Eighteen (ish) Years Later…

Princess Briallen Radegon really didn’t mind the whole suitor thing. Really. She didn’t. Briallen knew the stereotype, everyone did. She was supposed to be resentful. She was supposed to want to break free of her pearl-studded, diamond-encrusted shackles, burn her corsets, and do whatever truly liberated women did. Briallen didn’t want that; she didn’t think so. She felt perfectly privileged as a princess, if not an occasionally overwhelming sense of duty.

Her parents, though, were beginning to think that she did. And they were letting her know this with increasing frequency and volume after every fumbled first date. Why would she say that, do that, or wear that? If not in an act of sabotage.

But that’s what these things were supposed to be for, weren’t they? Being herself. Briallen wasn’t going to wake up however many years from now just to hear she wasn’t who whoever it ended up being had married. That sort of thing didn’t feel fair to either party involved. And it wasn’t like her dress or mannerisms were really that strange. At least, she didn’t think so.

“May I have one of your buttons?” There. Asking was much more polite than secreting one away. Briallen absolutely could have. She did it all the time. It made balls and state dinners much more interesting, although it was much harder one-on-one like this.

“May I ask what for?” Lord Calland Baltasaros—although he had already told Briallen she could just call him Cal—took the question in stride, Briallen thought. He cocked his head at it a little, but he was smirking too. The ones who kept smiling, even if it was a smirk, tended to take a little longer to become annoyed by her.

“I collect them.” Briallen explained as she tried to scoot her chair in a little closer to their small shared table. No, it wasn’t a very ladylike request, and if you asked the queen, the very act of collecting things spoke to pack-rat-like behavior, but the only one who’d be able to tattle on her later would be Cal and whichever member of the royal guard had been set to lurk in the garden shadows. Having an actual chaperone was just awkward and entirely unnecessary. “But the good ones never just fall off. That’s probably why they’re the good ones.”

Cal’s brow began to furrow. “Are you trying to tell me I have good buttons?”

“Yes.” Briallen smiled all the brighter. She didn’t even mind when they thought it was flirting. It wasn’t, but she did see how that might work out in favor of the both of them. At least she was tolerable that way.

“Alright...?” He said, but his brow didn’t do any unfurrowing.

Briallen removed her tiny pair of scissors from a hidden pocket in her sleeve. She wasn’t just saying these things; she really did nip nice-looking buttons off of clothing, usually when the wearer wasn’t looking. And even if she was making it up, she very much doubted Cal minded the way she had to lean over the table to reach him or the way she had to brace her other hand against his chest.

✨

Lord Calland Baltasaros—Cal, if she liked—was only the second son of one of her family’s own vassals. Briallen was supposed to feel bad about having already run through all eligible crown princes and one crown princess, but seeing as there were only three of them and that marriage to another princess would have made things exceedingly more complicated even if she hadn’t been turned off by Briallen’s thoughts on a current run of popular penny dreadfuls, Briallen didn’t feel bad about it at all. Cementing a vassalage could be just as advantageous, if not more, than symbolically unionizing a couple of kingdoms.

Briallen did think about those things: the good of her future subjects, her parents’ peace of mind, and even the feelings of the potential partner of the month. It wasn’t any more Cal’s fault he was here than it was Briallen’s fault she was here too. The least she could do was give him a shot. It felt a bit like playing a game after the first few; they talked, Briallen listened, and imagined, if she absolutely had to pick this one, what their life together might look like. It was a little too early to tell, though, with Cal.

He was easier to listen to than other suitors Briallen could name, and it seemed this wasn’t his first foray into high-stakes blind dates either. Which Briallen only took notice of because of the way he would nearly but not quite compare their time together to other setups in the past. She thought it was sweet, the thought towards her feelings even with all other things considered, although a bit unnecessary. If Cal really did share her strange, isolating circumstances, then Briallen would have much preferred a bid at commiseration.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

She really was listening, too. While Briallen had grown rather proud of her fake attentiveness skills, especially in the face of all these first dates, the topic at hand really did interest her; they’d gotten onto the subject of his hobbies, naturally, and of course, Calland Baltasaros had the much more lordly interest of falconry. Briallen liked the idea of it, though she’d never been given the opportunity to involve herself in it. Her mother thought birds were dirty; she thought that way about most things involving animals. They had always fascinated Briallen, and not because they bothered her mother so much.

There was the croaking of a frog in the shade of the nearby hedges, fascinating her even as Cal spoke.

“I am listening.” Briallen argued preemptively. He’d made a face at the way she’d glanced away for a second. She’d caught him. “There’s just a frog somewhere under the hedges. Do you hear it?”

She couldn’t tell if he paused to listen or to process the idea that a frog was what had stolen her attention from him. The frog ribbited all the same, so at least she didn’t sound completely crazy.

“Do you collect them too?” There now. That sounded familiar. That tone that said ‘of course you would’ and it wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

“No.” Briallen still chose to answer plainly. Honestly. Sure, if he got his panties in a twist about this, then it created other problems for her, but it dodged her the bigger bullet of self-belittlement. “I used to, sort of. When I was a kid.”

“Did you try and kiss them too?”

She met the question with a flattening look. “I was seven. What was I going to do with a prince?”

“What’re you going to do with one now?”

"Well, let’s go catch one and find out.”

✨

Briallen had meant it.

They were going to wade through the shallows of the garden pond and catch frogs. It wasn’t even the first time she’d had cause to use that kind of tactic. Not that it really was a tactic-tactic, but what was the actual answer to a question like that? She knew, obviously. It was just stupid. And he wasn’t even a prince.

Cal continued to take it in stride. Even after Briallen scandalized him with the sight of her ankles and calves as she girded up her skirts.

“You’re handling this a lot better than the rest of them.” Briallen decided to commend him, while also slipping in the fact that she didn’t mind talking about past suitors. “I’ve never gotten anyone to take their boots off for me. You’d think it’d get a few of them, because of the implications, but I guess mud and algae are a bit of a mood killer.”

Cal almost laughed as he rolled up the hems of his trousers. “And how many buttons have you gotten?”

“Just four. Seven, if we count the ones I managed to get anyway.” Briallen stepped out into the pond first. The cool water felt nice. It helped. As did having something to actually do with herself beside sit and pretend she was remembering her manners. “And I know that makes me sound like a brat, but it’s just buttons.”

“I think it’s cute.”

"No, you don’t.” Briallen said it before she even realized that was what she was doing. And she’d laughed through it too. Thank goodness they weren’t facing each other anymore. “I mean… It’s fine if you don't, and if you start lying to me now, I’ll have to take back what I said about how well you’re doing.”

“But I am doing well?” She didn’t need to be looking at him to know he was wearing that stupid grin from before. “They warned me you’d be like this.”

“They?” Briallen turned. She had to look at him then. She bet she could get it in one guess.

“Your parents, my parents, Argan de Rais...”

Briallen stilled her sloshing through the water as she contemplated just throwing herself out into the center of the pond to drown. She could swim, of course, but that felt like the quickest way out of this. “Why- Why would you admit to that?”

It wasn’t fair. Briallen had only expected the first answer. And she definitely hadn’t been expecting the last. Argan was the son of another one of her parents’ vassals, but at least he was his father’s direct heir. Briallen hadn’t minded him much… At first. Now, she could just imagine the spin he had given everything. Let alone the very idea that anyone, suitor or parent, was talking about her behind her back. It made her skin crawl and her stomach tie itself in knots.

Cal shrugged. “I thought you knew. De Rais said you did. Most of us do now, it’s kind of like a game now.”

Maybe Briallen would just drown herself after all.

“A game?” She repeated and by some miracle her voice didn’t shake. She didn’t shout or snap it either.

“It’s not like that.” Cal waded around to try and speak face-to-face again. “It’s like… That’s why you do all this too, isn’t it?”

“Do what?” She knew what. She just didn’t like the way they interpreted it. And as of yet, she hadn’t dealt with someone who knew and was doing their own weird version back at her. She was just like this; what was his excuse?

“Come on, Bria.” She hadn’t told him he could shorten her name like that. “You don’t honestly do all this every day. You just want to put us all through our paces. I get it. Honestly, it’s preferable to being asked to try and break a curse.”

“Oh, is it?” There she couldn’t help raising her voice a little. As if he knew the first thing about curses.

"Well, at least you aren’t actually some gremlin.” The ‘you’re just acting like one’ was implied.

“Well.” If all she was doing was putting him through his paces… Maybe Briallen would have to find a way to do a lot more than that. “Thank goodness for small miracles, then, huh?”