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“Rings. Now!” Lucan snapped the order and Sebastian was certain he must have immediately turned bright red, for he felt his face flush with intense heat. Nobody spoke to him that way, with such curt and aggressive orders. Plenty of people showed their lack of respect for him in various ways, but none dared bark orders at him. He was still the sole Prince of Force, after all.
With excitement coursing through his veins, Sebastian hesitated. He did not want to comply, of course. He wanted to keep his finery. He wanted to keep the very image of himself that was at imminent risk of being stripped away. Defiance was therefore not only an intriguing option, but his true impulse in the moment.
He looked at the big, dark-haired and obsidian-eyed knight standing over him. Lucan could take the things if he wanted. They both knew that. Lucan was giving him the opportunity to save some face and not simply be stripped of his things. It was a small and probably generous concession given the circumstances, and Sebastian did not want to be entirely ungrateful.
“Very well,” he said. “But know that when you take these from me, you take everything from me.”
“I am leaving you with your life,” Lucan said, extending a large, callused palm for him to drop his jewelry into.
Sebastian hesitated yet again before removing the very last vestiges of his royal trappings and becoming just another young man in the world. If he handed them over to Lucan he almost felt as though they would be safe, but he knew that was not the plan. Once he took them off he would be more naked than ever, standing barefoot in a simple shirt in the cool air of a mountain forest morning.
Sebastian made a tearful show of removing each and every piece of jewelry he had put on before his birthday party. He remembered sliding the rings on his fingers so casually, so certain of himself and his life. When he’d put them on, he had known himself to be a person of power, well protected by many thousands of loyal soldiers, and adored, at least theoretically, by tens of thousands of subjects.
Now he was like the fox Lucan had hunted, something to be bled. He dropped the rings one by one into Lucan’s large, callused, waiting palm, the very same palm that struck him for being a spoiled brat.
“We should keep most of these in reserve, the jewelry,” Lucan said. “There will likely not be enough gold in small towns to exchange for them, and they will be useful in both procuring necessary provisions and bribing anybody who needs to be bribed. We will not sell all your clothing, either.”
“Oh good!”
“As for your clothing, we will tear some of it up and cover them in blood.”
“Tear it up!?”
“If the usurpers believe you have been slain, either by bandits or wild animals, their hunt for you may stop.”
“Do you really think they will be hunting me?” Sebastian knew the question was stupid when he asked it, but Lucan entertained it.
“The man who led the traitors called for you specifically, and we rode out under a volley of arrows, pursued on foot for quite some way. We were fortunate that there were not riders positioned. Clearly they did not anticipate anybody not eating the cake. Your mother saved your life, Sebastian.”
“Yes,” Sebastian agreed. “She did. She meant to humiliate me, of course, but the outcome was fortunate.”
Lucan deftly avoided speaking his thoughts about Melinda’s mothering. “I think they are absolutely hunting you. You are the sole heir to the throne. In their eyes, you are a threat who must be eliminated. At least, these are my imaginings on the subject, and in matters like these imaginings are all we have. If we destroy the clothing, we perhaps save your life outright.”
“But…”
“Seb, I know this is hard, but it can’t be harder than what you lived through yesterday. Be strong, little king.”
But Sebastian could not be strong, not even with Lucan calling him little king in a way that made the very core of him shiver. He saw the knight take hold of the fancy lace shirt he had been wearing and begin to pull at the fabric with rough hands.
“I can’t watch,” he sobbed, turning away. He did not have to watch in order to be traumatized, though. He heard it. He heard every stitch being ripped apart in the tearing of his fine attire, all those seams carefully sewn by Davos himself ripped apart by Lucan’s powerful paws.
Sebastian cried harder for his shirt than he had for his mother, his father, his crown, or his own predicament. He watched through splayed fingers as Lucan soaked the shirt in fox’s blood and stashed it in a hollow with just the merest tip of it sticking out.
