Chapter 5
Eiri
“How long do we have to keep this up?”
Kien glanced around the crowded hall, taking in the hundreds of wedding guests. He did a better job keeping his face passive than Eiri could, but there was a slight furrow in his brow that said he’d rather be anywhere but here.
“Perhaps another hour? There are no more speeches, it appears, but propriety demands at least staying until the king and queen leave.” The only person near to them was Syrus, but they spoke in whispered Canjiri anyway. It was a tiny rebellion, but one with a degree of petty satisfaction.
“Do we really care about propriety, though?” Eiri kept his eyes on his plate, refusing to glance to his left, where his new husband sat.
Beyond him were the king and queen, with various princes and princesses past them.
No courtiers sat to the right of Eiri, clearly denoting his lack of support here in Vaetreas.
His lack of welcome was on display for everyone to see, and he felt it in their gaze when they looked at him.
Whispers and smirks had followed him from the grand hall to the banquet, and no one had done a single thing to stop it.
It was exactly what he’d expected from his new family.
Eiri repressed a shudder. Even the idea of these people being his family made his skin crawl. His mother wasn’t perfect, but at least he’d never had to worry she’d stick a knife in his back.
“Unfortunately, we do. The marriage can still be annulled at this early stage, and everything we do is being judged and weighed. Maintain your dignity and give them nothing to use against you.”
Easier said than done, when every word out of Syrus Vardor’s mouth made Eiri want to punch him.
“You’re in the palace in Vaetreas. Are you aware of that?”
Words like that.
At a warning glance from Kien, Eiri took a deep breath before he spoke, responding in Vaetrean. “I am well aware of where I am. Are you not? Would you like a map?”
Kien groaned quietly, but Syrus gave a low growl. Eiri refused to turn his head to look at him, but he imagined the man resembled a looming thundercloud right now.
“I just thought I would be sure, because you’re speaking Canjiri like you’re in a backwater tavern back on your little island.”
“Maintain your dignity,” Kien whispered in urgent Canjiri. “We are better than them. Give them nothing.”
The whispered counsel put a leash on Eiri’s immediate fury, but just barely.
“I am speaking my native tongue to a fellow speaker. Were I to speak to you, I would use your language.” He couldn’t hold back a small sneer from coloring the last two words with his distaste.
Vaetrean was such a crass, abrupt language.
“While you are in this country, you will speak the native language,” Syrus ordered, and Eiri’s hackles immediately went up.
“Perhaps that tone works on your soldiers, but I am not one of them and I do not take orders from some overblown officer who thinks he’s above everyone else simply because of the family he was born into. You will not forbid me from speaking my own language and you will not give me orders.”
He’d fought to keep his voice down, but the table was quiet when he stopped speaking.
The queen glared at them with blatant fury and her family’s reactions ranged from incredulous to scandalized.
One prince, though, seated near the end of the table, made no effort to hide his amusement, earning him a disapproving glare from the Crown Prince.
“Is there a problem?” Queen Delia asked, her voice colder than the depths of the ocean in winter. Speaking now would only increase her ire with him, so Eiri said nothing, leaving it to Syrus to explain. Any attempt to defend himself would be met with hostility, anyway.
“No problems, mother,” Syrus gritted. “We were simply discussing the differences in etiquette between our countries.”
“Save those discussions for someplace besides your marriage feast,” she said, and it was an order, not a suggestion.
“I agree. We apologize for the disruption.”
Syrus’ apology was enough to placate her for the moment, but the look Eiri received from her warned that this wasn’t over.
“I told you not to respond,” Kien said the moment all eyes were off them.
“You heard him! He tried to forbid me from speaking our language.”
“An empty threat. He could not have stopped you. He was likely baiting you and you walked right into it. Now the royal family has one more weapon in their arsenal against you.”
“I thought this was supposed to be a marriage feast, not a war council,” Eiri muttered. It took most of his concentration to focus on keeping his expression calm and even.
“This entire arrangement is one battle in the continuing war between our countries, and you know it. Every weakness you show, every insult you respond to, gives them more information and intelligence to use against us later.”
“I’m aware of that. I’m not stupid.” It made the whole situation even worse, knowing this farce of a marriage was not only awful, but unnecessary. Every one of the so-called “peace marriages” was. Legally, Vaetreas and Canjir had never been at war, but legalities meant nothing.
“Then act like it,” Kien ordered. “Right now, you are an unwelcome guest, but one that they must treat well, as you are married to a prince. The moment the fighting reignites, and it will, you become a political hostage.”
“That’s why you’re here.” In an instant, everything fell into place in his head. “My mother wasn’t feeling sentimental and allowing me to have some part of Canjir with me. You’re the backup plan for when it all goes wrong.”
He should have known. Eiri could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen his mother get sentimental, and all of them had centered on Akari. While he didn’t doubt her love for him, he was as much a political game piece as a son.
“I am here to make sure you stay alive and that Canjir is protected. Lucky for you, those things coincide. I need you to remember our situation going forward, though. You can not let your guard down. No Vaetrean can ever be trusted. You will be near Syrus on multiple occasions going forward, no matter what. You know who he is and how he acts. If that changes, if he tries to befriend you—”
“I’ll know it’s a trap of some kind. I know.
” Eiri sighed, risking a glance over at his new husband.
Syrus wasn’t as good at keeping his expression blank, his displeasure on display for everyone to see.
Eiri knew it was because he and Kien were still speaking Canjiri, but to the assembled guests it must look as though Syrus was upset about Eiri in general.
Which was true, of course, but surely a prince knew better than to put his emotions on display.
Had no one taught him how to survive the den of vipers that was a royal court?
Even though he’d avoided court back home, his father and then his mother had been on the council and he’d been forced to attend a number of ceremonies. The first thing his mother had taught her children was how to keep their thoughts to themselves.
A kinder person may have felt sympathy for the man, or even offered advice. A good person wouldn’t plot how to use that against him. As Eiri was neither, he stayed silent.
Kien went quiet beside him, satisfied that Eiri had seemingly taken his lesson to heart.
The rest of the feast passed in a blur of noise and increasingly drunken laughter, but Eiri kept his attention on the food, eating until his stomach felt ready to burst. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had access to so many fresh fruits and vegetables.
The platters at the head table alone could probably feed half his hometown and the wedding guests just took it for granted.
Some even turned their noses up at them.
“What do you think they do with all the food these spoiled brats won’t eat?
” he whispered to Kien as they were finishing.
They’d both all but ignored the trays of various meats in favor of fresh produce.
Like Eiri, Kien mixed the vegetables into his rice, allowing the light sauce to soak into the grains.
“You may not like the answer.” At Eiri’s raised eyebrow, Kien sighed. “More than likely, they will feed it to the livestock. The animal bones may be saved for soup stock, but it is just as likely that guests will take them for their hounds.”
Eiri looked out over the room, appalled.
Dozens of platters sat along each table, most of them still half full and some looked as though they hadn’t been touched.
All of this would go to waste? Surely there were people in the city who would eat it.
In every city, every town, there were always people who didn’t have enough, and these arrogant, entitled nobles would rather throw food to the pigs than feed their own people.
“And they have the audacity to call us barbaric,” he ground out. Beside him, Syrus shot him an annoyed look.
“I told you to speak Vaetrean,” he hissed. Eiri kept his expression clear this time, which only seemed to make Syrus more annoyed. He couldn’t stop the little curl of satisfaction that knowledge gave him.
“You did. I ignored you,” he said, dry as the Ashtaari Desert back home.
“I should have known you wouldn’t have the common decency to speak the language of the land you’re in. I clearly expected too much from someone like you.”
“Clearly,” Eiri agreed. Syrus’ attempt at an insult didn’t even faze him. He’d been called much worse by much better people than a spoiled Vaetrean prince. Like any bully, the man just wanted to get a rise out of Eiri, and when he didn’t get the response he was looking for, he scowled.
“You and I are going to have a very serious discussion about what is expected of you now.”