44. Alar
ALAR
"A wound you cannot see is still a wound."
—Vedona Academy, Healer Corps
As we were waiting for our parents, I alternated between watching the clock and my brother.
I was anxious despite Arwen's progress. He was doing well, but it was happening too quickly, and I didn't trust the results to hold under pressure.
We were not meeting in the rose garden either, which had become Arlen's safe space, because our father had scoffed at my suggestion to meet there and demanded the audience be carried out in Arlen's receiving room.
"A king doesn't rule from a garden," he'd said, as if that encapsulated his whole argument, and I had to admit that it had.
Arlen needed to perform well indoors.
I shouldn't have boasted to our parents about my brother's fantastic progress. I had spoken too soon, and now they were coming over to evaluate said progress for themselves.
Arlen had been doing great, I told myself. My father would be so impressed.
Or not.
My brother was shining too brightly, and like a candle with a flame too big for its body, he might burn out too soon.
He'd shaved himself without Balert's help, combed his hair back, put on a proper coat, and sat straight in his chair.
He was telling me very animatedly about how well he'd slept, about how his breathing was deep and calm now, about how he'd be ready for whatever Father wanted to throw at him.
I had a feeling that his speech was more for his own benefit than mine.
He was boosting his confidence by reciting his progress, and it wasn't a bad strategy, but it also revealed how anxious he was, and that was a problem because Arlen couldn't handle stress yet.
It was too soon.
"You don't have to perform for them," I said. "They are just coming to see how you are doing. They are your parents."
"They are the King and Queen of Catonia first, and my parents second. You and I know exactly what Father is coming to see."
He wasn't wrong, and there was nothing I could say that wouldn't sound like platitudes. "You're doing great. Just relax and let him lead the conversation. You know how he likes to hear himself talking."
At that, Arlen chuckled. "Yeah, I do. I need to practice talking like he does."
"That's the right attitude. Imagine yourself king, delivering riveting hour-long speeches."
He arched a brow. "Riveting? If I want to fall asleep fast, all I have to do is listen to one of Father's televised speeches."
The humor was good. The less stressed Arlen was, the better he'd do.
Since our heart-to-heart in the garden, he'd thrown himself at recovery the way he'd once thrown himself at everything, and the healer's warning had been knocking at the back of my skull the whole time.
Do not mistake a good week for a cure.
He'd been sleeping less, not more. He'd pushed me to speak aloud about the attack and tell him my suspicions of who might have been behind it.
I had done as he asked while knowing that we were going faster than the healer had recommended.
I'd cooperated because the clock was not only ticking but eating us alive.
A week to Father's final decision. Two until the ball.
There was no room left to go slow and careful the way the healer had advised.
There was a quick knock on the door before the guards opened it and announced, "Please rise for Their Majesties, King Alaranthus Tekumuton the Fourth, and Queen Hanith of Catonia."
I rose, but Arlen couldn't, and that was the first setback of the day.
I should have told the guards to skip it.
"Oh, please," my mother said. "We are visiting our son, not a foreign dignitary. No one needs to rise."
I dipped my head to my parents and motioned at the two armchairs I'd arranged for them, facing Arlen, who'd turned his chair around.
My mother ignored me, walked over to Arlen, and bent to kiss his cheek. "How are you doing, my son?"
"Better," he said. "Much better."
"Arlen." Father crossed and gripped his shoulder. "You're looking well."
"I'm feeling well, Father."
"I'm glad to hear that." My father offered my mother his hand and led her to the armchair. "Forgive me for insisting that the meeting take place here and not in the rose garden, as Alar had suggested." He helped my mother sit and then sat next to her.
"It's fine," Arlen said. "I enjoy spending time in the garden, but I know Mother dislikes sitting in the sun for too long."
That was good, framing it as a concession he was making for our mother and not an acquiescence to our father's demands.
"Thank you for being so considerate." Our mother picked up the thread right away. "I like looking at roses but not sitting among them. The heat, the bugs." She shivered. "I'd much rather stay indoors."
I wanted to kiss her.
Our father crossed his arms over his chest. "A few things have come up lately that I would like your advice on."
I hadn't expected that, and given the way Arlen's shoulders tensed, neither had he. Was Father going to actually grill him on matters of state?
"Of course," Arlen said.
"Duke Albrzi and Duke Rosten are quarreling over the high pasture again," Father said. "The river moved in the spring floods, and now each swears the grazing on the new bank is theirs by old right. Both have sent me letters. How do you think I should answer them?"
"You shouldn't answer them in writing," Arlen said it with surprising confidence.
"A letter from you ruling for one is a letter the other keeps forever as a grievance.
You should invite both to the capital, separately, and let each believe he has your ear first. Then you put the boundary to a joint survey neither of them controls, and you make certain the one who loses the pasture gains something else in the same breath, a remission or an appointment, so he goes home having won a thing too.
Each will call it a win, and a feud will be avoided. "
"And if the survey favors Albrzi and Rosten refuses to accept it?"
"Then Rosten has refused the land commission, not Albrzi. What was a personal feud becomes a bureaucratic affair. Much less emotional."
Father's face gave nothing away. "The harvest was thin this year, and Penvasita asks to be excused from this year's levy. If I excuse them, every province with a poor season will ask the same."
"You don't excuse the levy. You defer it.
" Arlen was actually relaxing the more questions our father threw at him.
This was familiar. This was something he had done hundreds of times.
I should have incorporated that kind of banter into our healing protocol.
"If you create a precedent, you'll regret it forever.
Compassion has its place, but not in matters of state and taxes. "
"Good answer," our father finally complimented him, and the smile it brought to Arlen's face eased the tightness in my chest.
"An envoy comes to you," Father continued. "He brings a true grievance and a threat in the same breath. His province has been wronged by another, and he tells you that if it is not set right, his king will not support you in the council. What do you do?"
"I separate the two things." Arlen leaned forward in his chair.
"I take the grievance seriously and set it right if it's just. Letting a wrong fester is never a good idea.
But I make him understand that his king has much more to lose than I do, and that I remember who voted with me and who didn't, and that there are consequences. "
They were good answers, and I let myself breathe, believing we might have reached our goal a week early.
The crack was the first sound alerting me that something was not right. Then came a groan, and before I could figure out what was happening, the window to the left of Arlen came crashing down, the glass exploding into thousands of pieces.
There was a split second of stunned silence, and then we all moved at once.
Father grabbed Mother by the arm and pushed her down, throwing his body over hers, shielding his queen from a blast he was expecting.
I rushed toward Arlen, whose upper body wrenched sideways and out of the chair as he tried to throw himself clear of the glass and whatever he expected to follow the breach.
He went down hard onto the floor in a tangle and tried to crawl from danger.
I threw myself over him and waited for the explosion.
It didn't come, but the guards did, throwing the door open and rushing inside with their rifles aimed at the intruders they assumed were attacking the royal family.
I was the first to understand that no explosion was coming. There was no grenade, no blast, just warm morning air pouring in where the window had been, and a carpet of glass shards glittering across the floorboards.
A window had broken, but nothing had been thrown at it from outside.
The guards were helping Father and Mother up off the floor, and Balert rushed over to where I was still draped over Arlen.
I got up, leaving my brother to his valet, and crossed to the window. I crouched at the gap and looked at the broken edge of the frame.
The molding looked rotted. The wood where the casement had been fixed to the frame was dark and soft and crumbling, gone punky with dampness, so that the heavy old window had simply pulled itself loose under its own weight and fallen.
Or so it was made to look.
I wasn't a carpenter, but I had eyes, and the rot didn't fit the rest of the window assembly, which seemed intact.
It was also too even, too contained, a neat band of decay exactly where the fixings sat and nowhere else, while the rest of the frame still seemed perfectly sound.
Dampness didn't cause rot in a neat, linear fashion.
The glass had come out clean of its bed, as though the putty that should have held it had been worked loose first. Someone had spent quiet hours on this window.
Someone had known about the assessment and had made certain that Arlen didn't pass it by reproducing the circumstances that had put him in the wheeled chair and robbed him of his confidence.