Edouard did not turn but kept moving down the corridor and released my arm once we were around the corner and out of sight. I began to speak but he shushed me with a single finger to his lips and I kept quiet until we reached our quarters.

My Prince flopped onto his bed and let out a heavy sigh.

“And I thought being in court was exhausting in our own time.”

“Things seem to have gone well with your uncle.”

“Ah yes,” he said, putting his hands behind his head but keeping his eyes closed. “We’re to go out riding into the borderlands with him tomorrow. He’s taken a keen interest in my schooling in the arts of leadership. He’s a dreadful bore, Ori.”

“Well boring sounds preferable to my evening.”

“How did you manage to do that?”

My Prince’s casual attitude bothered me. I was the one who had nearly been strung out on the rack and yet he complained of unstimulating conversation.

“I didn’t manage to do anything. I was accosted for no reason other than my complexion.”

Edouard and I had never discussed my heritage, and I had been hesitant to bring it up as it held a place in my mind with the rebel. But here it had reared its ugly head within hours of our arrival. We would need to consider if it was going to become a problem for us at this particular juncture in time.

“I don’t think it will come up again,” Edouard said.

“You heard Everard. Called you wise.”

“I also heard his guardsman call out to you after the King was gone.”

Edouard waved it off.

“He was upset at having been made to look foolish. Let’s not linger on it. We’ve done amazingly well.”

He was not wrong. By any measure, the day had been a success. We made it to Singhal, the letter of introduction had worked as intended and the King was taking an interest in Edouard already. I was still ill at ease as I rose to take my leave to my adjoining quarters. I stopped with my hand on the door pull, remembering.

“Does the King know you as Edouard?”

He sat up in his bed and looked at me, arms still wrapped behind his head.

“Of course, what else would he call me?”

“Just checking,” I said, turning to go.

It was not worth my time to bring up how our lack of discussion around that particular aspect of our cover story had very nearly gotten me killed. Someone had been in my room and lit a torch by the bed for me, and built a fire in the grate. I undressed in the flickering light and as I did, the exhaustion hit me. Quinze and the library and my little garret room all seemed like memories from another life as I slid underneath the sheets of this strange bed. My room was warm and cozy, the stained glass window beautiful in the glow of the moon, and my fire crackled gently as it burned low, but I was not comfortable. I was not comfortable at all.

I was seven the day my father didn’t come home. We had a modest house on the outskirts of Quinze, nearly to the river. The stench of it was appalling, but often we would walk upstream a ways where the smells of the city’s waste abated and we could catch something for our dinner. My father would get down on his knees in the loamy ground near the banks and show me how to dig for worms. Squinting, afraid to actually close my eyes, lest it get a jump on me, I would do my job: piercing the squirming worm onto the hook. He would take off his shoes and roll up his work pants to sit ankle deep in the water. I sat next to him but only my stubby toes reached beneath the surface.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

He would tell me about his day, expunging any of the harshness of his working reality. In the years since, I’ve often appreciated this most, his willingness to talk with me. It would have been easy for him to rationalize, to turn inward and leave me to my own devices. He could have told himself it was nothing for a child to know. He did not use his own life as an excuse to damage mine. He told me what he could, and left out what he couldn’t. My father forged a connection between us based partly on lies, yes, but I would not have had him do anything differently. If we caught something, I’d tote it home wrapped in papers, beaming with pride at our small prize from the dirty river.

On the day he didn’t come home, I was hungry. I grew hungrier as the sun set and the streets turned dark.

After dinner and washing up was my favorite time of the day. Story time. My father may have been a laborer with calloused hands and limbs roped with taut muscle, but at heart he was a scholar. In my eyes, he never looked more like himself than when his glasses perched on the tip of his crooked nose, sat upon the stool by my bed, he read to me. A man in his element has a certain look about him. With a book in his hand, my father looked like a painting. It was the only time serenity became him. He was a competent man in many aspects, but only looked like a painting while reading.

“What’ll it be today?” he’d ask me.

I’d squirm in my bed, kicking my sheets in excitement, prepared to be transported to another world.

“Now, that’s not an answer, kicking your sheets. What’ll it be, Origio?”

“The Canton Tales.”

My father grinned and I grinned right back. He knew I’d given him a tough assignment. The Canton Tales were leagues away from appropriate reading material for one my age, but father never said no. He edited the stories on the fly, and I never let him get away with the same edit twice. Of course, I had no firm understanding of why it was necessary for him to change the stories for my ears. It was a reality I accepted because my father said it was so. It was my favorite thing in the world. The Canton Tales and its traveling pilgrims provided a comforting backdrop for my father to spin his own yarns.

On the day he didn’t come home, I pulled a book off the shelf. We owned four in total, and we treated them with great reverence. The pages were worn with fingerprints and the bindings were strained, but it was our library and there was nothing better than a library. I sat on the floor and read in the fading light by our window.

When a pilgrim’s tale was finished, it was time for me to go to bed, and for my father to read a bit more on his own by candlelight at our scarred table.

“It isn’t fair,” I’d often whine.

“Need the practice,” father said. “Or else one of these nights I’ll go to read you a tale and will have plum forgot what the words mean. You don’t want that now do you?”

I had to admit his point there. I could not bear to think of the consequences of losing my bedtime stories. A dutiful son, I nodded and turned towards the cottage wall and away from the flickering candle light. I fell asleep countless nights to the soft sound of turning pages, a more soothing lullaby I’ve never yet found.

On the morning before he didn’t come home, he kissed the top of my head and tore a roll in half. It was still warm and the thin layers crumbled in my mouth, evidence of a young Febril’s commitment to fitting butter between each and every layer.

“I may be home late today,” he said.

I nodded. Later, I wished he had never given me hope with his final words to me. My father was helping to build Quinze’s canal system, taken for granted in later years, but one that took many years and claimed many lives. “There is nothing,” he once told me. “That wants to be under human control, less than water.” Giving feeling to the water was so like him, but it made things no easier in the long run.

It was Febril who found me the morning after he didn’t come home. News of a death on the canal worksite was a common occurrence and he thought nothing of the chatter around his stall. It was when my father did not show up the following morning that doubts crept in for the young baker. He had been over to our home a handful of times, bringing the days leftovers to share, a bread feast for us, and my father would provide the ale. They would laugh and talk late into the night, and like my father, Febril was an adult who did not patronize me, but would ask my opinion on matters of current news. The men would allow me to formulate an opinion as best I could and gently guide me towards my reasoning, my scaffolding behind the argument. It was my first and best training in scholarship.

He pounded on the door with his fist and dust motes shimmered in the morning light around the cracks in the door. I opened it and he burst into tears. The baker picked me up and held me to his chest. I coughed from the flour in my face and he patted me on the back.

“Come on then,” he said, setting me down and taking my hand.

For weeks I lived with Febril, his own six offspring, and his wife. I laid on the kitchen floor on my mat with all of the baker’s snoring children and listened to the couple’s increasingly vitriolic arguments each night. I was in shock, had spoken no more than a dozen words in those weeks, but I was not a stupid child. It was obvious to me what came next.

“Listen to me,” Febril said on the inevitable day not much later. “This place raised me and look at me. Quinze’s finest.”

His hands rested on my shoulder and the worry in his eyes was not hidden well by his bluff talk. An orphan of the city himself, he could not lie and tell me everything was going to be just as it was before. To his credit, he came to see me every day. Often, he brought a few of his kids along and they have always been like cousins to me. I attended their weddings and always stopped to talk when I ran into them in the street. But Febril, as his wife was quick to remind him, was not my father. The Empire was my father.