Chapter Three
Three
Being in the library was almost like being a prince again, when life was simpler, responsibilities slightly easier to avoid.
Books didn’t demand that Gabriel come up with answers to impossible questions; they didn’t ask him to attend fittings for ceremonial robes that made him look like a sad tent topped with a miserable head, or urge him to attend constant feasts and tourneys hosted by various lords of the land he was supposed to be ingratiating to his cause.
His father had been charming in his own, gruff way, with the air of a retired warrior you wanted to drink ale with while he told you outrageous war stories.
Gabriel had inherited none of this social ease.
After one conversation with a northern noble he’d thought had gone quite well, he’d been informed by his new household steward, Lady Oakley, that he’d actually talked at said noble for over an hour about the formation of rivers and estuaries.
Oakley had been kind about it, but it had been made very clear that Gabriel could not tick “successful social interaction with a vassal” from his to-do list.
The list was real, although it was actually more of an in-depth strategy, devised by his steward immediately after her appointment. Gabriel hated every part of it. Unfortunately, it made a lot of sense. That only made him hate it all the more.
She’d presented it to him last November, with his father only two months buried and the nobles in uproar, when Gabriel’s stress levels had been rising by the day.
“The thing is,” she’d said, sitting down opposite him and putting a lot of large, ominous scrolls on his desk, “you ascended to the throne in the wake of a violent uprising, and one of your first acts as king was to reveal the long-buried romantic relationship between King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, and decree that your people were free to follow their example. And that’s …
quite a lot. Most people might have started with a tax cut. ”
“I did that too,” Gabriel had said, so exhausted that it had taken a lot of effort just to get those words out. He was still sure then that he’d done the right thing—what was less certain was whether he’d be able to survive it.
“Well, yes, but it was somewhat … overshadowed. People knew who your father was—a warrior king who defended his claim and swung the sword himself. Who are you going to be?”
“Um,” Gabriel said, trying to pick up what he thought was a cup of delicious, life-giving tea and realizing too late that it was an inkwell.
“The king who … uh … brought education to ordinary people? The king who stabilized the market with a focus on strengthening relationships through international trade?”
“As scintillating as that sounds to me,” Oakley said gently, “we cannot wait months and years for these plans to come to fruition. People need to know who you are now. And that is why I have devised this.” She unfurled a horrifyingly long piece of parchment, covered in all manner of words and sentences that were as unappealing to Gabriel as a bunch of spiders holding hands. “My public relations strategy.”
Oakley was very nice. She was around five-and-forty years old, a widow with no interest in remarriage, and had campaigned to Gabriel herself for the job, pitching a new role that not only involved managing the royal household, but the public perception of the household too.
He’d been so impressed (and frightened) that he’d said yes immediately, much to the dismay of half of his council.
Oakley had a deep olive complexion, wore her mostly gray hair in a single, no-nonsense braid, cycled through exactly seven plain dresses each week, and gave Gabriel a stomachache almost every time he saw her.
Her public relations strategy dictated that he ought to be the common-sense king of the people; if he wished to trick them into actually wanting to be educated, he had to seem warm and reasonable, measured, even-tempered, demonstrating a firm but kind hand when necessary and a genuine connection to his subjects.
“Shall I tell you what your average fellow down at the inn would think of your education proposals?”
“Maybe not?” Gabriel tried, but she ignored him.
“Some jumped-up toff I’ve never met up at the castle thinks I’m stupid, my kids are stupid, and that I should pull them from laboring and cut our family’s income in half to send them off to sit in some stuffy room and be taught advanced numbers, reading, and writing, skills they’ll never need to use in real life. ”
“Nobody will think that.”
“That was actually almost word for word what one man thought.” Oakley pulled out another thrice-damned bastard roll of parchment.
“John Smith, from Essex. The word he used was not ‘toff.’ It was more anatomical in spirit. We’ve been out on the streets this week, running polls.
Would you like to hear the rest of the responses? ”
Gabriel would not. He’d taken her point though, and agreed to review the strategy.
He’d then steadfastly ignored it for many months, which meant that Oakley liked to ambush him with it whenever he dared let his guard down.
For example: right now, when he was peacefully perusing a stack of soothingly dusty books that smelled a little like stale bread.
One moment he was reading about the history and politics of the Silk Road, and the next she was standing right in front of him, a jack-in-the-box from the depths of hell.
“Good afternoon,” she said, causing Gabriel to spill lemon cordial all over his lap. She curtsied, then sat down opposite him. “I wanted to discuss these Arthurian miracles with you.”
“Are we calling them miracles?” This wording had been officially nixed, but Gabriel knew that once it started slipping into everyday speech, the war was lost.
“That’s right, Your Majesty, we’re not,” Oakley agreed. “But I think we ought to get ahead of them.”
Gabriel supposed he owed her his attention. Things hadn’t been going well. The social engagements he had attempted had been disasters; the people of England remained entirely uncharmed, half of them still in a state of outrage over his heathenish ways.
This talk of miracles, however, was nonsense.
There had been claims of an odd beast spotted by a few farmers—always in the distance, its exact physical features confused and blurred—and that some sheep had died afterward, munched by a mysterious maw.
Whispers that it was the work of the Beast Glatisant—the Questing Beast—had grown louder in volume until it was almost impossible to get through a feast without hearing snatches of speculation.
Gabriel refused to entertain it. It was wolves. It was always wolves.
Now someone had apparently spotted the Lady of the Lake, rising ethereally from the waters. As soon as one person insisted they’d seen her, twenty more spawned from nowhere. That was the real magic trick; how instantly eyewitnesses appeared, swearing on their souls that they’d not been mistaken.
“This will all blow over eventually,” Gabriel said, and Oakley sighed.
“If you don’t want this country to be overtaken by rumor and speculation, we need to start telling people the story we want them to hear.”
“Actions speak louder than words.”
“My thoughts exactly, sire,” Oakley said triumphantly. Gabriel had somehow managed to corner himself. “Let me schedule some more appearances for you, farther afield. Attend some feasts, perhaps the rest of the tourney circuit. Get your face out there. Try again.”
Gabriel imagined setting out in the back of a carriage or on horseback, traveling far from everything that brought him meager slivers of joy. No library, no comfortable seat by his own fire. No perfect view of anybody else’s morning walks. “My face will be staying here, as will the rest of me.”
“If you’d just—”
“I’m grateful for everything you’re doing, honestly, Lady Oakley.
And I wish I could be the king who could do …
any of this. A public speaker, a true diplomat, an ambassador.
But I’m not. I only make things worse. Send somebody in my place.
Lord Das, perhaps, or … you could go, although I don’t know how we’d get along without you. ”
Lady Oakley considered him for a long time, her index finger tapping a gentle rhythm on the arm of her chair.
“Leave it with me,” she said ominously, and then she got to her feet, curtsied, and swept away.
Untold horrors awaited when she got her hands on a fresh piece of parchment and some ink.
Gabriel couldn’t focus on silks and spices anymore.
He exited the library, thinking of his bed, and a precious half hour spent with the curtains drawn and the blanket pulled up over his head until someone came to fetch him for his afternoon meetings—and found that he had cut directly across Arthur Delacey’s path.
He was wearing an inky blue doublet Gabriel didn’t recognize, and his skin was sun-soaked bronze after hazy summer days spent cavorting with Gabriel’s sister and Sidney Fitzgilbert. His gently curling hair shone like polished ebony, a glint of something warm in there where it caught the light.
Gabriel felt his traitorous heart leap. Arthur looked good. Really good. Hell.
“Sorry,” Gabriel said, his classic opener, something that Gwen and Lord Das were trying to train him out of.
Arthur’s mouth quirked in the most painfully gentle smile. His dark brows could be wicked when he wanted them to be, but there was something soft about them right now that made Gabriel want to run for cover.
“For what? Walking the halls of your own castle? How could you, you mad fiend.” Gabriel couldn’t do anything but look pained in response. “Oh, sorry—I didn’t bow. You sort of ambushed me.”
“Don’t,” Gabriel said quickly. “Please.”
“I don’t see what the point of becoming an all-powerful, ordained-by-God dictator is if you’re not going to make people do a little clowning whenever they bump into you.”
“Mmm.”
It was Arthur’s turn to grimace, although he kept it subtle and polite, two words that Gabriel would never have used to describe him before. He fiddled briefly with the sleeve of his jacket, glanced out of the window into the courtyard, and then cleared his throat.
“You know, you broke my heart,” Arthur said, levity ruined by the strain in his tone and the tight lines of his angular jaw, “and yet I’m the one who’s funny and charming whenever our paths cross, while you just stand there like a bale of hay.
It’s not very sportsmanlike, is it? I should be the one sulking, and you should be offering me pity crumbs. ”
He was right. Of course he was. And Gabriel did feel horrible about it—but he’d done it for Arthur’s own good. Gabriel was the one still stuck in the mire; Arthur was happy and free. That was what you did when you loved someone but you were too broken to deserve them. You let them go.
The trouble was, Gabriel had no idea how to be smiley and amicable with somebody who’d once kissed him and changed everything, now that there was a vast pit of unsaid things between them. He offered Arthur a weary smile and a shrug. “You know I’m not good with … people.”
“I’m not ‘people,’” Arthur whipped back, sharper than usual, and Gabriel flinched. Arthur seemed to notice; he sighed, like he was frustrated with himself. “I mean … Gwen frequently says I’m actually some sort of changeling goblin.”
“You know, you don’t have to make jokes,” Gabriel offered, but this was wrong too, because it felt as if Arthur moved away from him even though he hadn’t taken a step.
“Actually, if I stop, I’ll die.”
He was smiling again. To a stranger it would look entirely plausible, but Gabriel knew it was all for show.
The pale scar that curved out from under the hair at his temple caught the light as his gaze dropped to the floor—one of many reminders their bodies held in common of all that had happened last year.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
He gestured at the hallway past Gabriel, and then he did bow; it only lasted two seconds, but Gabriel hated each of them with violent fervor.
He was relieved when Arthur walked away.
The silence after he was gone was unendurable.