Chapter Two The Prince of Glass
CHAPTER TWO
The Prince of Glass
Lucen had been ordered to smile for the draft broadcast.
He had compromised by showing his teeth.
"You changed the address," Chancellor Maelor Senn said after the cameras went dark.
Lucen unfastened the high collar of his white uniform. "Observant."
They stood in the Broadcast Gallery, a narrow chamber inside the Crown Palace where every wall was made of mirrored glass.
Behind those mirrors, technicians packed away light rigs and voice amplifiers.
The entire room had been built so the speaker could see himself from every angle while the kingdom watched only one.
Lucen had always thought that summarized monarchy better than any history book.
Senn remained near the camera dais. He was sixty, silver-haired, and so precisely dressed that Lucen suspected his tailor feared execution.
The Chancellor of the Crown Council had served Lucen's grandfather, then his father, and had somehow accumulated more power with each transition while appearing to possess none.
"The approved text described the Trials as a sacred civic tradition," Senn said.
"They are neither sacred nor civic."
"Tradition, then."
"Unfortunately."
Senn's gaze cooled. "Your father expects cooperation this year."
"My father expects grandchildren. The Council expects theater. The public expects someone pretty to hate. We all carry burdens."
The mirrored door opened.
King Tavian Ardyn entered without escort.
Lucen straightened by reflex and hated himself for it.
His father had been handsome once. Official portraits still insisted on the fact. In person, illness had narrowed him. The bones of his face pressed sharply against skin, and the cane in his right hand struck the marble with an irregular rhythm. He was only fifty-eight.
Power aged badly when it could not admit weakness.
"Leave us," Tavian told Senn.
The Chancellor bowed and went.
Lucen waited until the door closed.
"You should be resting."
"You should be obedient. We disappoint each other."
Tavian crossed to the window overlooking Crown Square. Below, workers were raising banners for the arrivals. Every banner carried Lucen's profile and the words ONE CROWN. ONE FUTURE.
He would have preferred a threat in smaller letters.
"You told drafted women the Trials may not be fair," Tavian said.
"They may have noticed on their own."
"You embarrass the institution you will inherit."
Lucen joined him at the window. "Perhaps it embarrasses easily."
His father's hand tightened on the cane.
There had been a time when Tavian would have shouted. Since the diagnosis, anger came quieter. More dangerous for having to travel through pain first.
"Forty-seven years," the king said. "Forty-seven seasons without a succession war. Do you understand what existed before the Marriage Continuity Act?"
"Three royal cousins poisoning one another and half the northern army choosing sides. I attended lessons."
"And after?"
"A televised marriage competition that lets the Council pretend coercion is unity."
"After, the realm stopped bleeding over whom the heir married. Every province received a theoretical path into the royal line."
"Theoretical being generous."
The winners came disproportionately from families with tutors, court experience, and the sort of teeth money maintained. The Council insisted the selection algorithm was blind to class. Lucen had once asked to see it.
The request had been denied on national-security grounds.
He had been nineteen and still capable of surprise.
Tavian turned from the window. "You will marry the winner."
"That remains to be seen."
"No. It does not."
Lucen met his gaze.
This was the center of it. Not romance. Not heirs. Not even public tradition.
The Compact of Seven Rivers, signed after the civil war, gave the Crown Council emergency authority if the heir failed to contract a politically valid marriage before his twenty-seventh birthday. Lucen turned twenty-seven in four months.
If he remained unmarried, Senn and the Council would govern in his name until a union was approved.
If Tavian died before then, the temporary authority could become permanent with remarkable ease.
Lucen had spent the last two years trying to find a legal path around the Compact.
So far he had found footnotes, dead ends, and one clause everyone at court preferred not to discuss.
"I know the law," Lucen said.
"Then stop acting surprised by it."
"Knowing where a cage was forged doesn't make it less a cage."
Tavian's expression shifted.
For a moment, he looked not like a king but like a tired father who knew his son had inherited the worst parts of him.
"Your mother understood duty."
Lucen looked away.
"Don't use her for this."
"She understood what the Crown costs."
"She died paying it."
Silence struck harder than shouting.
Queen Elowen had collapsed during a provincial tour twelve years earlier. The official cause was a heart defect. The unofficial truth was that she had ignored symptoms for months because postponing the tour would have signaled instability.
Duty had been the word everyone used at her funeral.
Lucen had hated it ever since.
Tavian rubbed one hand over his mouth. "I am not asking you to love the system."
"Convenient."
"I am asking you not to break the country proving you are morally cleaner than the people who built it."
That landed.
Lucen's worst fear was not that he would fail to change Aldermere.
It was that changing it badly would hurt people who had never been invited into the argument. Tavian moved toward the door.
"The first candidates arrive tonight. You will greet them tomorrow. Smile when required. Speak from the approved script. Do not undermine the judges. And Lucen—"
He paused.
"Do not choose a favorite."
"I have no intention of choosing anyone."
"The cameras choose for you."
Then he was gone.
Lucen remained alone with a dozen reflections.
He took a folded paper from the inside of his coat.
The palace archivist who had given it to him had resigned the next morning and moved to a coastal town under a new name. Lucen did not blame him.
The page was a copy from the original Compact, written in old legal shorthand. Article Twelve, subsection four.
If the designated winner of a Crown Selection publicly refuses royal union after final ratification, and the heir formally declines to compel the contract, the Marriage Continuity Act enters suspension pending national charter review. Suspension. Not repeal.
But suspension would dissolve the Council's emergency marriage authority. It would force the provincial assembly to reopen the Compact for the first time in nearly half a century. There were problems.
First, the winner would be immediately guilty of civic breach under modern Trial regulations and subject to Wastes exile unless those regulations fell with the Act.
Second, the heir had to decline compulsion publicly, which Tavian would treat as abdication even if the law did not.
Third, no candidate could know Lucen intended to use the clause before final ratification. If collusion were proven, the refusal would be invalid.
He needed a winner willing to say no.
He also needed not to destroy her life by giving her the chance.
So Lucen had chosen the only strategy that let him sleep at all.
He would make the Trials impossible to complete.
Not obviously. Not dramatically. He had learned from two years of court opposition that visible rebellion merely gave Senn something to prosecute.
He would be difficult. Unappealing. Politically inconvenient.
He would challenge the judges, expose contradictions, refuse to reward polish over judgment.
If the Council could not produce a convincing winner, public support might fracture enough to delay ratification beyond his birthday.
A bad plan. But it was his. The door opened again.
This time it was Captain Ren Kess, commander of Lucen's personal guard and the only man in the palace permitted to enter without knocking because he had once saved Lucen from a falling balcony and had considered that sufficient introduction forever.
Ren held a stack of candidate files.
"First train roster."
Lucen groaned. "Burn them."
"Tempting. They would send copies."
Ren dropped the files on the table.
"Anything interesting?"
"Depends how you define interesting. Noble daughters. Merchant heirs. Two teachers. A machinist. One woman from the southern vineyards who has been arrested three times for illegal union organizing."
Lucen looked up. "She sounds promising."
"For national stability?"
"For dinner."
Ren picked up one file from the middle.
"And a waterworks apprentice from Greybridge who argued with the drafting officer because leaving her shift would reduce ward pressure."
Lucen took the file before deciding not to.
ANNA—no. The typing was wrong. A handwritten correction sat above it.
ANYA SERRIN. AGE 22. MUNICIPAL WATERWORKS APPRENTICE, GRADE II.
Household: mother, Mira. Sister, Nemi. Father: Davin Serrin, relocated infrastructure labor, status unconfirmed. Relocated. Lucen's jaw tightened.
There were words the Crown used when it wanted a person to disappear grammatically before doing so physically.
"Why is this in the candidate file?" he asked.
"Family compliance assessment."
"That was rhetorical."
Ren leaned against the table. "You told them today you couldn't promise fairness."
"Yes."
"Then perhaps stop being surprised when the paperwork agrees with you."
Lucen closed the file.
"I wasn't surprised."
"Liar."
The evening bells began over Crown Square.
Far beyond the palace, silver trains were moving toward the capital from every direction, carrying forty-eight women who had been told the kingdom required one of them to marry him.
Lucen looked at Anya Serrin's file again. A waterworks apprentice. A missing father.
A family with everything to lose.
Exactly the kind of person he should leave alone.
He put her file at the bottom of the stack.
It would have helped if fate had respected filing order.
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