David
“For starters, Amelia, please don’t call me your majesty.”
“I apologize. Is your royal highness better? You’re a king.”
“I’m not a king here, and it isn’t what we say in the Middle Ages anyway.”
Amelia was shaking her head before he was halfway through saying his very short sentence. “You need to stop thinking that way right now. You are not the king of this England, but you are the king of an England. It’s like you’re a—” she paused to look out the window, checking, he was sure, for stragglers from the dispersed press corps, “—visiting dignitary, come to England as part of an embassage. As such, you need to be treated with respect, as we would the King of Saudi Arabia, for example. Thus your majesty or your royal highness is what you should be called, and what I am calling you.”
They were sitting in a lounge across the hall from William’s room. He was asleep again, having devoured a mostly liquid meal. He was doing far better than David might have expected for someone with a hole punched through him, but David also remembered watching television shows where people with bullet holes in the shoulder were sent home the same day. He supposed it depended upon where the hole was, and a crossbow bolt had the benefit of not exploding on impact. It made the same-sized hole going out as coming in, and the damage was restricted to the area of the hole.
David had asked the doctor if everything was going okay and been assured that it was. But even the doctor had appeared a little wide-eyed about David’s existence and had spoken with a deference and a demeanor that made David wonder if he was telling him what he wanted to hear rather than the truth.
He said as much to Amelia, who replied. “You’re the King of England.” It had become her mantra.
“We’re in Wales, though, in Gwynedd, even.”
“So you’re a prince of Wales, one who really is Welsh, for all that you’re also American. England has an American princess now. Surely Wales can have an American prince.”
Chad’s army of employees had been streaming in and out of the hospital all day, adding weight to the idea that David might really be who he said he was. By now, everybody on the planet had seen the new video of his and William’s arrival, and though David had overheard a general agreement that it could have been faked, the existence of the video plus the reality of David standing at a nurse’s station in their hospital was hard to deny.
Chad’s infusion of staff hadn’t all been, like Amelia, about the press corps. The promised young woman, a dark-haired, blue-eyed third year university student, had arrived to sit with William. If he leaned forward, David could see her now. She had a laptop open on her lap and was typing away at a paper on Alfred the Great. Though she spoke no Welsh at all, her medieval French and English were pretty good.
For the others, David had the distinct impression that Chad was afraid he was going to disappear again—for good reason—and he wanted to gather as much information as he could while he had David in his clutches. Suffice it to say, both David’s and William’s blood had been drawn, and scientists in labs all over the UK were rejoicing—and hard at work—tonight.
David eased back into his chair. Amelia was making a certain kind of sense, but if the pomp of being king in Earth Two had always made him uncomfortable, here in Avalon, it struck him as completely archaic. He was an American, from a country in which every person was the king of his own castle, and even the poorest person could view himself, as John Steinbeck once said, as a temporarily down-on-his-luck millionaire—though why the first semester of his high school American lit class was coming back to him after twelve years, David didn’t know.
Worse, part of him wouldn’t mind at all being treated with the respect your royal highness would afford him, and he distrusted the emotion enough to prefer erring on the side of caution.
He did know, however, as much as he hated to admit it, that he was as out of his depth in Avalon as Anna had warned him he would be. “My relationship to my people is just so much more personal.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s weird the way your majesty or your royal highness changes the pronoun around. At home, while I have been called your grace, the honorific is usually reserved for churchmen. To my face, everyone says my lord. Do you see the difference?”
“You want me to call you my lord?” Even Amelia, the embodiment of the serene spokesperson, was aghast.
He laughed. “You can’t do it, can you? That’s because it means something. You can say your majesty with detachment.” He sobered. “Call me David. Please.”
Amelia pressed her lips together, and David had a feeling she wasn’t going to call him anything at all—or he was stuck with HRH. When he got home, he was going to make a point of asking his mother when the change had occurred. He guessed that some pompous European prince during the Renaissance or the French Revolution had thought it sounded better or put him above his otherwise peers.
“All right.” Amelia picked up her tablet and swiped through several screens. “To get back to my main point, you are a king, and regardless of what you want to be called, you need to think of yourself as one here.”
David took in a breath through his nose and let it out. “Okay. I will take what you’ve said under advisement.”
“How long have you been king?”
“Five years.”
“Do people still question your right to rule?”
He laughed. “I’m in the midst of a civil war right now, didn’t you know?” He tipped his head. “Though admittedly, that war was predicated on the idea that I’d been assassinated in Ireland, so the people usurping the throne were taking it from my three-year-old son rather than from me.”
Amelia was genuinely gaping at him. “I-I didn’t know.”
“I hadn’t said before now. Anna only knew about the attack on her outside of Llangollen.”
“You’re keeping the throne, though, right? You’re fighting back?”
“Oh yes.” He nodded. “I didn’t seek the crown and the power that goes with it, but it is mine, and I would be doing my people a disservice not to use what they have given me to better the world.”
Amelia pressed her lips together in something that looked almost like a smile and glanced from him to her tablet and back up again. “Did you read my notes?”
David looked at her warily. “What notes?”
“What you just said was my next talking point.” Now she genuinely smiled. “You’re good. Maybe this won’t require a total makeover.”
He folded his arms across his chest and studied her. “You are doing what they all do, every time.”
“What is that?” She was flipping through the screens on her tablet, not paying complete attention.
“Treating me like a kid.”
Her head came up, and her face paled. “No, I wasn’t.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Why do I need a makeover?”
Amelia put out a hand to him. “That’s not what I meant. Really, it isn’t. I was being flip when perhaps I shouldn’t have been.”
“You are correct that I don’t have experience with talk shows or interviews. We don’t have cameras in the Middle Ages, but I can be coherent when I choose to be.”
“I know that.” She took in a breath. “But really, you’re misunderstanding me. What you wear, how you stand or sit, and everything you say is going to be dissected by the entire world. It is so easy for any of that to be misinterpreted. My job is to try to manage that process. I’m not trying to manipulate you. I’m trying to manipulate them.” She threw out a hand to indicate the world at large.
David nodded slowly. “I get that. And again, I am well aware that I am out of my depth here. The world has changed, and I’m not a part of it anymore.” He spread his arms wide. “I am in your hands.”
Amelia nodded vigorously. “Thank you. Chad has suggested, and I agree, that we need you to look the part, to project an aura of a king. Saying you are one isn’t enough.” She gestured up and down with her hand to indicate his appearance. “First thing tomorrow morning, Chad is flying in a tailor.”
David looked down at himself. Even before coming to Earth Two, he had cared very little about his clothing. He’d lived in jeans, t-shirts, and sweatshirts. At the moment, he was wearing his medieval pants, shirt, and boots, which he’d had on when he’d arrived. He’d removed his overtunic, cloak, and belt knife, all of which were stashed in a locked closet in William’s room.
“Will you want me to wear a suit?”
“Suits are what the royal family wears to events, but if members of the younger set were going on the Owain Williams show, they might wear something more casual. Chad has people studying the issue.”
“You mean he has focus groups telling him what would make me most appealing?” David laughed again.
Amelia didn’t. “Yes.”
David instantly sobered. “My valet would love this. The chamberlain and his varied assistants as well. He and my wife are capable of discussing the various merits of my clothing long past the point where I have any interest.”
“About five seconds, I imagine?”
David grinned. “Exactly. If Lili were here, she would have understood all this immediately. We manage my image there too. It’s just that the conversation revolves around the wearing of robes and scepters and crowns.”
Amelia leaned forward. “You don’t have to be interested, but you need to let me stand in for your wife. If you were dealing with one of those rebellious barons—or that Scot king, Balliol—you would be focused, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course.”
“The entire world—and I mean that quite literally—will be watching. You need to treat this with commensurate seriousness.”
David eased back a little into the softness of his chair. Early on in his kingship, his natural inclination had been to think that speaking the truth was enough when it came to public relations. At the time, he hadn’t understood how everything he said fell under diplomacy, but he did now, even if he might mock the need for political calculation. Lili was a master at it, and he felt she had a natural charm that put everyone at ease. He had a harder time with it, coming across as either arrogant or too earnest. He also still found himself embarrassed by the attention given him.
Over the years, however, he’d learned the folly in making light of what others cared about, so he gazed steadily back at Amelia and promised, “I will. Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”