THE CORONATION WAS A SMALL AFFAIR, SHORT AND FORMAL IN the chapel of the cathedral, draped in black crepe and unearthly quiet save the droning of the Lord of the Scepter. He placed the crown on Theodor’s father’s head, and even from the back of the sanctuary, I could see the bright spots of tears in his eyes.
The queen—queen dowager now—and Princess Annette were seated on the risers with the rest of the royal house. Annette wasn’t going away to be married. The delegation from Serafe had returned home as swiftly as possible after the Midwinter Revolt, as it was already called. Besides, I thought with a sour feeling, there was no reason to hurry her marriage now. No need to produce an heir.
In a short addendum to the ceremony, Theodor was named Prince of Westland and first heir to the throne, and I felt tears spike my eyes. I had always known that distances we couldn’t erase with lunches in the greenhouse and trysts in the garden separated us, but the formal invocation took my vague understanding and forged immutable iron around it. Theodor accepted the signet ring of the Prince of Westland, but his eyes found me as he recited his oath as heir.
I unabashedly cried into my handkerchief.
A flood of black silk and velvet washed out of the chapel and into the white streets. The tenor in Fountain Square was changed—riots replaced with women selling black crepe mourning armbands and white silk roses, revolution displaced by grief. The malcontent of the people was still simmering below the surface, but it was clear that most of them had never wished death on anyone.
My brother was still missing.
Several Red Caps who had served as martial sergeants during the revolt and hid caches of weapons had been captured. Their trials were swift and their hangings swifter. Niko was never found. I recognized the names of a few of the sergeants, and Theodor reported that the woman who had led the mob at my shop was found guilty of storing and distributing weapons. My neighbor said she went to the gallows taunting the soldiers. I didn’t attend the executions, but instead lit a candle in the alcove of the cathedral for Jack the day after they were carried out. Perhaps it was for her, too. Perhaps it was even for Pyord.
The Lord of Keys and the new king were in agreement not to hunt down the entire Red Cap army. I hoped against hope that Kristos had escaped. But there were many missing who were presumed dead.
I set off, back to my shop. Back to work, back to the life I had built for myself. Back to Alice, coaching her to leave me and begin her own career someday, back to Emmi, training her nimble fingers. Back to the flurry of commissions that had followed the Midwinter Ball. Back to begin again on Madame Pliny’s court gown, as I had destroyed the first version beyond repair. Back, even though nothing would ever be the same.
“Wait!” The familiar voice echoed past the frozen fountain and caught me. Theodor. He trotted beside me, his gold-brown hair bobbing in its queue.
“I don’t think running across Fountain Square is considered dignified behavior for a prince,” I said as he caught up.
“Hang dignified,” he said. “Come with me.”
“Don’t you have some formal dinner to attend?” I replied. “Some coronation feast?”
“Nope. Did away with that, in consideration of the state of deep mourning the whole nation’s in. Mother’s insisting on throwing a ball in the spring. I was hoping to convince her to hold it in the public gardens,” Theodor answered with a soft smile. He took my hand.
“Please, Theodor,” I begged without trying to find any more words. “Please.” It was over. A common seamstress couldn’t marry the prince, heir to the throne. Perhaps there had been a chance when he was First Duke, several steps removed, but now? It was impossible. We would always have the greenhouse and the dinner in the mirrored room and the night after the riot, preserved in memory. But if there was no way forward, I couldn’t keep wallowing in the impossibility of it.
“Come with me,” he insisted, and I relented.
The carriage was the same, even to the driver who had emerged from the scuffle after the ball unscathed, but the Royal Guard following it was new. They trotted on identical chestnut horses behind us into the public gardens, through the wrought iron gates, past the river walk, over the bridge, and to the doors of the greenhouse. They had the decency to leave us at the door.
“I have an even stronger affinity for this place,” said Theodor. “Now that I am not going to study in the tropics, I am all the more attached to the tropics I’ve created here.”
He opened the door and led me inside. A table was set with a simple lunch and three chairs. He sat next to me, never letting go of my hand.
“Theodor,” I whispered, “I can’t. This will never come to anything, between us. If it ever could, that’s over now.”
“I—we will have to discuss the peculiarities of our relationship at some point,” he conceded. “I’m not giving up on my cockamamie scheme to manage to marry you. Not yet. I have the ear of the king now, you know. It might even be politically advantageous—solidarity with the people, marrying one of their own.”
I found I had no voice, but I managed a slight nod of assent.
He smiled. “I promise not to get myself betrothed to some foreign princess if you promise not to marry some side-street butcher or barber.”
Despite myself, I laughed. “Not right away, anyway.”
“But it isn’t why I brought you here.”
The door at the back of the greenhouse opened, the one between a pair of orange trees laden with white blossoms, and a man walked out.
Kristos.
I leapt to my feet, but stopped myself from running to him. He strode quickly to me, however, and wrapped me in his arms before I could speak. Anger at him was, for the moment, overcome by relief. He wasn’t dead.
“What are you doing here?” I finally said.
“I’m sorry, Sophie.” He dropped onto the chair next to me.
“I—it’s a little late for that,” I said quietly, glancing at Theodor. He had lost his uncle, his father had lost his brother, our country had lost its king. And that was only the beginning—dozens of nobles and hundreds of common people had died in one night of failed insurrection. The repercussions had yet to be accounted for—businesses that would close, families whose income would be cut off. I had been outraged that he had put my life up for wager for the revolution he believed in, but he had risked far more lives than just mine. Kristos’s apologies were inadequate now. “Why did you stay?”
“It wasn’t entirely altruistic. The king’s soldiers were everywhere, the roads out of the city blockaded, ships not permitted to leave the harbor. I could have tried to run overland, but I’m no woodsman. Figured staying and hiding here was preferable to starving in the woods in winter.”
“And your comrades have kept you hidden?” There was a touch of gall in my tone, and I didn’t rein it in. “Tell me, what do they see you as: a hero of the failed revolt or their enemy, who abandoned the cause?”
“Neither. I’m the embodiment of their disappointment, but I’m the only reason most of them are alive.”
“You stopped them. When they were still fighting for a man that had betrayed them,” Theodor said.
Kristos responded with almost automatic defense. “His ideals weren’t entirely corrupt—he didn’t want to be made a king or anything like that, from what I could get from the letters. He simply intended to be the sole executor of the transition into democratic governance. But he taught us too well—I know what consolidated power can do. It was never what we intended. We had a committee of leadership set from the beginning.”
“And he paid Kvys mercenaries to ensure his plans went off as he intended?” I asked.
“We agreed to the mercenaries,” Kristos said. “We didn’t have the army on our side.” Had they tried? I wondered. What a mess that would have been.
“At least it didn’t come to that,” Theodor said. “This insurrection could have escalated to international war.”
“Pyord had planned on it,” Kristos said. I gasped, and he laughed. “Not quite that dramatic—just that he said, if it came to international conflict, all the easier to position ourselves where we want to be. ‘Let the big hounds fight themselves ragged,’ he suggested once.”
“Yes, he was very smart,” I replied drily.
“At any rate,” Kristos continued. “After I left you that night, I tried to find as many of the leaders of the League as I could, the sergeants who were leading our men in the streets. I could stop the fighting through them. And the things I saw …” He trailed off. I waited. “I saw my comrades fighting in the streets, bloodied and killed. But what gnawed at me, carved my soul like no sword could, was seeing them bloodying and killing the king’s soldiers. Not that I have an overactive amount of sympathy for those who take the king’s silver, but I saw my comrades turned into something ugly, something I didn’t intend. I thought I knew what revolt was, what war was, but …” He swallowed hard, pushing past memories hidden from me to continue. “The brutality of my own comrades shocked me. Frightened me. They had so much rage, so much momentum flowing into a single goal—taking life. I didn’t know men could become beasts so quickly. It was horrid, Sophie.”
I saw the haunted look in his eyes and knew he was not lying. The anger I wanted very badly to hold on to threatened to recede, a wave pulling back on a defeated and tired shoreline. So much of my brother, so much of what I had loved even as it frustrated me, was his idealism, his belief in something greater than himself. I never understood how he could look beyond our gray workaday lives into some hazy, golden future; it was a gift I didn’t share. Without it, he seemed a diminished version of himself, smaller and faded. “What had you expected?” I asked quietly. “That—men turned to beasts, butchering each other in the street—that was always what I saw when I looked into the future you wanted to make.”
“I … I thought there would be something righteous in it, something heroic. Maybe there was, but I couldn’t see it in their faces. Not then.”
“You stopped it, Kristos. You kept it from going further. It could have gone much further,” I added, overripe fears still spilling from me. There were those of the Red Caps who wouldn’t have been content with new governance, or even with extermination of the nobility. Some would have come even for those like me who didn’t support them, who they saw as colluding with the nobility. “You saved them from their own worst natures.”
Kristos nodded, ready to hold this idea, to examine it, but not quite ready to swallow the antidote to his guilt. “I saw something else.” He cocked his head and looked at me strangely. “I saw an emblem on the soldiers’ coats—an embroidered flower. And I knew that design.”
“My charm,” I whispered. “You recognized my work?”
“It’s one of your oldest ones—one of the ones Mother taught you,” he said. “The members of the League still in the street were calling them the Rose Soldiers. They thought they must be some special unit, specially trained, the best of the garrison, because they fought with such purpose and intensity.”
“They were mistaken,” I said. “My charms don’t work like that—I can’t make a man a better soldier.”
“Oh yes, you can. They had something they believed in, and though I didn’t know how you had given them out or that the prince was involved, too, I knew that my little sister had inspired something in those men. Somehow. I had this strange sense—it doesn’t end here. You were right. There is a way to change without death in the streets. There has to be. I have a lot of people out there who need to be convinced of that.”
“You prize idiot,” I said, ignoring the pair of tears that coursed down my cheeks. “You could have been captured and executed.”
“I was willing to die for one cause, why not another?”
“Not funny,” I said. “They won’t pardon you.”
“I wouldn’t want to be pardoned,” he said, raising his chin. “The ideals I believed in—I still believe them. I would still fight for them,” he added, “with all respect, Prince. I’ve been writing again. The press will keep publishing what I write. But it doesn’t advocate revolt this time.”
“I’ve appeased him with assurances that there will be no restriction on the proliferation of his pamphlets in his absence,” Theodor interrupted.
“Absence?” I looked from Kristos to Theodor, waiting for an explanation.
“He’s leaving the country,” Theodor said with a raised eyebrow. “I know a ship in need of a sailor. One-way signing contract only. If he were caught, I couldn’t stop the process of justice for him. So he needs to leave if he wants assurances on his life.”
“Where?” I asked, fumbling at how to feel. Kristos would be safe, but this could be the last time I saw my brother.
“Does it matter?” Kristos said with a lopsided smile.
“Yes, for some reason.”
“Fen. For now,” he added. “Pyord was right about something, and that was that knowing about other forms of governance can encourage one to see the weaknesses in one’s own. In order to keep writing, I need to keep studying.”
Fen was no country of scholars. Neither was Kvyset, or Pellia. I nodded, knowing what he was saying—the Allied Equatorial States, with the public libraries funded by their princes, or West Serafe, with its universities open to anyone with the tenacity and talent to find a sponsor. It was enough.
I turned to Theodor. “Why would you do this for him?” I wiped the tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand.
“To be completely frank, I’m really doing it more for you,” Theodor said with a lopsided smile. “But he’s right. We haven’t extinguished this revolution, and without some changes, it will only wait for another opportunity to flare up and consume this country. We need some reforms. If we’re to avoid another attempted revolt, more riots, we need the populace to consider those reforms as an alternative to violence. They may listen to appeals for prudence from the same writer who led them to revolt,” he said, with a pointed look at Kristos. “I’ll be presenting a bill to the council this month with some measures I believe will alleviate some of the concerns of the people. Some measures from your brother’s pamphlets.”
“At least someone was reading them,” Kristos said, with a pointed look at me.
“Don’t you have a boat to catch?”
“I missed you,” Kristos said with a little sliver of his old grin. I hadn’t forgiven him yet; perhaps I never would, completely. But I could agree with him on that point. I missed him when he was gone. I still missed him, even now as he sat two feet away from me.
“Stay safe, Kristos,” I said quietly.
He nodded, turned to leave, then turned back toward me and enveloped me in his arms. Then he rumpled my hair and disappeared through the door behind the orange trees.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“He would have made a good Privy Councillor,” Theodor said. “If he hadn’t ruined himself with revolution, he could have built reform.”
“What is this, the Greenhouse Summit?” I asked, unconvinced. Reform sounded too weak a word when compared with revolt. But that was where Kristos’s writing had started, with reforms. With ideas.
“For now. But next week I take my seat as the head of the Council of Nobles. And despite the fact that I would rather dig in the dirt here than chair a meeting of panicked and squabbling noblemen, I’ll do my duty to the country, which I think requires, at this point, changes.”
My fingers inched along the simple white trim on my gown’s black sleeves. “We can’t go backward,” I finally said, “so we might as well try to go forward.”
“I want to go forward with you rather than without you.” He put it so simply. Could it be as simple as that?
“But it’s not so simple,” I answered him and myself. “Kingdoms are united, treaties are sealed …”
“See, I think paper and pen should handle that just fine. I know I can’t promise anything. I can’t ask you to want to step into this hornet’s nest with me. And even my best plans might still fail, but if I have to rule a country, I want you beside me.”
I bit my lip. I didn’t want to lose Theodor, but I wanted my life unchanged, with the daily rhythms of my shop and the comfort I could find in a needle and silks. I didn’t want to be queen—but Theodor didn’t want to be king, either. What a pair we’d make.
“What do you want, Sophie?” he asked again, and I saw him as I had seen him the night after the riot, in his bedroom, both of us wearing simple linen. Equals in this if not in title or blood.
I breathed the heavy air of the greenhouse, thick with flowers and fruit and, under it all, soil and moss and bark—I wanted to drink in everything here. I looked down at my hands, the familiar calluses on my fingertips from the needle—I wanted to keep sewing, keep charm casting. I watched a fresh shower of snow settle gently on the bare branches outside—I wanted to keep living in this city through whatever changes were coming.
I looked back at Theodor. I saw an uncertain future, and a role I never wanted for myself. But I also saw trust, and hope, and love.
“This.” I took his hand and drew him to a bench by a bed of deep pink rose balsam. “I want this.” For now, it was enough.