Married!

Sophia Elise, that girl whom they all vowed to protect, the nervous wreck and utter rot to the eastern wing… is to be married?!

Alice is already prepared for the words, making no negative assumptions of the situation whatsoever. The bundle of youthfulness immediately begins to clap in celebration, the sharp sound billowing through the empty Silver Chamber. “Yay!!! Congratulations Sister!!!”

“W-what?!” Both Naomi and Natan speak as one. “Sophia?!”

“Thank the Goddess she wasn’t a traitor…” Beatrice lets out a deep sigh of relief, color returning to her face.

The Fourth Princess grips her forearms nervously, desperately trying to reduce her stage profile.

Alice rushes the court and grabs her older sister by the hands (a grave breach of royal tradition, but such news calls for a celebration and there was truly nobody to care about it anyway). “Oh my Goddess Sophia! This is such incredible news~”

Was it?

“My Lord, this is not a joke correct?” Naomi confirms with the seated Empress. “One day after her coming of age?!”

“This is no jest.” Their mother confirms.

“Who's it going to be?!” Beatrice lets on a bit of jealousy with that statement, herself already going through a mental checklist of possible suitors (it was, surprisingly, quite long). “Mother, when was this?!… I mean My Grace… who c…”

“Cease with the formalities, this was finalized just last night with their government.” Their mother stands from the throne, the official authority of the court leaving the moment her thin bottom leaves the padded silver. For a moment she casually jogs behind the royal monolith, grabbing something stored within its recesses like a salesman pitching a product. “I have his… photograph.”

They all jump at the mention of the technology, even their family not yet visited by such an incredible marvel.

If he could afford to have a photograph portrait taken, how rich could this person be?

He wasn’t rich, and this was no official photograph. Chemically washed in a basin from what they assume was an Imperial Spy; the candid photo barely the size of one’s palm was of impressively high quality yet lacked the… grace of the official portraits the siblings had seen in their travels.

A young man of fair skin, handsome angular features, and deep brown hair and eyes; caught in this frozen moment of time carrying something with both his hands. A military uniform dirted from actual physical labors and a gaze of absolute control; like a commander leading a legion on a charge.

“He’s Tiancin…” Beatrice gasps at the unexpected ethnicity, cutting down her entire list into just two names.

“No he’s not just Tiancin.” Natan recognizes him completely, lowering his somber voice. “It’s Zai. It’s Prince Zai Tianci. Goddess it’s really Prince Zai…”

The Second Prince of the Ensolian Imperium once visited the northern provinces of Tiancin on official business. Just a year after Natan Elise’s coming of age he had found himself alongside his father aboard the aerostatic Silver Barque, the monolithic logistics vessel crossing the Wailing Fang Mountain range alongside a fleet laden with legumes and pilot crackers; relief to a nation in the midst of the worst recorded crop failure of the century. They would, when the mass graves were exhumed and numbers of missing finally counted, call it the Great Starving.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

There, at the foot of the landed fleet of relief aerostatics, in a snow covered corn field cleared out and converted into a haphazard airfield, he watched as a crowd of starving civilians pounded at the barbed wire fence.

Natan remembers the panic of their faces, their desperate screaming for food; how they held up crying babies and the wasted away corpses of their young children. He remembers how the guards, uniformed in slick Tianci black, pointed their storm rifles and shouted orders towards them. How even his own attached squad of imperacutta legionaries joined them, ceramic monsters unsheathing lethal power blades as they ran towards a breach in the wire.

And just a single word stopped them.

All of them.

The pleading speech that followed that unearthly silence put even the most desperate into orderly lines. Natan knew that it had to be unrehearsed and created on the spot, as it was of such relevance no person would have written it prior to the moment: spoken words of divine ambrosia that turned desperate animals back into humans, something he had never seen before even now in his twenty eight years of life.

And the one who spoke was just an adolescent, so much younger than him and not even of age.

Natan remembered how tattered that royal black winter coat looked, and how with each exhaled breath that thin, hungry body looked like it was about to freeze. But he still worked, like some common conscript the young teenager personally, alongside what Natan now recognized as the Tiancin royal guard, took crates of foodstuffs from within the Silver Barque’s cargohold and brought them to the awaited starving.

Natan had begged his imperacutta guards to let him help them, help that young royal; how he prostrated on his knees (a crown prince, doing such an awful thing!) to let him even close to the crowds but they could never for his own protection. Natan even now holds the shame of his inability, of a powerless him just standing there: a belly full of hot soup and warmly nestled within his shearling winter coat, a bystander just watching as the events unfolded.

The knot in Natan’s heart of seeing a hungry royal prince feeding a malnourished child on his lap who looked like nothing more than a collection of bones wrapped with skin, a watery soup of softened, boiled hardtack. How that Prince laughed, and cried with each of them, how in that single encounter Natan tasted bile in his mouth and was changed forever.

He wished, and to this day still regretted, that he could’ve done just one small thing for that young man. And when he returned to Capital he quietly, on one of his unannounced escapades into the city, gave that same coat to a street orphan. It held too much shame, and in a way, maybe it was his way of making amends with the universe.

Natan wondered if on that day, if he just gave that young Prince his coat or a single cup of hot soup from the Silver Barque’s mess hall, he wouldn’t feel what he was feeling now: when every time he ate something even mildly expensive (served often in most functions business or royal), he would taste that same bitter bile in his mouth and gag.

And even now, here in the palace staring at this photograph, he feels that knot tightening his chest.

“Wait, that Prince Zai?” Naomi blinks, removing her cavalry cap to scratch her hair. “Him?!”

“Sophia, why do you get to marry a handsome Tiancin Prince?! Why do you get to have the pretty guys and make pretty children with them?!” Alice almost jumps in frustration, the mildly racist statement brushed aside as she continues. “Whyyyyy?!”

But Sophia recognizes him, the same features as the one in the small alcove. Of one of the most embarrassing moments in her recent life. She mentally recounts their small conversation about food, and how she surreptitiously snubbed him in the midst of his own soft realizations. How he laughed at what should’ve been a grave offense, and when he offered an actual genuine connection she completely felled him like a careless lumberjack to an ancient oak.

He must hate her, especially after her embarrassing formal introduction by the Empress at the peak of the event, he must have nothing but spite in his heart for this mean, awful hearted, spoiled rotten princess.

“Oh Goddess…” Sophia lets out slowly. “I met him last night.”