Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
When Henry was very young, his parents had worked in one of the city’s textile mills, which produced fabrics that were sent by ship all over the world and provided much of the kingdom’s wealth.
To be precise, the fabrics provided wealth for the noble families that owned the mills and, in taxes, for the royal family as well.
The people who actually toiled away in the mills—such as Henry’s mother, father, and older brother—earned only a few coins per week, barely enough for a few cramped rooms, secondhand clothes, and a bit of food on the table.
They labored long hours for those few coins, with only a half day off per week.
Henry was often told by his parents that he was fortunate: they earned just enough that, unlike his brother, Henry wasn’t put to work when he was very young. And he was lucky, he supposed. He’d seen the way his brother dragged himself home in the evenings looking like a worn old man.
At first he’d been cared for during the day by his grandmother, who’d also worked in the mills until her body was so broken that she could barely walk.
Lungs fouled by years of fabric dust meant she coughed frequently and sometimes struggled to breathe.
She died when he was six. After that, he was on his own for most of the day, either huddled up inside their home or wandering the streets with a small pack of similarly situated children.
He wasn’t miserable because he’d never known anything different.
Then a fire had raged through the mill, taking the lives of over a hundred people, including his parents and brother.
Henry was sent to a poorhouse, recently opened amid much fanfare about the king’s generosity.
Like the other children, he was given work to do—mostly building small pieces of furniture.
He would undoubtedly have spent the rest of his life in a factory, or perhaps he would have become a soldier.
But one morning a very well-dressed stranger had appeared, accompanied by the orphanage director, and Henry and a few other boys had been lined up in front of them.
The stranger peered at them as if they were chickens for sale in the market, and he’d asked them a few questions.
Then he’d pointed at Henry and said, “That one will do.”
In all the years since then, Henry had spent nearly all of his time within the palace or its spacious grounds. Excursions into the city had been rare and usually heavily chaperoned. He’d stopped minding that long ago, content to be living in comfort with his prince.
And now here he was once again, striding through his birth city as if he were a traveler from afar.
Nothing looked as he remembered. The streets were narrower and more crowded, the people grimier.
There was a cacophony of shouts and wagon wheels and pounding, and odors of food, of unwashed bodies, of animal and human waste.
It was all very strange and might even have been overwhelming, but the iron bands around Henry’s heart caused him to feel numb.
Nothing mattered. Nothing that he saw or heard or smelled or felt.
All he was left with was his sense of loyalty to Stefano, a knowledge that Stefano was important to him, and a distant longing for what he’d lost.
The neighborhood he sought was some distance from the inn, well within the old city wall and not far from the docks.
It had cobbled streets flanked by three- and four-story buildings, most of which had spalling plaster and rickety-looking upper balconies festooned with drying laundry.
On the ground floors were small establishments where one could purchase a cheap meal, jewelers of middling quality, a few pawn shops and barely respectable pubs.
Henry visited several jewelers and pawn shops, offering to sell only a single item at each one.
His story was that he’d inherited from a deceased distant relative who’d married into the aristocracy.
It was doubtful whether any of the shop owners believed the tale, and they offered far less than the objects were worth, but he’d expected that.
He was able to collect sufficient funds to get them to Fraysia and keep them in modest comfort for a time—not that Stefano required much in his present form.
He did require some things, however. Henry remembered that Stefano used to occasionally capture a frog from the pond, putting it in the same cage in which he was currently imprisoned, in fact.
Stefano would bring his captive indoors and spend the day observing it closely, often creating sketches and even small paintings along with his copious notes.
He made sure to keep the creature somewhere warm, and he’d provided a damp cloth to keep its skin from drying out.
Stefano had also fed it little bits of raw meat.
He’d set the meat atop a small stick and wave it around until the frog gobbled it up, a process that seemed to entertain and delight him.
By the time he returned his frog to the pond—usually the same day he’d caught it—the pampered little beast had seemed almost reluctant to return to the relative harshness of nature.
With all of this in mind, Henry stopped by a butcher’s shop on the way back to the inn and bought the smallest amount possible of some very expensive beef. The butcher raised his bushy gray eyebrows at the odd purchase but didn’t ask about it.
As Henry climbed the stairs to their room at the inn, he imagined opening the door and discovering that Stefano was gone.
The idea made Henry’s heart ache as it strained at the iron bands confining it.
When he reached the room and spied Stefano in the dish, exactly where Henry had left him, he heaved a small sigh of relief.
Stefano watched with his large, unblinking eyes while Henry set down the bag and removed his cloak. In his human form, Stefano’s face had always been very expressive—a problem when he was in the presence of his family but a pleasure to Henry. Now, of course, his expression was unreadable.
“Are you all right?” Henry asked. “Aside from the obvious, I mean?”
It was odd to see a frog nod in response to a question, although Henry was glad that Stefano wasn’t in distress.
“I sold a few of your things, so we’ve plenty of money for our journey.”
Stefano gave two small croaks that sounded approving. Perhaps that meant he’d accepted what they must do.
“Are you hungry, Stef?”
Stefano’s tongue darted out, long and pink, the movement almost too fast to see.
With a small splash he hopped out of the dish and landed on the floor with a somewhat distressing smack.
It must not have hurt, however, because he immediately hopped across the floor and then bounded onto the high windowsill.
He turned to stare at Henry. “Bugs,” he said.
At least, that was what Henry guessed he’d said.
It was a miracle that Stefano could speak at all in this form; perhaps that had been another of Louis’s small mercies.
“I’ve something better than bugs, I think.” Henry walked to the window and unwrapped the small paper packet, setting it on the sill to display the tiny cubes of meat. “I believe that the butcher assumed this was for my cherished cat.”
Somehow managing to look offended, Stefano again shot out his tongue, this time grabbing a chunk of food and drawing it back into his mouth, where he swallowed it whole. “Good,” he said.
Satisfied that his prince wouldn’t starve, Henry emptied the water dish into the washbasin and refilled it from a clay pitcher painted with yellow flowers.
He realized then that he was hungry as well.
It was early evening and he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. “I’m getting my own dinner now,” he announced. “I’ll be just downstairs.”
Although it had been a warm day and had not yet cooled much, the fire was lit in the public room, giving the space a cozy atmosphere.
About twenty people sat at polished wooden tables, most of them talking cheerfully and all of them relatively well-dressed.
Some appeared to be locals—lawyers, successful merchants, and the like.
The rest were probably from elsewhere and currently visiting the kingdom.
Not wealthy enough to own a second house of their own in the city, but certainly not poor.
Henry sat in a quiet corner, aware of the scents of ale, bread, and roasting meat. The inn’s proprietor smiled when she brought him a tankard. She was a stout, gray-haired woman with warm brown eyes. “Is your room comfortable, sir?”
“Very much so. Thank you.”
Her smile widened. “Excellent. I’ll bring you a meal. Large portions? Young men like you always have healthy appetites.” She winked and then sailed away.
It didn’t take long for her to return with a plate nearly overflowing with meat, stewed root vegetables, corn cakes, and chunks of bread. She refilled his ale.
It all tasted… fine. It seemed of good quality and he guessed it was nicely seasoned. Ordinarily, he would have enjoyed it very much, especially on an empty stomach. Now, though, he couldn’t pull much enjoyment from it. The iron bands had dulled that too.
Henry ate slowly, listening in on nearby conversations.
If anyone was discussing the prince’s disappearance, Henry couldn’t hear it.
The king was probably aware he was gone but hadn’t yet announced it publicly.
It would be an embarrassment for him. Stefano had rarely spent time in the public eye, so it would be a long time before anyone outside the palace took notice of his absence.
Of course, that didn’t mean that guards weren’t quietly scouring the city and the countryside, searching for him.
The idea of Henry himself being caught, harshly punished, and likely even executed didn’t panic him. Not that he wanted those things to happen, but even his fears were muted now. At any rate, if the guards were close behind him, there was nothing he could do about it.
No, he realized. There was something he could do: he could run.
Without Stefano to care for, Henry could disappear into the city’s meanest streets, hiding among the desperately impoverished until the search was called off.
Or he could go to the docks and book passage on the next ship sailing out of the kingdom.
Or he could run away from the city, into the dark embrace of the nighttime countryside.
But he could do none of those things if he wanted to keep Stefano safe.
Henry looked around the busy room, at the locals and visitors enjoying their dinners and their companions.
Surely each of them had a share of burdens and worries, like an invisible sack of stones tied to their shoulders.
But they looked happy now. Not a one of them had spent years being beaten for someone else’s weaknesses, and none of them were facing the impossible situation that Henry was.
Except… none of them was Prince Stefano’s beloved. And none had the honor of being responsible for Stefano’s well-being and salvation. Henry would not give up either of those things, even if it meant his own destruction. Iron bands be damned, he could still feel something.
He finished his meal quickly, thanked the landlady as he paid her, and made his way back upstairs. He found Stefano perched on the wide windowsill, gazing through the wavy glass at the street below. “Were you planning to leave?”
Stefano croaked softly, a mournful sound. “Where?”
Henry walked over to stand beside him. There was little to see outside, apart from a flickering candle in the window across the street and a few pedestrians passing by, their voices muffled by the window.
“Sorry,” Stefano said after a while.
“I’ve never wanted your apologies before and don’t want them now. You haven’t wronged me.”
After another long silence, Stefano shifted so he was facing Henry instead of the glass. “Leave me.” The words clearly took great effort.
“I will not.”
“I disgust.” Somehow Stefano made the word disgust quite clear.
Henry lifted a lantern from the bedside table and set it on the sill next to Stefano.
His prince had always been a little vain.
Only a little, though, and it had always amused Henry.
Stefano would spend hours caught up in his studies, then suddenly realize that his hair had become tangled with bits of leaves and dustings of spider webs, or disarrayed due to running his fingers through it.
He would comb it carefully and straighten out his clothing, sneaking glances at Henry to see whether he’d noticed.
It was endearing. And anyway, Henry found him beautiful even when he was a mess.
Now, however… he was a frog. With pebbly damp skin and protuberant eyes, with a mouth that stretched over halfway around his head, a squat body, and widespread fingers.
There was still beauty to him, however, even if it was a very different kind.
His belly was patterned in yellow as bright as spring flowers.
His gray eyes were speckled with tiny gold flecks and resembled rare jewels.
He had a clever tongue and could leap to impossible heights.
As a thing of nature, as a frog, he was quite handsome.
“You don’t disgust me,” said Henry. Then he dampened a small silk cloth he’d purchased that day, set it on one of the two pillows, and deposited an unresisting Stefano. “Rest well, Your Highness.”
Stefano gazed at him, unblinking, before sighing and closing his eyes.