Magdala rolled her eyes. How many times had she heard this story? Half a dozen at least. Perhaps more. It changed with each repetition, but the root of it was always the same …
“I had no weapons, but I broke the prince’s arm and then kicked in his brother’s ribs. Neither of them could stand for weeks. They stayed away from me after that.”
Magdala didn’t mention that, in an earlier iteration of this tale, there had been three other boys with Julian, making them a two-to-one match against Prince Asherton and his Ashkendoric half-brother.
More than anything her father had said in ten years of meetings, Julian’s tales of the prince at school had fanned the flames of royalism around her father’s hearth.
According to Julian, Asherton was tyrannical in his tempers, illogical in his policies, a warmonger. A bloodthirsty dictator. The others lapped up every word, even though Julian hadn’t seen the prince in person since they were together at military school three years past.
Sometimes Madgala wondered if Julian was the child Seamus wished she could be.
“What does Angelonia think of your endless stories?” Magdala called into the kitchen.
Julian frowned at her over his shoulder. “She enjoys them. I was meant to have a late dinner with her, so I’m sure she’d feel vindicated if he met with an accident.”
He liked to bring up his betrothal to Angelonia whenever he had the chance. It wasn’t every day that a lower guardsman attained a dukedom, but in Julian’s case, it wasn’t surprising. He was maddeningly handsome, and Angelonia had enough money and title for both of them. Angelonia had come to Allagesh to study faerie stones or something of the kind, but all Magdala ever saw her do was sit in front of her mirror and torment her tailor, or snap at the servants, including Magdala.
“What a devoted child you are.” Seamus beamed at Julian.
Magdala took the whetstone from the mantle and as Julian bent to sit in an armchair before the fire, Magdala slid into it first. He started up gracelessly to avoid sitting in her lap.
“It’s my house,devoted child.” She smirked.
Julian’s mouth tightened and he dropped onto the creaking sofa instead. There had been a day when he would have laughed and teased Magdala back. She missed those days.
“The others will be here soon,” Seamus said. “Magdala, can you make us more refreshments?”
“It’s after midnight, Da,” Magdala said, sliding the blade along the whetstone. She liked its sharp song, theliquid-smooth slide in her hands. “I’m not baking a pie at this hour. Tell your friends to bring their own refreshments or be content with the bread in the oven.”
“This is in service to your country,” he scolded.
Magdala opened her arms, indicating her black guard uniform.
“That is not service to Allagesh,” her father said bitterly. “Not when you are guardinghim.”
“I’ll not make a mincemeat pie in the middle of the night,” Magdala said, with an air of finality.
Seamus frowned at her, the wrinkles beside his eyes deepening. “Sometimes, you’re just like your mother.”
Magdala grit her teeth. No. She was nothing like her mother. Her mother was wild and uninhibited; Magdala couldn’t remove her shoes in the house. Her mother said what she wished, went where she wished; Magdala guarded insipid duchesses just to put food on the table. And her mother left. Magdala stayed. Loyalty mattered to Magdala, and so she was nothing like her mother.
A knock sounded on the door and Julian got up to open it. Magdala didn’t bother to see who it was. She knew the assortment of angry, eager faces that would fill the room, their bodies steaming the windows. The apothecary, the baker, a politician, a cobbler. In a few hours, these people crowding into her house would be straining against her arms, screaming, throwing stones past her head at the prince’s coach. And Magdala’s loyalties — to her profession as a royal guard, to the father she loved, to her mother inthe far-off Wildlands—would tug at her, ropes fastened to her limbs, pulling each in a different direction.
She had no patience for rioters and revolutionaries tonight, so she escaped to her room in the loft and dropped onto her bed, listening to the voices wafting like heat waves up the stairs.
“What does this mean for us?” cried a shrill woman’s voice. “The baby? Does it mean that the bastard is no longer in the line of succession?”
It irritated Magdala how they refused to use the prince’s name. He was ever ‘the bastard’ in this house. Awful as he may be, and even with her personal reason for hating him, she disliked it when these people dehumanized him. It smelled of cowardice. If you’re going to stab a man in the chest, you must not imagine him as an animal. You must look him in the face and acknowledge that you are snuffing out a soul, and if you still have the strength to do it, perhaps you are an animal yourself. And perhaps you are a hero. Who knows.
“Yes!” a man’s voice cried. “Because he is illegitimate and the baby was born to the queen-regent and her husband, so the baby can claim the throne when he comes of age.”
A cheer filled the room and Magdala covered her face with her hands, knowing what was coming. It was all her father had spoken of for days.
But it was Julian’s voice that quieted them. “According to my brother, Huxley, the eldest son must take the throne. The bastard will still take the throne when he comes of age at summer’s end.”
The room crescendoed to uproar, a storm cloud pulsing with lightning, ready to strike.
“UNLESS!” Now it was her father’s voice. The room hummed. “Unless the bastard is killed.”
