Chapter One
One
In one of the many anterooms that surrounded the royal council chambers at Camelot, there stood a large, ornate wardrobe that was rarely ever touched.
It had apparently once been used to house cloaks, because somebody had left one behind, its scarlet velvet now webbed and pilled with ashy dust. The rest of the wardrobe was empty.
It smelled like camphor and rodent, and the door didn’t quite shut properly, letting in a thin, gold line of candlelight.
King Gabriel knew all of this because he was sitting inside it, having a panic attack.
It had become his preferred location to panic, if he was unable to retreat to his own bedchamber.
The darkness quieted his mind, and the fragrant wood against his back was soothing.
He hoped, one day, that he might see a mouse.
Nothing could be better for a panic attack than the appearance of a lovely mouse.
Somebody entered the anteroom.
Gabriel lifted his head from where it had been resting on his upper arm, and slowed his breathing to a steady shudder.
“Your Majesty?”
It was Lord Ali Das, one of his councillors, the Master of Trade.
He had a very relaxing voice. Gabriel enjoyed listening to it during long meetings.
He didn’t waste words, like some of the other members of his council.
He was also the youngest, except for Gabriel, who often felt like a silly boy king, surrounded by giants.
“Sire,” Lord Das said gently. “I saw you walk in here, and the guards didn’t see you leave. The most logical explanation is that you’re still somewhere in this room, but as that seems unlikely, I’m going to keep looking for you. I imagine I’ll be back here in about … ten or twenty seconds.”
Footsteps, as he walked away.
Gabriel sighed, banged his elbow on the door, and unfolded himself out of the wardrobe.
He had grown somewhat used to compensating for the loss of the lower half of his left arm—a battle wound that still felt fresh some days, thirteen months after the amputation—but could never predict when the scattered pinpricks of pain might strike along the scarred tissue, white-hot like bolts of lightning.
The candlelight felt too bright out here, the air too close. His heart was beating at a heady gallop. Could you die of panic? Probably. He’d have to ask the castle Wizard.
“Ah,” said Lord Das, re-entering the room and smiling pleasantly. He had moat-green eyes, rich brown skin, and thick, black hair that curled down to the nape of his neck. Around five-and-thirty, and soothingly handsome. “Your Majesty. I must have just missed you.”
“I was hiding in the cupboard,” Gabriel said miserably.
“I know,” said Lord Das. “I was giving you the opportunity to pretend that you were not … hiding in the cupboard.”
“Thanks,” said Gabriel. “Sorry.”
“Her Royal Highness was under the impression that you might have slipped away to attend to other matters, and that we should continue without you.”
“I wasn’t attending to anything.”
Lord Das smiled again. “What you get up to in the cupboard is your own business.”
“Do you think it’s all … in hand?” Gabriel waved toward the door, in the general direction of the council chambers. He was thinking longingly of his bed, his cat curled up on the other pillow, the blankets piled up and the window cracked to let in the last summer breeze.
“I think we can get through one day of wildly improbable conspiracy theories without you. It is not the best use of an agile mind anyway.”
“Very good.”
Gabriel was halfway out the door when Lord Das cleared his throat. “You know, you don’t have to hide in cupboards. You’re the king. If you don’t want to do something, you simply don’t have to do it.”
What he didn’t understand was that Gabriel actually wanted to be in the council meetings, in theory; he wanted to be on top of everything, to have something wise and clever to add to every discussion, to solve the problems that felt unsolvable.
For a while, he’d felt good at it. Getting on with things.
Making decisions. The aftermath of his father’s death had filled him with a strange sense of calm—the worst had happened, and here he still was, running a country.
Putting one foot in front of the other, one matter of state after the next.
Whatever that strange magic had been—shock, or perhaps denial—it hadn’t lasted. Lately, it often felt like his head was full of flies, and his tongue was the apple they were filling with worms. Today was a worm day.
Back in his chambers, he found Merlin Lucifer the ginger tomcat curled up on the end of the bed with his front legs sticking up at odd angles, asleep with his eyes slightly open in a way that was very unnerving.
It was a relief to lie down, not bothering to remove his jacket, and place his hand on the cat’s back so that he could feel the gentle rise and fall of his ribs, his fishy breath soft and grounding.
An hour later, he awoke to the sound of his door crashing open.
Princess Gwendoline, scourge of the privy council, came stalking into the room.
She was a little more solid than she’d been this time last year, secretly muscled in the shoulders, less pointy-faced, and even more freckled.
On her nineteenth birthday, she’d cut two feet off her flaming red hair so that it fell to just below her shoulders.
Agnes, her lady-in-waiting, had begged her not to do it with tears in her eyes.
The queen mother had almost fainted. To be fair, it didn’t take a lot to get Gwen and Gabriel’s mother to faint these days.
“Have you seen this?” Gwen said, flopping onto the other side of the bed, accidentally dislodging Merlin Lucifer, who made a disgruntled ek of a noise and escaped to a nearby armchair.
Gabriel took a crumpled piece of parchment from her. It was a notice proclaiming the results of a competitive tournament in Kent.
“What am I looking at?”
“Just read it, please, preferably before my head explodes.”
Gabriel read it thoroughly, looking for clues, ignoring Gwen’s pained sighs as he did so at his own pace. At the very end, he found a single line that informed jousting enthusiasts: Lady Bridget Leclair forfeited second round, withdrew from lists.
Ah. Gabriel was beginning to see the problem.
“It just doesn’t sound like her to me. Does it sound like her to you? Forfeited? Second round? Withdrew? From lists? Again? That’s the fourth time this season.”
“You know her better than I do,” Gabriel said, closing his eyes. “You spent all that time in the spring … knowing each other.”
“Don’t be vulgar, it’s weird on you,” Gwen said, before snatching back the notice. “I wish I knew what she was thinking.”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
Gwen screwed up the parchment and threw it across the room, igniting Merlin Lucifer’s interest and sending him careening after it; he managed to get it stuck on one of his claws, became very frightened of it, and tried to run away, unable to understand how it was keeping pace.
“It’s not that simple. Things are so much easier when we’re…” Her fingers twitched, like she was reaching for something physical. She sighed. “If she wanted to talk, she’d have responded to my letters. I’m not going to push her. I just wish I knew why.”
“I’m sure she misses you too, G. Perhaps you ought to try again.”
Gwen fixed him with a very penetrating look. “I’m not going to take advice on this from the idiot prince of terrible communication.”
“Actually,” Gabriel said, wondering if his sister might go away if he simply put a pillow over his head and stopped replying, “I’m the idiot king of terrible communication now.”
“That you are,” said Gwen. “And long may he fucking reign.”
One year and one month ago, almost to the day, Gwen and Gabriel’s father had fallen in battle so close to Camelot castle that Gabriel could see the exact spot from his old bedroom window.
He hadn’t thrown his mother out of the king’s chambers upon his coronation—that would have felt weird and mean, despite precedent that insisted on it—but he had moved to completely new quarters: renovated guest rooms that didn’t treat him to a vista of ghosts or the joys of reliving the most horrible moments of his life every time he fancied checking on the weather.
Now his chambers looked out over the orchard and the gardens, and he could torture himself in an entirely different way.
Every morning, Lord Arthur Delacey liked to walk the grounds.
Sometimes he was accompanied by Gabriel’s sister; sometimes he walked arm in arm with his body-man, Sidney Fitzgilbert; other times, he made the journey alone.
It had originally been part of his Wizard-ordered rehabilitation, a way of regaining his strength after being attacked by his own father’s hired henchmen and then almost finished off entirely during the battle for Camelot, but Gabriel suspected it was necessary for other reasons too.
Namely that he no longer reached for a drink to dull the sharp edges of life, or to bolster his courage, or even to relax on a fine summer evening.
The change had come about after his head injury, and while Gabriel got the impression that this might have something to do with Arthur’s father too, he’d never been brave enough to ask.
Arthur liked to smell the flowers these days, even if he did suffer from allergies, so that every flower-sniff was followed by hours of complaining.
His hair, which had been butchered that summer along with the rest of him, had grown out so that it brushed the top of his shoulders again, although it seemed shaggier now than it had been, prone to waves instead of lying flat and glossy.
Gabriel knew all of this because he’d been wildly and painfully in love with Arthur Delacey until February, when he had abruptly decided that it was more sensible for all involved if he tried not to be.
He’d almost asked to change chambers again, or at least for new furniture, so that he could avoid looking at the empty armchair Arthur had liked to sprawl in, with none of his limbs contained to the parts traditionally used for sitting—or his bedside table, where Arthur had taken to leaving notes tucked into the books that Gabriel was reading, finding little ways to speak to him when Gabriel was too deep in his own head to hear him.
The less said about his bed, the better—not because it had been party to countless nights of unfettered passion, but because he’d spent quite a lot of time crying in it after his father died, jolted from nightmares by the pain from his amputation, and Arthur had usually been there to scratch soothingly at Gabriel’s curls and hum nonsense until he fell asleep.
It wasn’t like theirs had been a long and storied romance; a reunion last summer for the first time since they were unfriendly children, a slow circling, a few stolen kisses, and then a tragedy that had thrown everything into sharp relief.
Unfortunately, when you were the king, people had certain expectations about whom you’d bed and wed—and when you were a king who’d decided just a few months into your rule to reveal historic letters of a romantic nature between King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, your personal relationships were inevitably subject to the sort of scrutiny that made Gabriel want to lie down and die.
The people of England had been shaken by the coup that had killed Gabriel’s father and needed a strong, stable leader who spent his time giving encouraging speeches, untangling messes, and reforging stronger alliances, not a boy of one-and-twenty who spent half of his time silently vibrating with panic and the other half crying into his secret boyfriend’s shoulder.
Gabriel had thought that he might be able to be both. He’d briefly clasped that dream, and then let it slip away, lost in the maelstrom of too many hard things happening all at once.
An autumn spent by each other’s sides and a tentatively happy Yuletide had turned into the coldest winter Gabriel had ever known, and he had warmed himself by the fire in his study until three o’clock in the morning reading reports on civil altercations and declining public approval rather than seeking out a friendlier embrace.
When it snowed in February, blanketing Camelot in hushed white, Gabriel didn’t notice for two days; when Arthur left him a note on his bed asking if they could talk, he didn’t find it for almost a week.
Eventually Arthur had discovered him early one morning standing in the kitchens eating freshly baked bread directly from the cook’s paddle, and Gabriel had said, betraying his own heart, “I think I need to focus on being king right now,” and Arthur had looked at him for a very long time, and then said, “Okay.”
Gabriel relived it all the time in his head. Okay. Okay! Okay? Okay.
The one thing it wasn’t was okay.