x
Chevalier’s brothers were a handful at the best of times, but starting the day juggling them, the foreign princes, and Belle after a sleepless night was exhausting.
I didn’t include Arianna in the list because she was still too shy and uncomfortable around everybody else to be a problem. All of her blushing and giggling as Luke recounted his proposal from the day before had been rather adorable. That led naturally to the pair resuming their lovesick gazing into each other’s eyes, however, leaving the conversation open for Belle to take over with all her usual bubbly energy and the princes to spin off in multiple directions. She talked my ear off about Benitoite, Rio, and her upcoming wedding plans; they teased Luke and Arianna, posited theories about how Chevalier convinced me to go to bed with him the first night of our honeymoon, pestered Licht, Gilbert, and Keith for an explanation about how they knew, and speculated about the round table meeting.
I tried to focus on Belle and tune the rest out. I still heard enough to make my ears burn.
The bed looked so comfortable when I finally made my escape.
Chevalier was still in the enviable position of a motionless lump under the covers. I could all too easily imagine myself crawling back into bed with him, snuggling up to his warmth, and falling asleep in the comfort of his embrace.
But he and I both had too much work today for that.
I lifted my chin, straightened my back, and forced myself to walk past the bed to the window.
“Good morning, Chevalier,” I called as I threw the drapes open.
Silence.
I smiled to myself. Much had changed in the past year, but this hadn’t. Chevalier was not a morning person, and the same tactics I’d developed as his maid to coax him out of bed still worked.
“Everybody was at breakfast, so Leon set the time for the round table. It will be at noon. He said he’d let Sariel know, too.”
Luke had proposed to Arianna in the gardens, and looking out our window at the gorgeous spring day, I couldn’t imagine a more perfect setting. The seasonal roses were in full bloom alongside the year-round varieties, lining every cobblestone path and wrapping every arch and trellis in reds, pinks, and whites, the blossoms so thick they obscured the green leaves completely in some places. Add to that the heavy fragrance of the flowers and a chorus of birdsongs, and Arianna had probably felt like she’d been transported to a fairy tale.
Clavis appeared down below, skipping along with a shovel in hand.
“Luke proposed to Arianna yesterday, although I’m sure you already know about that. You could have told me he’s been going to you for relationship advice. I am your wife, after all.”
I added a little pout to my voice to tease Chevalier, and I turned around just in time to collide with his bare chest as his arms wrapped around me and his lips covered mine. This wasn’t part of my maid routine. I couldn’t complain, though.
“Telling you would have ruined the surprise,” he said.
The sunlight caught the warmth in his crystal blue eyes and played across the smile on his lips. I hugged him back and stood up on tiptoe to return his kiss.
“I brought you breakfast. Get dressed and eat.”
“Not going somewhere, are you, little dove?” he asked, the corner of his lip turning up in a smirk.
“Clavis took charge of the servants the last couple of days, so I need to go to the kitchens and clean up any messes he made. And as much as I appreciate the view, Theresa will be here soon, and if you can be jealous of Gilbert looking at me the wrong way, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for me to not want her to see you naked.”
It was also perfectly reasonable for him to melt me into a puddle with a series of kisses which had no right to be that intense this early in the day. I was dizzy when he finished, and his smug smirk was more apparent than ever.
“Don’t you have something to do, little dove?”
I swallowed hard, unable to render words just yet, and smacked his shoulder in lieu of the scolding he deserved for teasing me like that. He was still chuckling when I left.
I loved being married.
The morning flew by as I settled into the normal routine of managing the servants and socializing with the party guests I’d neglected over the past couple of days. I dispatched two gardeners with shovels to find and fill in Clavis’ latest pit trap and two maids to the library to take down ‘Chev Loves Ivetta’ banners and heart decorations plastered across the ceiling, and then I spent an hour apologizing to the Simmons family yet again when the middle daughter found the pit trap before the gardeners did. The noblewoman who ended up buried under a veritable avalanche of rose petals in the library was much more easygoing about her involvement in another Clavis prank. How he managed to hide that many rose petals under the banners remained a mystery nobody cared to solve.
Lunchtime neared, and I was ready for a break. I hoped the round table wouldn’t be too stressful.
“Ivetta, do you have a moment?”
I stifled a sigh and plastered a smile on my face as I turned to face the familiar voice. Elise was on my list of people to find and say hello to this afternoon, and I enjoyed spending time with her. But I just wanted to sit down for a few minutes.
“Yes, of course. What is it?”
“Um, well, I wanted to tell you…well, first, happy birthday.”
“Thank you,” I said, searching her nervous hazel eyes. “Is something wrong?”
“Well…” She bit her lip, looking everywhere except at me. “My father…”
That explained everything. She was a sweet girl, but she had no backbone, and I was very familiar with her father's ambitions to get her married to the highest ranking person possible. I wasn’t sure he approved of her relationship with Yves, and I had a sinking feeling that was her latest problem.
“Did he make you end things with Yves?” I asked gently.
She finally met my eyes and nodded slightly. “But I don’t mind that. We get along well, but…well, you know.”
I nodded encouragingly. A flash of black in my peripheral vision alerted me to the presence of Gilbert or Leon, but whoever it was could wait.
“I guess we’re probably better off as friends. But, um…I’ll be going away for a while. My father has been sending letters to other countries, and he wants me to meet some of the…candidates.”
“Kings?” I asked in disbelief. There was no reason for a baron to market his daughter in other countries unless he had extremely high designs, and everybody knew Chevalier would not be taking another wife.
“And crown princes,” she said miserably, her eyes drifting down to the carpet. “I think he’s hoping my friendship with you will make me a more attractive option for a political marriage. I tried telling him nobody would consider someone like me for a queen, but…”
And this was another of her problems. Low rank aside, she was also painfully shy and insecure.
“No, don’t talk like that. You’re a wonderful woman, and whoever you marry will be lucky to have you. This could be really good for you, actually.”
She looked up at me again, her nearly invisible strawberry blonde eyebrows furrowed. “Do you think so?”
“Of course! You’ve never left Rhodolite before, have you? If nothing else, you can have a lot of fun exploring other places. And you can write to me all about it. Chevalier and I will be traveling soon, so you can tell us all the places we should visit.”
There was her smile. It broke through like the sun on a cloudy day, lighting up her freckled face with the glow I’d heard both Yves and Nokto credit as the reason they’d initially approached her. If she smiled like that more often, maybe I would get a letter one day saying she was engaged to a king.
“I never thought about it that way. Thank you, Ivetta. My father is waiting, so I have to go now, but I’m glad I got to see you.”
“Oh, well, you can’t go, just like that,” I said, surprising her by pulling her into a hug. “I’m glad I got to see you, too, Elise. I’ll be looking forward to your first letter.”
It was Gilbert, not Leon. I saw him over her shoulder, clearly waiting to speak with me, and my mind was suddenly back on task, calculating the time I had left until the round table. Not enough for a decent conversation. I didn’t know what he wanted with me, but I had a few things I wanted to talk to him about.
Elise and I exchanged our farewells. When she turned to go and saw him, she visibly tensed and gave him a wide berth.
“Jumpy little thing, isn’t she?” he commented as she hurried away.
“She’s just very shy. I need to get to the round table, so could we talk afterwards? Maybe in the gardens? I haven’t been outside all day.”
His blood-red eye flicked over my shoulder, and he chuckled. “I wouldn't mind, but your guards don’t seem to like that idea. Would it help if I said Silvio and Keith will be there as well?”
“It’s the queen’s decision,” Julius said stiffly.
I sighed. He was as overprotective as Chevalier, and Byron wasn’t much better. I’d thought on more than one occasion the two of them would probably fight Chevalier himself if they felt he was out of line.
“I’ll be there.”
Leon was already seated at the round table, as were Jin, Clavis, and Nokto, and servants were setting the table with food. Clavis hopped to his feet to pull out my chair while Jin studied me curiously.
“Didn’t realize Chevalier invited you,” he commented.
“He said I’m part of the royal family, so I should be here. I hope that isn’t a problem,” I added, meeting Leon’s amber eyes.
He gave me a warm smile in answer. “No problem at all. Saves me from having to tell you later.”
“There’s food?” Luke’s excited voice interrupted as he burst into the room.
I smiled and shook my head. Engaged or not, he was still the same overgrown boy when it came to food.
“Did you get Silvio off your back?” Clavis asked.
My ears perked up.
Luke nodded as he piled food on his plate. “For now.”
“Does Silvio have a problem with you and Arianna?” I asked curiously.
Luke shrugged, his mouth already full with his first bite.
“Don’t talk. Chew,” Jin ordered. “To answer for him, Silvio didn’t care about Arianna at all until he found out Luke was proposing, and now, she’s suddenly too good for Luke. Hey, Chevalier.”
He strode into the room and settled into his chair next to me as Nokto took up the thread of conversation. I squeezed Chevalier’s hand under the table.
“Apparently, I wasn’t good enough for her, either. He has pretty high standards for a cousin he supposedly despises.”
“Looks like we’re the last to arrive,” Yves announced, walking in with Licht.
“Not quite,” Chevalier replied.
“Oh, right, Sariel. This is serious, isn’t it?” Clavis asked happily, delighted at the prospect of more trouble.
“You made a lot of work for me this morning, Clavis,” I commented.
His grin widened. “I got a date out of the rose petals.”
“What about Regina?” Yves asked sourly.
Sariel’s entrance interrupted Clavis’ reply. A heavy silence fell over the room as Sariel took his seat, and Chevalier looked pointedly at Leon, who drained his glass of wine in a single gulp.
“Right,” he said, setting the glass down and topping it off again. “So, you’re all wondering what this round table is about. It’s kinda complicated and long overdue, and I guess I should start by saying I’m sorry for lying to everybody, because I’m not actually Leon Dompteur.”
In any other setting, at least one person would have burst out laughing. Now, however, silence reigned, and more than one prince was frowning. Sariel’s already narrow lavender eyes were slits behind his thin glasses.
“Explain, please,” he said coolly.
“Ivetta, Luke, you probably don’t know, but the real Leon was a sickly kid. He had a heart condition, so everybody here knew of him but didn’t know him, ‘cause he never left his room. Well, his mother was afraid of losing her standing in the palace when he eventually died, so she set out to find an identical replacement. That’s where I come in. I was actually an Obsidianite slave.”
This was what Gilbert knew, I realized, knowing my wide eyes were expressing the shock nobody else was showing. This was how Leon got the ex-slaves to listen to him.
He had been a slave. Leon, with his big heart and larger-than-life personality, had been a slave as a child.
“They locked me up in Leon's room so I could learn to be him. After he died, his mother had everyone who knew about the switch killed, and not long after that, she died, probably from the guilt of what she’d done, I guess. Anyway, that’s it. I’m not Leon. I never told anybody until Belle came, ‘cause I figured she should know, since she had to name the next king. But it’s all about to come out because of Freedom, so there’s no hiding it anymore.”
“Do you have any proof of this?” Sariel asked quietly.
Leon’s eyes flicked to me, and he nodded. “Yeah, but I’d rather not show you when Ivetta’s here. My last whipping was a pretty bad one. I still have the scars on my back.”
“I thought those were from Bloodstained Rose Day,” Yves interjected. Something trembled in his deep blue eyes, something akin to anguish. Or anxiety.
“Nope. Had ‘em before that,” Leon replied lightly, as if neither the whippings nor the infamous battle of a decade ago bothered him anymore. My heart—and the scars on my back—throbbed
“This is how you convinced King Highness to go along with your plan for Freedom,” Nokto summarized, his dark crimson eyes studying Leon and Chevalier alternately.
Chevalier nodded in silent confirmation.
“This is treason,” Sariel said. There was no accusation in his voice; he was simply stating a fact. “Impersonating a member of the royal family is a crime punishable by death.”
Yves’ eyes flew wide with undisguised panic, and he stood abruptly, sending his chair clattering to the floor. “No! I won’t let him get executed!”
“He didn’t have a choice at first. He was just a kid,” Licht agreed.
“Sit down, Yves. Nobody's killing him,” Jin assured his younger brothers. “But someone could make the argument he should have come forward when he was old enough to understand, and that's the problem.”
“Chevalier has already pardoned him, though.” All eyes turned to me, and I took a deep breath, glancing at Chevalier before I continued. “He must have, unofficially. Otherwise, he would have seen to Leon’s execution himself, and Freedom would never have happened. But he kept the secret until now, which means the purpose of this meeting is not to condemn Leon. It’s to inform the rest of us so we can decide how to handle this. Am I right?”
Chevalier nodded. “I intend to write an official proclamation after this meeting.”
“A very carefully worded official proclamation,” Sariel said thoughtfully, pushing his glasses up his nose.
“So…are we done here?” Luke asked. We all turned to him, and somehow, he’d managed to clean his plate in silence.
Clavis laughed. “Have you heard a single thing we said?”
“Yeah. Leon’s a fake, but it’s all okay, and nothing’s changing. Right?” Luke summarized.
This time, Leon laughed. “The last part’s up to all of you, but, yeah, the rest is about right.”
“Well, it’s only because of you and Chevalier that I survived Bloodstained Rose Day, and I won’t treat you any differently because you’re not technically my brother,” Yves said firmly.
“Same,” Licht agreed.
“You’re one of the best drinking buddies I’ve got, and I practically raised you. No getting away from that,” Jin added with a grin.
“Great. Alcohol is thicker than blood,” Leon said, laughing.
All eyes turned to Clavis and Nokto. Clavis shrugged. “I don’t really care. Nokto?”
Nokto’s lips turned up in a sly smirk. “Does this mean I get all the women who are always fawning over Leon?”
“Nokto,” Yves said reproachfully.
“I’m serious. What happens when they find out he’s not a prince of Rhodolite?”
“He still is,” Chevalier replied firmly.
Nokto shrugged and sipped his wine. “There will still be those who are crushed by this revelation. Don’t worry, Leon, I’ll be here to comfort them for you.”
Yves grumbled under his breath, “You’re disgusting.”
“Hey, that means more for me, too!” Jin said, his burgundy eyes lighting up as he continued the tease. Suddenly, all the brothers were laughing and talking over each other, peppering Leon with questions and teasing remarks.
“Leon, my office when you’re done,” Chevalier cut in, pushing his chair back and standing.
“You got it,” he replied, draining another glass of wine.
I didn’t miss the slump of his shoulders or the empty plate in front of Chevalier. Leon was probably relieved this went so well, as was I, but Chevalier felt it was more important to start the official proclamation immediately than to eat lunch. Maybe he didn’t have an appetite. I didn't, either. My stomach was churning at the thought of what was to come for Leon.12Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5cc4oDapXq
