Prince and the Throne (Fedosian Wars #2)

20. Break You

twenty

Break You

Charger eyed Sofia suspiciously, pushing about the hay she put down for him. The ill tempered creature acted as though she would poison him, and she rolled her eyes at the black horse. Aleksei had obtained a few horses from the Chartorisky stables for the low, low price of free, and the stables at the Red Manor were half occupied. He had gotten mares and was looking for a suitable stallion. He’d also bought Sofia the gelding she liked. He was white and reminded her of Lev’s Rhytsar, though Aleksei said they were nothing alike. She had named her horse Orchid. It didn’t matter he wasn’t fearsome. She wasn’t going to war, not charging on a horse anyway.

After feeding and watering the horses, she closed the stalls and strolled down the long aisle carrying a bucket of bristles and singing. They meant to get a few dogs soon, but for the time being, she locked the doors. The trees sheltered wolves and the Red Manor was surrounded on three sides by silver birches, green in the summer, beautiful auburn in the fall, but quite naked like bony hands in the winter.

Aleksei’s friend Countess Katya had invited them to a dinner party tomorrow, had sent an official invitation with Sofia’s and Aleksei’s name, and she meant to drag Aleksei to it. The countess was being kind initiating them back into high society because though Aleksei got invited to plenty of dinners, he couldn’t go with Sofia on account of her being a murderer. Everyone knew she killed her husband and had taken a lover twelve years her junior, and at court, that was more scandalous than her being a Guard and living with a Shield.

They’d buried much of their silver in the forest like simple folks, but she kept a little jewelry boxful to pay out the wages of the servants she employed. She was the governess of the Red Manor now, except for the stables… Any groom she found, Aleksei didn’t like, so she left that to him, and he was still yet to find stable hands. The trouble was Charger would either bite or kick the handlers and Aleksei wouldn’t let them whip the horse.

The servants’ quarters had quieted down for the night as Sofia left her snow boots by the door and wore slippers so as not to track mud through the beautifully polished wooden floor. The gold icons of the saints greeted her in the foyer. The sacred relics of her family, which she had to squabble with Luminary Matvey to obtain, watched over the manor, and she hadn’t had trouble with the stranger since the craft town inn, nearly two months ago. The Church of All Saints in Krakova had more gold than plain surface but the old parson fought Sofia tooth and nail over the few things she’d wanted.

Perhaps Matvey meant well wanting to keep the relics in the church, she’d thought at first, but he turned out to be a deviant, a charlatan, because she’d heard from the courtiers he was selling the archmage’s items in private auctions and demanded her uncle’s things, but the luminary sent her forgeries.

The archmage’s gold cuffs, rings, chains, everything, the old fraudster had switched out with worthless metal just turned yellow with potion, not even that good of a forgery. Sofia had only meant to keep them safe in a wooden trunk but as soon as she picked up the cuffs, she had a feeling they weren’t gold. She asked Aleksei, and he couldn’t tell, so he tried using it for alchemy—forgery. Old bastard! She confronted the luminary at service during Day Solis and made a scene on purpose and now he avoided her like the plague.

She fumed each time she passed by the trunk of junk in her foyer. She’d throw them out but was keeping them as evidence. Not that the archmage would have given her a single coin had he been alive, but these things should belong to Lev.

The relics were gold though. She had them tested by a jeweler because Aleksei wouldn’t touch them, saying, ‘I can’t use the saints for alchemy! What if that angers them?’ And that was the reason the old bastard couldn’t sell them off. No Fedosian would ever dare melt saint icons for alchemy gold.

Sofia strolled through her home, went to the bedchamber, and found Aleksei behind his writing table. He was so used to living in the bedchamber that he hardly used the rest of the manor. Sofia had asked him to translate the skin book to keep him occupied, and he was doing that, with numerous volumes of codices splayed out over his table and on the floor around him. She pecked him on the nape as she passed him.

“In our past lives, Charger and I used to be sworn enemies,” she said, as she shed her wool cloak and equally heavy dress on the bedside chair. “I won, I suppose, because he was reborn a nasty horse, and I the companion of a count.”

A month ago, Niko had come by with a pitiful face, knocking on the window and wanting to know if Aleksei still loved him.

‘I wish you would have listened to me about the Chartorisky,’ Aleksei had said. ‘But you’re still my brother, and I’ll never not love you.’

A prince, even the crown prince, couldn’t grant the title of duke, because in Fedosia a duke would outrank a prince, but Niko would be ennobling Aleksei count during the winter solstice when he’d be granting lands and titles to a few commanders and nobles in his capacity as the heir apparent.

As soon as Eugene left, taking all the sentinels to Seniya to meet with Fedya Pulyazin, a liar as far as Sofia was concerned because he did not have Lev’s head, Niko stopped being difficult and came around Aleksei again, acting like the child he was, and barraging his brother with silly questions.

‘Do you love Sofia? What if she died? Will you find a different wife, then? What if she left you? Would you still love her? I was introduced to a Vietinghoff lady today. She was very beautiful. More beautiful than Sofia and younger. Do you want to meet her?’

A tang of jealousy over his brother’s love, Sofia thought, but innocent otherwise.

Aleksei looked up from his writing and smiled, the stunning scarlets catching the candlelight. Then he turned sour and moaned, “How does anyone learn this shit? Light alchemy is ludicrously complex.”

“Being a Guard helps, I suppose,” she said. Lev had always claimed it was easy, and it was for him.

“Do you know what I was thinking?” Aleksei set the writing quill down. The logs crackled in the fireplace behind him, and in the bright orange hue he turned into a dark silhouette as he got up.

“You were thinking of selling Charger.” She tried her luck.

He came over as she was by the bed, putting on her nightgown, and stood there looking at her for a moment before reaching out and combing her curly hair back. She’d taken the pins out and now the locks were free.

“I’ll sell him if you want.” His eyes wandered over her body as though she was a mare he was considering purchasing.

“It’s a joke, Aleksei,” she whispered. “What were you thinking?”

“That I love you,” he said. “Also, when the cold months pass, we should go up to the Bone Country and meet Lev. I’ll act as Niko’s envoy, and you’ll be there to protect me.”

It was slipping his mind he killed Pyotr Guard. Sofia couldn’t protect him, but she didn’t mention it and kissed him instead. She had decided to go to Usolya in the spring but not with Aleksei. Ignat or Dominik, and some ministers and advisors who could speak on Niko’s behalf but not Eugene. Hate was a strong word, but she didn’t like him anymore.

Aleksei took a step forward, and she took one back, waltzing toward the large piece of furniture behind them draped in red velvet—the bed, her favorite thing about the room. The trees had been budding green when she first came as a visitor to the Red Manor after the Royal Ball. Soon, spring again, soon the prince would turn sixteen, and it would mark one year they’d loved each other.

“The saints must favor me for I am the most blessed.” He kissed her and her world tipped. It would end up with him on top of her, and she ached for it, badly, desperately.

He didn’t have scars to hide for she’d seen them all, and no longer a sentinel, he didn’t have so many buckles, straps, and belts for carrying weapons. The drawstring cotton trousers went down easy enough.

Back and forth, back and forth, they breathed, as the flames in the fireplace licked slowly at the dry logs, the heat taking hold, then it grew, popping and crackling, becoming all consuming, before it simmered down to embers, giving heat without the brightness…

“What are you doing?” He laughed.

She’d been lying as if she’d died. “Debating whether I should get up and wash or sleep.”

“Sleep.” He pulled the blanket over them, then whispered in her ear, “I fucken love you. I’d die if you ever left me.”

“Where would I go without you?” She took his arm and made a pillow of it. “Don’t go doodling in the red medley. That is the only place I can’t follow you.”

“Mhm.” He buried his face between her shoulder blades.

“Tomorrow we’re going to Countess Katya’s dinner, right?” she asked.

“If you insist.” Sleepy, he dragged his words.

“I insist.”

“Mhm.”

Sofia resisted sleep so she could fall into it all at once, then she dreamed of Elfur again, and saw her father again. Fire, and he burned. She called his name, and her hand outstretched, she ran toward the pyre. The archmage caught her and dragged her away. She remembered the shadows were so dark that day.

“What are you doing?” Aleksei mumbled.

“What?” Sofia woke up.

“What?” he asked. He’d been asleep as well, and they’d woken each other.

“Nothing,” she said. “What were you dreaming about?”

“Why?” he asked.

“You were talking in your sleep.” She turned to face him and traced his collarbone with her finger.

“I thought you were at the writing table. I could hear the pages shuffling.” He blinked, trying to wake up. “Never mind… What I’ve translated so far makes very little sense.”

“What does it say so far?”

“The woman who wrote it, she carved it onto her own skin while she was losing her mind,” he said. “She was playing with someone else’s light, and three mages came and stole it from her…”

“Stole her magic?” She nuzzled her nose against his.

“I guess.” He combed her hair with his hand. “It’s your book. Anyway, she cast a dark spell upon the mages, and stole their alchemy.”

“A lot of thieving going on,” she said.

“Yeah, then she used the dark spell again because a merchant ripped her off, I think. She only used it twice, the second time, she began going mad, she thought she was being possessed, and the third time, he came and took her.”

“Who’s he?” she asked.

“The dark mage.”

“What dark mage?” Sofia laughed.

“You know what, I have no idea. It’s the symbol for a mage, I know that. Then that symbol for light inside dark. I can’t find anything like it anywhere in the light codices and have been translating it as a dark spell.”

“Makes sense.” She hiked a leg over him, then climbed on top of him. “Are you tired?”

“Not anymore.”

“How’s this?” Sofia asked in the dressing room. Where there used to be a painting of Duke Burkhard with his hunting dogs above the mantle, Sofia had put up one of Saint Aleksander the Wise, staking her Guard flag in the Red Manor. Awfully proud of it she was too, for she didn’t think there had been a painting of a Guard in a Shield estate in the last century.

“Like the spring flowers, my lady,” her maid said. She was helping Sofia dress.

Sofia had tried the latest fashion of wearing a twirling wire under the skirt, but it made Aleksei harass her, lifting her skirt in the dining hall and trying to fit himself inside the wire while laughing hysterically. ‘How do you sit? How do you use the privy? How are you going to fit inside the carriage? Is it supposed to wobble?’

She gave up on it rather quickly and reverted to puffy underskirts keeping the shape of her dress. It was their first time attending a social event together, and she wanted him to behave. In the spring, they had been at several balls together while he was on duty and she was married, but tonight they would be arriving and leaving together. That made her happy.

Aleksei wore a currant red velveteen tailcoat with black leather trousers, making her nearly die when he came into the dressing room.

“Is that not cold?” she exclaimed about the trousers, secretly jealous at how good he looked. She’d been preparing for hours and not two drumbeats ago he’d been walking about in a dressing gown, and she had to yell for him to change thinking they were going to be late. It took him no effort to be stunning, and she frowned at the imagined number of younger women swooning over him. Not only he wasn’t a sentinel anymore, he was to be a count. Her frown deepened.

“It’s lined with wool,” he said. “But I can change if you hate it that much. You look upset.”

“Never you mind. We’re going to be late… Do I look old?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“Never you mind,” Sofia grumbled. As she put on her gloves, in the corner of her eyes, she could clearly see the maid mouthing something to Aleksei.

“You look like spring flowers, my lady,” Aleksei said.

“More like mature flowers at the end of summer before the petals shrivel and fall off the stem,” Sofia said. “I’m wilting.”

“What are you mumbling about?” He laughed. “Is it the trousers? You’re still frowning at them, or me. I’ll change.”

“It’s nothing. Let’s leave.”

“Are you going to be upset the entire time?” He held out his arm for her to take.

“I forbid you to be with anyone else!”

“Of course. What is with you?” He looked curious.

“Let’s leave. We’ll be late,” she insisted, taking his arm.

“If we go by a tortoise?” he asked.

“Shut up.” She shoved him out the door. They were going to their last social event. He was going to be stolen from her walking about in public like this. No dinners, gatherings, balls, teas, nothing! She was going to lock the doors to the manor after tonight.

She’d been speaking to herself which she hadn’t realized, and he turned and shook her. “What are you murmuring about? How are you so adorable? I’m going to break you in half!”