3. THE FUNERAL CROWN
Chapter three
THE FUNERAL CROWN
LEON
Morning comes the color of pewter, and they dress me for grief.
A valet I have met exactly twice fastens me into black, brushing lint from shoulders that do not need brushing, and I let him because it gives his hands something to do and spares us both the conversation.
In the mirror a stranger looks back. The cameras outside would know him.
The arenas full of screaming people who learned my voice before they learned my face would know him.
The boy on the deck of a yacht twenty years ago would not, and neither, some days, do I.
The chapel is older than the country, all cold marble and candle smoke, and it is full.
That is the first thing I understand walking in, that a funeral at this level is not a gathering of mourners but a gathering of interests.
Heads turn. The grief in the room is real for maybe a fifth of them.
For the rest I am the show, the returned heir, the question they came to see answered in person.
My mother, Queen Emelia, lies in state at the front beneath a banner of the house I am told is mine.
I have spent my whole life with her, and now I will spend the rest of it unable to forget this version, still and waxen and crowned.
I make myself look. It feels like the only honest thing I can offer her, to not look away.
Across the aisle, in the section reserved for foreign houses and visiting power, a man sits with the stillness of stone.
Broad through the shoulders, gray threading dark hair, a face built to give nothing away.
I do not need anyone to tell me who he is.
My wolf knows before my mind does, rising in my chest with a low complicated growl that is part challenge and part something older and more wounded.
Alpha Keith. My father. My blood.
He looks at me the way you look at a debt you cannot pay.
We have met every summer since the king's people found the records that named me his lost son, and in all those summers we have never once said the obvious thing out loud.
There is sadness in his eyes today and some of it is for me and some of it is his own, because Emelia raised the boy he lost to the sea, and now he has lost her too before he ever got to thank her for it.
I cannot cross the aisle and say so. Not here.
Here I am the Crown Prince, and the Crown Prince has one father in this chapel, and it is not the man sitting six feet away with his hands on his knees.
Beside him sits a young woman in severe couture black, beautiful in the sharp engineered way that reads on a screen.
She catches me looking and does not look away.
Instead she gives me a small private nod, almost a dare.
Candice. My twin, raised in New York in the house I should have grown up in, an actress famous enough that the press treats our reunion like a plot twist. We spoke on the phone regularly.
The wolf in me strains toward her too, a cleaner pull than the one I feel for my dad.
I am still cataloging my own family, when King Ferb rises to speak and the room goes silent the way a forest goes silent before weather.
He is old, my adopted dad, and the last months have carved him thinner, but power still moves with him to the podium.
He speaks of the queen first, and the grief in his voice is the realest thing in the chapel.
Then, with the timing of a man who has spent sixty years reading rooms, he turns from the dead to the living, and he turns to me.
"My great-nephew by blood," Ferb says, his voice carrying without effort into every cold corner.
"My son by choice. The sea took him from one house and gave him to mine, and I have raised him as the heir of this realm.
I name him so again, here, before you all, before God and the dead.
Leon stands first in the succession of this kingdom.
Let no one in this room mistake my meaning. "
The silence after holds for one heartbeat.
Then it fractures into a thousand small sounds, the rustle of bodies, the hiss of whispers, the unmistakable texture of a room recalculating.
I feel the weight of it land on me physically, the way the title landed in the garden.
Heir. Said in front of every faction at once, like a flag planted in contested ground.
I do not move. I have performed in front of a hundred thousand people and felt steadier than I do now.
When the service finally releases us into the long gallery where the court mingles and circles and feeds, I do the only thing my body actually wants. I look for her.
And I find her almost at once, because the pull does the finding for me, drawing my eyes to an elegant figure near the tall windows like a compass swinging north.
The woman from the garden. In daylight she is no less unsettling, red hair swept up, a gown of deep slate gray, that same trained stillness.
She is in conversation with two diplomats and she is winning it, I can tell by the careful way they lean toward her, but the moment my gaze lands she feels it.
Her eyes lift to mine across the whole crowded gallery.
The world narrows to a corridor with only her at the end of it.
Sound dims. Whatever the man beside me is saying turns to noise.
My pulse picks up her rhythm, or she picks up mine, I cannot tell which, only that there are two heartbeats trying to become one across forty feet of marble and grieving nobility.
I have lost the thread of three separate conversations.
I do not care. I would walk the length of the gallery and to hell with the cameras and the court and the corpse of a queen still warm in the next room.
She breaks it first. A small, deliberate turn of her shoulder, the cut of a blade severing a line, and the corridor collapses and the noise rushes back in and I am standing in a crowded room with my heart going like a drum and no idea what anyone has just said to me.
"Quite a homecoming," a smooth voice says at my elbow.
I turn. The man is handsome in the way a well-made knife is handsome, dressed beautifully, smiling beautifully, and my wolf takes an instant and total dislike to him. Wolf, like me. I can smell it under the cologne, and I can smell something else under that, ambition gone slightly rancid.
"I don't believe we've met," I say.
"Lord Varrik." He inclines his head, all courtesy, no warmth.
"Kin to His Majesty, as it happens. A cousin's son, if you want the exact rung.
Far enough from the throne that no one worries about me, close enough that I have watched it my whole life.
We're practically family, you and I." The pause he leaves is surgical.
"Some of us simply stayed. Learned the language.
Buried our dead in the right cemeteries.
Whereas you arrive like a story, and we're all expected to clap. "
"My dad named me heir an hour ago," I say evenly. "If you have a complaint, the line forms behind him."
Something flickers in his eyes, pleased, as if I have confirmed a wager. He follows my gaze, which has betrayed me by drifting back toward the windows, toward her, and his smile sharpens into something with teeth.
"Ah," Varrik murmurs. "The lady has caught your eye.
I'd be careful there, Your Highness." He says the title the way she did, but where hers was a wall, his is a hook.
"You don't know what she is. Dragon blood draws hunters, and a man standing too close to her draws them with her.
New crowns are fragile things. They break so easily when someone knows where to push. "
He bows, perfectly, and is gone into the crowd before I can answer, leaving the threat hanging in the air like cologne.
I look back at the windows. She is watching me again, and this time there is something in her face that was not there before.
Fear. Not for herself. For me. As if she heard every word Varrik said from across the room, and as if she already knew it, and as if knowing it is the oldest exhaustion in the world.
Whatever she is, whatever danger comes with her, my wolf has already made its decision, and it is not the kind that can be unmade. I just do not yet know the price.
Dearest Readers,
A funeral is not a gathering of mourners at that level. It is a gathering of interests, and Leon walked into that chapel and understood it in one breath, and I want you to sit with how lonely that is.
A father across the aisle who has never reached for him. A twin he has only ever spoken to on the telephone. A dead mother he cannot remember. And an old king who stands up and plants a flag in contested ground with his name on it.
And then Varrik, smiling, with his little knife of a sentence. Dragon blood attracts hunters.
Tell me, my darlings. Was that a warning?
Or was it a threat wearing a warning's coat?
Turn the page.
Your author.