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“You don’t look at her like she’s ajob, Orion.” Griffin flashed another grin when Orion glared at him, and shrugged. “You don’t. And who on this planet knows more about carrying the sins of the fathers than you and me? Perhaps this girl—”
“I understand my duty, Griffin.” Orion sounded harsher than he meant to, especially where his brother was involved. Given Griffin only ever looked delighted that he’d provoked a reaction—any reaction. Today was no different. “And I will do my duty, as always. You may recall you promised me that you would do the same.”
“My problem isn’t finding one woman to marry, Orion,” Griffin said then, his grin so bright it almost concealed the darker gleam in his gaze that Orion sometimes thought only he ever saw. “It’s that there are far too many to wade through, all with their own particular demands.”
“I’m happy to do it for you, then, if you find the task too onerous.”
“Perhaps you should deal with your recalcitrant bride-to-be,” Griffin suggested, laughing. “I’ll find my own, don’t you worry.”
Orion did worry. He worried about everything, the way he always had—because there was no one else to do it. But he knew there was no pressing Griffin when he was in one of his languid moods, so Orion left him in his office and marched out to find his staff, half expecting to find that Griffin had misread the situation. More than half. Because sometimes it was hard to tell what was actually gossip swirling about the palace, and what Griffin decided to make gossip.
But when he astonished his staff by presenting himself in their offices, everyone leaped to their feet and began bowing dramatically. And in the resulting chaos, he quickly understood that for once, his brother had not been exaggerating.
“Her behavior is quite extraordinary,” his head secretary confided once they’d left the bowing and scraping behind and repaired to the man’s office, where he looked ill at the sight of his sovereign sitting in a regular chair in front of the desk. But he pressed on. “In the history of the throne, there has never been a queen who...” He blinked, as if he could hardly bring himself to say the word. “Your Majesty, Lady Calistaworks.”
“In her family firm, yes. I believe she’s quite proud of this.”
His secretary managed to radiate severe disapproval while looking faintly obsequious. A skill Orion doubted he could master. But he was too busy wondering when he’d appointed himself Calista’s champion to study how the other man did it.
“The wedding will be on Christmas Eve, sire,” his secretary pointed out.
“I have not forgotten.”
His secretary bent his head. “And your fiancée has yet to present herself at the palace so that we can begin to instruct her in the duties of her new role. She cannot...simplyappearovernight and hope to acquit herself as queen. That would be disastrous.”
Orion did not need his secretary to remind him that there had been enough disasters in the kingdom already. His staff had been forced to help him through his father’s rule, where they’d spent their days attempting to smooth everything out, fix what was fixable, and do their best to present the public with a vision of a better, calmer, more competent king than the one they had.
Of course they were all concerned that his fiancée represented a kind of throwback to those chaotic years.
Still.
“It is not as if she’s a stranger we picked up off the streets,” Orion pointed out, a bit drily. “She is the daughter of Idyllian nobility.”
“Which has no doubt prepared her adequately for a robust role as a socialite, Your Majesty, but can in no way substitute for proper training in how to represent the kingdom as its queen. That is, as they say, a different kettle of fish entirely.”
Despite himself, Orion found himself thinking about his own mother. She had received all that same instruction, presumably. But she’d been so young. And no one could have been instructed in what it took to handle his father. Especially given what Orion knew now, it was perhaps unsurprising that his mother had taken her own life in the end.
He thought of the stark terror he’d seen on Calista’s face in the car that first night. That hint that she was something more than simply her odious father’s daughter, sent to enact his squalid little games.
And the thought that another queen—hisqueen—might end up in such despair that she followed in his mother’s sad footsteps one day made something in him shift. Hard. As if the notion might take him from his feet.
“Leave it with me,” he told his secretary.
And then he decided to indulge himself while he was off putting out fires.
His father had dearly loved the pageant of monarchy. Always a motorcade. A parade, if possible. Armed guards wherever he went and as much pomp and circumstance as every engagement could hold.
And pageantry had its place, certainly. Orion tried to be careful not to eschew things simply because his father had enjoyed them—like the glorious history of the throne of Idylla, and of his family.
But today, Orion changed into regular clothes and slipped out a side door of the palace where reporters were never allowed to camp out and wait. He would have loved to have gone alone, but he was a king, and well aware of his responsibilities—even when he was shirking them. And so two bodyguards came with him, also dressed down, though they fanned out enough to give him the illusion of living a normal enough life that he could simply...take a walk in the royal city if he liked.
And he did like. Every now and again, he liked to go out from the palace and away from his usual concerns and blend in. Sometimes his subjects recognized him, but they were usually so delighted to see the king out there engaging in normal pursuits—instead of making embarrassing headlines like his father had—that they rarely caused a fuss.
Today, it was a brisk morning. Cool, by Mediterranean standards. Orion followed a meandering sort of path down the hill where the palace sat, a beacon of depravity or hope, depending on how well he was doing his job. He found his way into the affluent part of the city, where the better part of Idyllian nobility lived while in town. He knew they all had their ancestral estates either out in the rural parts of the main island, or on the smaller, supplementary islands that made up the rest of the kingdom.
As he drew close to the street where Calista lived in her father’s grand old house, he slowed, because he could see the scrum of paparazzi from a distance. They heaved about outside Aristotle Skyros’s house, even though, as far as Orion could see, there was no one there to take pictures of.
He didn’t turn down the street. Why give the vultures more to pick apart? He kept walking, flipping up his collar against the damp as he made his way into the central business district.
