Trial by Fire

Day two begins at 5:50 a.m. with a schedule slid under your door.

08:00 — Polo, Royal Equestrian Club, Norrby Fields. Riding boots advised.

It's on palace letterhead. It even has the little crowned watermark. You read it twice, then call the Royal Equestrian Club, where a sleepy groom tells you in Aldorian that the fields have been under frost since October and nobody has played polo there since the Tuesday before last.

You put on a suit, not riding boots, and you're standing outside the prince's door at 7:15 when it opens.

Caspian stops dead. He's wearing running clothes and a baseball cap pulled low, a man clearly planning to slip out for a jog while his bodyguard drives forty minutes in the wrong direction.

"Morning, Your Highness," you say. "Polo's cancelled. Frost."

He looks at you. He looks at your shoes. "How tragic."

"Where are we running?"

"We aren't—" He sighs, hugely, at the ceiling. "Fine. The lake path. Try not to fall behind, Officer. It's embarrassing for everyone."

You don't fall behind. You run eight kilometers along the frozen shore with him in the blue dawn, past swans, past a tram driver who toots his horn and waves, past two early dog walkers who walk straight into a bench when they recognize him. He runs fast and talks while doing it, which is deeply annoying. At the end he bends over with his hands on his knees, breathing hard, steam curling off his shoulders.

"You're not even sweating," he accuses.

"I'm sweating on the inside."

He squints up at you. The dimple threatens. He doesn't let it out.

The rest of day two is a war.

At ten, his private secretary's office tells you His Royal Highness will leave from the south courtyard. His car leaves from the north. You're already in it.

At one, he claims a migraine, locks himself in his suite, and goes out through a connecting door into his sister's empty apartments. You're waiting in her drawing room, reading one of her fencing magazines.

At four, he tries to take a tram.

"An actual tram?" you ask, stepping on behind him in a hoodie you borrowed from the Annex lost-and-found.

"The people's transport," he says grandly, then hides behind a newspaper while three university students scream.

By midnight, he's sitting on the stairs outside his suite with his head in his hands, laughing helplessly. "Who are you, Ethan?"

"The twelfth."

"I tried the laundry chute once. On the ninth. He got stuck trying to follow me. Fire department."

"I read that one. I'm not following you down a laundry chute."

"Then what would you do?"

"Wait at the bottom."

He looks up at you through his fingers, and for a second something in his face is very young and very tired. "You're ruining my whole reputation."

"Which one?"

He doesn't answer that.

Day three is a hospital.

St. Ursel's children's wing is having a new floor named after his grandfather, and Caspian is there to cut a ribbon and charm the donors. He's good at it. Better than good. You watch him from three steps back as he works the room, remembering every nurse's name, crouching to look at a drawing a little patient's father holds out, making a cardiac surgeon blush to the roots of her gray hair.

He's different in front of people. Brighter. Like someone turned up a lamp. You've seen politicians do it, but on them it looks like work. On him it looks like breathing, except his shoulders never fully come down.

The donors' reception is in a glass atrium on the ground floor. Catering trays. A string quartet. You clock the room: two exits, a fire door, the service corridor where waiters come and go.

You clock the man by the service corridor, too.

He's in a waiter's white jacket that doesn't fit across the shoulders, and he's not carrying anything. Everyone else in a white jacket is carrying something. He's been watching the prince for six minutes without blinking. His right hand stays inside his jacket.

You touch your earpiece. "Possible concern, service corridor, white jacket, no tray."

"Copy," says the second officer by the door.

Caspian is laughing with a banker. He turns, champagne in hand, and steps toward the windows.

The man moves.

He's fast, but you're already moving, because you started when his weight shifted. He's three strides from Caspian when you hit him, low and hard, and you both go down into a catering cart. Glass explodes. Somebody screams. You get his arm, twist, pin it, and the thing in his hand skitters across the marble.

It's a phone. Just a phone, and a crumpled envelope with My Prince written on it in red ink.

"I just wanted to give it to him," the man is sobbing into the floor. "He looks at me on the television, he looks at me—"

Two officers take him. Someone gets the prince behind a pillar. You're on your knees in broken glass and spilled champagne, and only when you stand up do you notice the blood running down your wrist.

A shard of a tray has opened the heel of your hand. Not deep. Messy.

"Varlow," the second officer says. "You're bleeding."

"I've noticed."

Behind the pillar, Caspian is staring at you. All the brightness has gone out of his face. He looks like a man who has just watched a car crash.

"I'm fine, Your Highness," you say.

He doesn't say anything at all.

That night, at eleven, there's a knock at your door.

You open it with your bandaged hand, a hospital nurse's quick job already coming loose, and the Crown Prince of Aldoria is standing in the east-wing corridor in a gray sweater, holding a red first-aid kit like it might explode.

"They did that badly," he says, looking at your hand.

"It's fine."

"Don't say fine, Ethan." He steps past you into your room before you can stop him, which you could have done, and didn't. "Sit."

"Your Highness—"

"Please."

That's the word that does it. You sit on the edge of the narrow bed. He kneels on the carpet in front of you, opens the kit, and unwinds the loose bandage with a care you didn't expect. His fingers are warm. He's frowning in concentration, his hair falling into his eyes.

"Do you know how to do this?" you ask.

"I watched a video in the car." He dabs antiseptic. You don't flinch. He does. "Does that hurt?"

"No."

"Liar." He winds fresh gauze around your palm, slow, careful, his thumb pressing the end flat against your wrist where your pulse is. He has to feel it. It's going much faster than it should. "He was going to give me a letter."

"I didn't know that when I moved."

"I know." He doesn't let go of your hand. "That's what I keep thinking about."

He looks up.

He's very close. Kneeling between your knees, your hand in both of his, his face tipped up to yours in the lamplight. Those eyes. That mouth. You can count his eyelashes. You can feel his breath.

Neither of you moves.

Then he does. He stands up so fast the kit tips over, gauze rolling across the floor.

"Goodnight, Officer," he says, to somewhere over your shoulder, and he's gone. The door clicks.

You sit there for a long time, staring at your perfectly bandaged hand.

At 11:42, your phone lights up on the nightstand. Unknown number.

You already know who it is.