Gleam (The Plated Prisoner 3)

I’ve put off the grumblings easily enough, but I know it won’t last. I brought enough gold with me for the transition, but people are growing restless. There are mutterings in the halls. They wonder why the Golden King hasn’t turned anything gold yet. My excuse for respecting Ranhold and allowing time for mourning is nearly dried out, and my cache of coin right along with it.

I need Auren to get back to work. Yet I know I must handle her as delicately as I handle the politics here. I have dozens of strings that I’m tying simultaneously, all of which take concentration and finesse.

Which is why I keep coming out here to the gazebo, where the air stings just enough to collar my focus.

At the steady sound of a tapping hammer, my eyes skim over the sculptures outside. The courtyard is filled with them. Standing on stone pedestals every few feet, the blocks of ice are carved into elaborate likenesses.

From my vantage point, I can see one made into a willow tree, on another, a timberwing with its maw open in a fierce cry. Beside it, there’s a sensual goddess with her arms outstretched toward the sky, a dress draped over hourglass curves. Each and every sculpture is incredibly detailed, some of them so tall that the artists need ladders to work on them.

With chisels, hammers, and buffing rags, the men painstakingly ensure that every piece is kept in pristine condition. The sculptors are always working, whether it be to create more carvings or to preserve what they’ve already made.

I can tell that they’re uneasy being watched by me, but they keep their gazes pointedly away, working without pause. I’m just about to pick up my ledger again when a new worker comes out, purple uniform matching the others.

My eyes lock on him immediately, and for a moment, I have to blink to separate what I’m seeing from what I once saw.

With an artisan tool bag belted around his waist, he walks over to the sculpture of a sword standing on its point and begins to polish it with a rag, dusting off collected snow.

He’s bald, and four prominent wrinkles run along the top of his head like a tiger’s stripes. He has the gruff jaw of a man who could hide a sneering mouth behind his full white beard, though I’m too far away to see if it’s true or not.

As he looks his piece over, he rummages in his tool belt before pulling out a pair of spectacles and propping them on his nose. Sharp air hisses through my teeth at the sight.

He looks like my father.

It’s not him of course. Not unless he made a deal with the gods to be raised from the dead. But the beard, the bald head, the tanned skin, those Divine-damned spectacles, even the knuckled grip on his hammer, it’s all very reminiscent of the one who sired me.

Silenus Midas.

Sile to everyone, father to me, though father is a term used very loosely. He was nothing but a village drunk who sometimes managed to stumble out of the house to do carpentry work in town.

As for me, I was just the bastard son he loathed. He hated that he had to sacrifice some of his money on food and clothes for me, when he’d rather spend it on ale.

I’m not sure if hate was in my own nature or if he nurtured it, but it was something we had in common for each other. I never knew my mother, but I loathed her too.

Apparently, she was flighty. A loose woman who went too far into the cups in a pub one night and ended up in Sile’s bed, breeding me nine months later.

As soon as I was born, she dumped me on his doorstep with a jug of wine and six gold coins, and never looked back. Sile either couldn’t track her down or didn’t bother to.

I’m not sure what I detested most about him. His laziness, his drunkenness, or his tendency to beat the hell out of me.

Actually, maybe what I hated most was that he was such a joke to the village people. Everywhere he went, he was followed by sneers or mockery or pity.

They bestowed that same treatment onto me as well. I was nothing. Just the bastard son of a bastard drunk, too poor to rub two coppers together, and I was never going to escape that sorry excuse for a life.

Which is why the moment I became a legal Orean adult, I stole a jug of wine—in a mocking tribute of my mother—and left it for him on his soiled bed in our tiny, broken down cabin.

It didn’t take long for him to drink himself into a blacked-out stupor. Took even less for me to spark the flint and set fire to the derelict shack of a house. It was always dry in Fi

rst Kingdom.

“Sire?”

I pull my gaze away from the sculptor and find my main advisor standing just outside of the gazebo, between the iron balustrades.

“What is it, Odo?” I ask, reaching for the ledger before tucking it in the inside pocket of my vest.

“My King, we have a problem.”

My eyes narrow. “Is it Prince Niven?”