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Ana was waiting for him. That, more than anything, drew him like a lodestone. ‘Make it happen.’
‘Yes, Your Majesty.’ Rudolpho bowed and Casimir almost groaned. He’d spent a lifetime preparing for this moment, and here he was acting like a petty two-year-old. ‘I also want every portrait and photo of my sister and mother gone from these palace walls by the time I return. All bar the two in the portrait gallery. They can stay.’
Someone gasped. This wasn’t going well. That second command could have waited a decade or so before being made. Casimir had waited all of seven minutes. He smiled grimly and tried to explain himself—another first in a day of firsts. ‘Put them in a room somewhere and shut the door on them. My family will never be forgotten—not by me, not by any of you. This I know. But this palace has served as a shrine to the dead long enough. No more. Not one minute more.’
People bowed their heads. His father’s people, not wanting to make eye contact.
His people now.
He’d carried the hope of a nation on his shoulders for years and it was finally time to deliver.
‘I will serve,’ he rasped. ‘To the best of my ability I will serve you all. When have I not? But I am not my father, and things will change around here. Not in five years’ time, not in ten. Change starts now.’
It wasn’t until he and Rudolpho were approaching the helicopter ten minutes later that the old advisor deigned to talk about Casimir’s first words in his new role.
‘Good pep talk,’ Rudolpho offered drily. ‘You could have warned me about wanting to take the portraits down.’
Could’ve. Didn’t. ‘I wanted to see their reactions for myself.’
‘And what did their reactions tell you?’
‘That some will always resist change and others will embrace it.’
‘You didn’t need to issue a royal command to know that.’
Casimir smiled mirthlessly. ‘I also learned that the people of Byzenmaach are willing to give me more leeway than I expected, going forward. And I’m going to take it.’
‘You’ll be needing a new chief advisor, I presume,’ Rudolpho offered tightly.
‘No. I want you to stay on in the role, but there’s a catch. I don’t want the kind of silent subservience you gave my father. I know how you work. You sidle in sideways, using your considerable diplomacy skills to smooth over problems that you knew my father would never outright address. That stops. For forty years you’ve had the pulse of a nation at your fingertips. Now you have a voice to go with it and I expect you to use it, because I’m listening. I’d like to see if together we can fix what my father would not. Are you up for it?’
‘Your Majesty, I am most definitely up for it, as it were. Although not entirely fluent in your vernacular.’
‘That’s all right.’ Casimir allowed himself a smile. ‘You’ll learn.’
* * *
The first thing Casimir saw as he approached the winter fortress by air were the flags flying at half-mast. So they knew and there would be no need to say it again. The king was dead. Byzenmaach was his now, not that it mattered here in the cradle of these mountains.
The people here had always been his.
By the time they’d landed and he’d reached the entrance hall, it seemed as if the entire castle staff had either seen or heard the helicopter land and dropped whatever they were doing.
People lined up to one side of the door. People who’d cared for him since he was a child. People he cared for, like Silas and his wife, Lor. People like Tomas the falconer and Saul the stable master.
God help him, he was tired.
But he did what he had to do. He started at the top of the line and took an old groundsman’s hand in his and let the man offer his condolences. He would speak to his people until there was no one left in line that he hadn’t touched and listened to. He would do this because, unlike his father’s courtiers, he owed them.
He looked away from the person in front of him just once—looked up to see how far the line stretched—and there stood Ana at the foot of the stairs, with Sophia beside her. He smiled, and maybe it was a mere echo of the smiles they’d shared all those years ago, but it was real.
