A Royal Without Rules

Lenz stared at him. “What is she to you?” he asked after a long moment.

“She is nothing to me,” Pato replied, his voice harsh. “Because nothing is the only thing I am allowed. Nothing is my stock in trade. I am useless, faithless, untrustworthy, and most of all, a great and continuing disgrace to my royal blood.” He held Lenz’s gaze for a taut breath. “Don’t worry, brother. I know who I am.”

Lenz looked pale then.

“Pato,” he said carefully, as if he was afraid of what Pato’s response might be. “We are finally in the endgame. We’ve worked too hard to get here. Didn’t you tell me this yourself only weeks ago?”

Pato scraped his hands over his face as if that could change the growing hollowness inside him. As if anything could.

“I know what I promised.” But he didn’t look at Lenz. He felt unbalanced, half-drunk, and he knew it was Adriana. She’d crippled him, and she thought he didn’t care. It was almost funny. “I have no intention of breaking my vow. I haven’t yet, have I?”

Lenz stared at him, lifting one hand to stroke his mouth, clearly mulling over the right approach to a thorny problem he hadn’t seen coming. Pato almost laughed then. This was why Lenz would make the perfect king. He could detach, step back, consider all outcomes. Pato, by contrast, couldn’t seem to do anything but seethe and rage. Especially today.

“We picked Adriana because of her name, yes,” Lenz said after several moments passed, his voice carefully diplomatic once again. “But she’s special. I know it. I—”

Pato laughed then, a rusty blade of a sound that stopped his brother flat.

“We’re not going to stand about like pimpled schoolboys and compare notes,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument. “We’ll be the only people in this petty kingdom who do not find it necessary to pick over her body like so many carrion crows.”

For a moment, that simply hung there. Then Lenz blinked.

“Oh,” he said in a curious voice, a new light in his eyes as he looked at Pato. “I didn’t realize.”

“She’s out of this,” Pato said, ignoring that. “She isn’t coming back.”

Lenz studied him. “Is that wise?” he asked quietly. “Can we afford a deviation from the plan at this point? The wedding—”

“Is in a week, I know.” Pato couldn’t hide the bleakness that washed over him then. He didn’t try. “And she’s out of this. She’s free. If she deserves anything, it’s that.”

Lenz’s brows rose, but he only nodded. “Fair enough.”

Pato smiled then, though it was too sharp, and he understood that he was not himself. That he might never be himself again. That Adriana was gone and he was emptier than he’d been before, and he wasn’t sure he could live with it the way he knew he must. But he smiled anyway.

“How is the king’s health?” he asked, because Lenz was right. This was the end of this game, and he’d agreed years ago to play it. There was no changing that now, even if he’d changed the plan.

“The same,” Lenz said. He didn’t smile. He only looked tired. “The ministers are beginning to press him. It might happen sooner than we thought.”

Pato nodded. It was exactly as they’d planned. It turned out they were good at this, this dance of high-stakes deception and royal intrigue.

He sickened himself.

“Then I suppose we play on,” he said wearily.

Lenz’s gaze was sad. “We always do.”

* * *

Adriana walked through her family’s villa slowly, taking the time to really look around her as she did. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d paid attention to all the familiar things in front of her, which she’d somehow stopped seeing over the years. The graceful rooms, the antique furniture. The art still on the walls and the places where art had been removed and sold in the leaner years. All the things that made up a Kitzinian pedigree, a certain station in Kitzinian society, even a tarnished one. Collections of china in carved wood cabinets. Beautiful rugs, hand-tiled floors, mosaics lining the fountain in the center courtyard. Coats of arms, priceless statues and pieces of pottery handed down across centuries.

And in the small parlor in the farthest corner of the villa, the one no one talked about and never visited by accident, were the trio of portraits. The faces of the women whose choices hundreds of years ago had sentenced Adriana to infamy in the present.

“What they call you reflects far more on them than on you,” Pato had said. She couldn’t get his words out of her head.