Previously:
Spoiler
Zygrei, the crown prince of the empire, escaped an awkward social situation at a part by escaping into the parlor room, where other young men had gathered to play cards. He joined the game, and before too long the only players left were him and his friend, Rejkiv the Marquis of Eastmarch--stiff competition.
Continued...
The sky outside was beginning to color when Zygrei claimed the last cards from Rejkiv’s hand. He pocketed a few of the coins for the sake of hearing the metal jingle, but signaled his attendants forward to slip the rest into coffers.
“What are you even going to do with it all?” Rejkiv asked him, watching the coins clink into the chests.
Zygrei, watching the marquis, had to consider for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said at last, fighting back a yawn. “Any ideas?”
Rejkiv’s attention flicked over to him. “A few. But they’ll cost you.”
“That’s the point.”
“Not, I meant you’d have to buy the ideas from me.”
“At least that’d solve some of the problem.”
“A dozen crowns for the best of them. A bargain.”
“Six.”
The man shook his head and looked off toward the tapestries on the wall. “Eight. No less.”
Before his attendants could sweep the last of the coins off into the chests, Zygrei pulled a handful over the table toward him, counted, and then shoved him in Rejkiv’s direction.
“That’s only seven.”
“I’ll settle for an eighth less of an idea.”
The marquis tapped his fingers together for a moment and then nodded. After slipping the coins into his pocket, his face took on the serious look Zygrei had long since come to distrust, especially when they had both consumed enough stitch between the two of them to make an adult tiger stagger.
“Seven-eighths…you give all the coins to me.”
The attendants finished stuffing the coins into the coffers and Zygrei waved them off. “That would certainly get rid of them. But what would you do with them if that’s your best idea?”
“Seven-eighths of my best idea,” Rejkiv corrected.
Zygrei looked over his shoulder at the parlor’s huge window. His vision was fuzzy but the horizon line was now undeniably orange.
He stood to his feet and steadied himself on the back of his chair when his head spun. “Find our coats, please,” he said to his attendants as he walked over to where his sister was on the couch. Rejkiv, he noted, trailed right behind.
You can’t avoid the topic forever, Zygrei thought at the marquis, but even drunk as pond scum the man could dodge words, and so he let the idea go.
He focused his attention on his sister instead. She was asleep, her black hair half out of whatever arrangement she had had it done up in and half covering her face. The orange gown pants she had decided to wear—in playful opposition to the currently favored shades of blue and purple—were bunched up and wrinkled around her.
Zygrei shook her shoulder gently. “Anyi, time to go.”
It took a moment, but she shifted on the couch. Her eyes opened slowly. She blinked a few times, her gaze bloodshot and unfocused, and then finally looked at him. Her gaze flicked sideways toward Rejkiv beside him and she laughed.
“My brothers,” she said. Her words slurred together.
He did his best not to laugh, but even the thought of their mother being furious didn’t help. “Ani, it’s nearly dawn.”
“Mmm.” The corners of her mouth turned up in a smile that said she hadn’t heard a word, and she buried her face into the pillow.
Zygrei looked at Rejkiv. The marquis looked back and grinned. For the second time that evening, they understood one another perfectly.
“I suppose we’ll have to leave her for the chamberlain to find,” Zygrei said, mustering all the seriousness and articulation he could.
“Long walk. Pretty, though.”
Zygrei scratched his beard, intently thoughtful. “Is it six or seven miles from here?”
“Six to mine and eight to yours. Not short, as I said.”
“Looks like rain, too.”
“Snow, probably. Sleet all over.”
“A long, cold walk for sure…” Zygrei shook his head. “Shall we—”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Ani muttered. She propped herself up on her elbow long enough to glare at both of them, but her eyelids soon drooped and her elbow slipped off the couch edge.
“Sorry.” Zygrei crouched down and rummaged for her slippers “But it is almost day and if—where’s your other shoe?”
He had one in his hand and the other was nowhere to be seen.
“Lost it.”
He opened his mouth to ask how she could have possibly lost a bright orange slipper, but Rejkiv tapped his shoulder. When the prince looked up at him, he shook his head curtly. The nice brother, she sometimes called him.
Zygrei sighed. “Go ready the carriages,” he told his attendants, putting the one slipper onto Ani’s foot. He shook her alert wondering just how much stitch she had had.
“Come on, Anyi.” He scooped her off the couch and stood up, about to set her on her feet when she wrapped her arms around his neck. He stood still for a moment, rolling his eyes at himself, but decided to carry her anyway. She would have her way, he realized, and better him than the marquis.
Better Rejkiv than anyone else.
The ballroom next door was empty when they entered, except for the servants cleaning the flooring. Attendants dressed in royal and Eastmarch livery met them at the doors.
The leader of them—a man whose name Zygrei could never remember—stepped forward and bowed as his assistants held out coats. “Apologies, Your Majesties, Your Excellence, but Her Majesty’s could not be found.”
Zygrei considered that for a moment and then set his sister on her feet long enough to wrap his coat around her. She had always been small, and he had always been large, and he figured the result served her right. He managed to suppress a smile. Rejkiv, standing a feet away and fixing the fastenings on his own coat, was coughing, most likely to cover a laugh.
The attendants, bless them, kept straight faces as they opened the doors to the morning, but Zygrei wouldn’t begrudge them a good laugh once they were off duty.
He picked up the bundle of cloth with a girl inside and walked down the stone steps. It had been a cold spring so far, and the morning air bit through his silk suit, but before long, they were at the carriages.
Zygrei set his sister down again and helped her inside.
“My friend,” the marquis said, standing there beside the door. “I know what you’ll be doing with your hard-earned coins.”
Zygrei glanced at him with one foot on the carriage step.
“Buying her a new coat and shoe.”
The prince shook his head, stepped inside, and sat down, ready to sleep the entire ride back. But reputation or no, he knew his manners, and he looked back at Rejkiv, entirely unsurprised to see him still standing there with one hand on the door frame.
The marquis nodded his head. “Good nigh—”
“Won’t you ride with us, Eji?” Ani muttered.
Zygrei looked at her quickly. She was still mostly asleep from the look of it, but her eyes were open and she was looking intently at the marquis from where she sat in the carriage corner
Not so drunk after all, he thought, relieved. He looked back at Rejkiv, very much curious as to what he would say.
The marquis shook his head. “I’ll put you out of your way.”
“It’s already past dawn anyway.”
Rejkiv glanced at him
“Ani,” Zygrei said, curious now to what she would say, “his carriage is—”
“It could follow us.”
“She makes a fair point.” He regarded his friend, trying his best not to be amused and not succeeding. Stitch had a way of messing with one’s sensibilities.
But ever the master, the marquis glanced at the sky. “The sleet and snow were no lie. Won’t be responsible for keeping the coatless heir of the empire out of doors for longer than necessary. Good night, Your Majesties.”
“Morning,” Ani said tartly.
Zygrei nodded at his friend and the man, after clicking the coach door shut, walked away. Not long after, the carriage lurched and began to roll. He looked out the window as Lady Devaya’s estate faded from sight.
“Do you care so much for him?” he asked.
“Hm?”
“Did you enjoy the party?” He looked back at her, expecting her to be half-asleep again against the window, but she was upright, hands folded neatly in her lap, watching him with a barely restrained smile.
“It was fun.” She grinned, eyes sparkling in the dim light from the lantern overheard, and then her look soured. “But only because you took me. Kilvran never lets me have any stitch.”
He laughed right out loud, at both the words and the pout with which she had said them. “Our dearest brother wouldn’t know stitch from snowmelt.”
“Oh he does now.”
Zygrei eyed her sharply. “Does this have something to do with—”
“Why he refuses to be the least bit social?”
He shrugged.
“Maybe.”
“Oh?”
“Most of it was his doing. I just…encouraged Lady Vahkasha to challenge him. Not my fault that he lost.”
He grimaced and looked back out the window. “Ah, Ani.”
“My point is, he’s no fun.”
“He loves you probably even—”
“Promise me, Zygrei,” she said, her voice suddenly sharp. “Promise me you and Eji won’t leave me alone like that ever again.”
He grimaced and closed his eyes. He had been back three days and had thought the threat of this conversation past. “I tried to come home.”
“You didn’t try hard enough.”
Zygrei let out a long breath and then met her glare. “The snow in the pass…”
“Doesn’t matter.” She crossed her arms, though his coat hid most of the movement.
“I did everything I could to get back here.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He could think of nothing to say to that. For as long as he could bear, he held her glare, but before too long, he believed her. “I didn’t try hard enough,” he agreed with a sigh.
When her glare did not abate, he returned to looking out the window. Snow had indeed begun to fall, true to the marquis’s word. You would know how to make her laugh and forgive us, he thought at his friend, now miles away in a different part of the city.
The snow flurries strengthened as the road wore on and the wind began to whistle around the carriage. Zygrei rested his head on the glass, letting the cold numb the headache growing behind his temples from the stitch and who knew what else.
Ani abruptly got up off her bench and came to sit down beside him on his. She wrapped her arms tightly around him. “I just missed you so much, Zyggy. Promise me you won’t leave again.”
He returned her embrace. “I bet I missed you more.”
“No.” Her voice was fading with fatigue once more. “Eji missed me more. He told me so.”
Zygrei took that in and then picked his words carefully. “He did? When?”
“Dancing.” She paused for a moment and he listened intently. “You must not have had any good dancers in the east. He asked me five times.”
“Five? You should have shared him.”
“Hm?” Her voice was barely audible now.
He shook his head and decided he would get it out of her in the morning. “Nothing.”
The carriage began to tilt upward with the incline in the road. The shouts of gatekeepers and the gongs pierced the wind, and he wondered how he possibly forgotten the thrill the sound still sent through him.
Five months, he had been gone in Eastmarch with the marquis. First, as a short vacation like so many others before. Then, as an extended vacation because of Lady Mikka. Then the heavy snows had begun. And then—
“Zyggy?”
“Ani?”
“What are you going to do about the kidnappings?”
Zygrei looked down at her quickly. Glasses of stitch had done as intended and driven the matter out of his mind, but the thought that she of all people knew—knew despite the party and all the letters that reassured her he was only visiting marquis—sobered him significantly. “What about it?” he asked, trying to keep his voice unaffected.
“Eji said you only came back because you had something to tell the Council.”
Damn him.
He made himself laugh. “He was only trying to make me look bad. I suppose he told you he brought presents too, and—”
“Already gave me one.” She held out her arm up into the lamp light, and his humongous coat sleeve fell down to reveal a sparkling bracelet of silver and amethyst.
Damn him elevenfold.
“I brought better.”
“Really?” Her voice lost all shreds of fatigue for a moment. She looked up at him with such excitement in her eyes she might as well have been five again.
“Of course, little sister.” He kissed the top of her head. “Now go to sleep.”
She smiled and closed her eyes. Within minutes, she was asleep with against his shoulder.
He grimaced again and looked back out the window. He put his head to the cool glass again and then, glad she was still so easy to distract, drifted off into sleep himself
Also, I think I have a better sense of her age now.
*sorry for the extended food metaphor. XD Sleep deprivation... Yeah.*
