flinch at the reference—none of our children do. They grew up with a father who sometimes forgot to wear his human face at the breakfast table, who occasionally walked through walls when he was distracted, and who once terrified a palace cook so badly she quit on the spot when he materialized in the pantry looking for biscuits.
They know what he is.
