“Five, as requested, Your Highness.”

“Dmitri.” When the prince shifted to retrieve them, a noticeable tremble ran through his fingers. Without hesitation, Dmitri brought one to his mouth and swallowed, pressing his eyes shut. “Shtàka, that is vile,” he said, coughing.

After a few measured breaths, Dmitri faced Luscia. His cheeks showed little color, which was ironic, for his Unitarian skin was shades darker than her own. Higher, a plum hue cradled his lashes. Wan lips twitched sheepishly as he regarded the four remaining doses.

“I am indebted to your promptness, Lady Boreal. I apologize for calling you from your bed.” Dmitri glanced at the hem of her robe. “I know I am not your favorite person as of late,” he noted, keeping his gaze fixed there. “You’ve been avoiding me.”

“It’s true I have been…cross with you.” Luscia chose each word prudently. “But you are my future king. You are owed promptness.”

He nodded, yet seemed displeased by her reply. Luscia didn’t know what else to say. The Prince of Orynthia refused to fight for the children of Boreal as they were slaughtered in his own city, and she could no longer expect him to. Luscia wouldn’t be so naïve again. Justice for her cross-caste brethren floating in the bay, massacred and strewn in the streets, demanded vigilance. And if such vigilance demanded an illicit alliance with the al’Haidren to Darakai, then so be it.

“Do you like my garden?” Dmitri waved to the manicured landscape around them.

“It—it’s lovely.”

He chuckled. “But?”

“It is lovely, really,” Luscia insisted as his brow rose. “I just prefer the way things are out there, within nature. Free, I suppose. When something grows amidst adversity, it becomes strong. Place it in a stone box, and it remains stunted. Frail, like a bird with its wings clipped.”

“Fascinating.” Dmitri sat forward in thought. “You exhibit such masterful self-discipline, but prefer a wild beauty to a cultivated one.”

“What you are insinuating, Your Highness?” Luscia crossed her arms before quickly uncrossing them again. Best to keep defiance under the skin, where it could not be seen, at least when it came to discussions with her aunt.

“I simply appreciate the irony. Here, you can’t stand to see even the most delicate of things, such as a flower, trapped in a controlled environment, yet you control yourself meticulously. What contradiction your entire being must hold together every day. But—” Dmitri gripped his cane to stand, extending Luscia his arm before she could protest. “—enough of that. Come, I want to show you something.”

Rising, she warily took the arm of his expensive coat. His cane rapped the cobblestones as they walked the exterior of the vast gardens. Pointing out his preferences, the prince notated each uniqueness and rarity of origin. Confined as she’d been to the peninsula of Boreal, Luscia had never travelled beyond its borders, excepting Bastiion Proper. Her eyes widened at the High One’s imagination. There was so much mystery to the shapes and colors he’d crafted, the artistry he’d etched across a world she’d never seen.

“Look, there’s yours.” Dmitri moved to a pair of modest, thorny blossoms. Their petals were a radiant pearl under the moonlight, apart from hints of yellow at the edges. “The Noculoma-Anastasis is always overlooked in these gardens. We don’t have many, only this pair and the third in your possession.”

“I’m honored.” Surprised, Luscia studied the plant and asked, “What inspired you to uproot it?”

“I wished for the third to dwell beside its match, as the other pair. Like you, I suspect, it will continue to bloom even when the light seems lost. Most especially when it is lost.” He ushered her onto a narrower walkway, past the Noculoma-Anastasis. “Almost there—this way.”

Distracted by the bordering procession of shrubs, fashioned into every type of creature, Luscia felt Dmitri’s hand tighten around her own on his arm when he lifted a finger to his mouth.

“Wait,” he whispered, pointing ahead to the sentries posted outside a smaller, more secluded garden within the walled paradise.

Luscia could not see who occupied it at this hour, but the list of court residents with royal sentries was quite short. Beside her, Dmitri stared at the mossy gate, a tendon skipping along his jawline as his lips pursed crookedly. Cane in hand, he fiddled with something in his pocket, but ceased when the gate creaked open and a slim woman emerged.

Dmitri stood a fraction taller as his mother tucked away her handkerchief and lowered a lace veil to cover her glistening, tear-stained face. Without a glance toward where her son stood silently in the dark, the elegant queen lifted her head and mutely left her guard to somberly follow. As the prince watched his mother disappear behind the maze of hedges. Luscia swallowed and looked away, suddenly feeling as if she were intruding on something immensely private.

Moving more slowly now, Dmitri led her into the little garden. After locking the gate, he directed Luscia to a bench in the center of the rounded landscape. Encircling the bench were an array of toy replicas carved from stone: a horse, a chess piece, a soldier, a rabbit. Nine in total, bedded in the flowering groundcover.

With the aid of his cane, Dmitri bent a knee to the earth and produced a carved wooden bird from his pocket. Heaving a breath, he blew bits of sawdust off its tiny beak, as if it’d been carved by his own hand. As he placed it gently beside the marble rabbit, Luscia realized the bird was not alone—similar objects littered the soil, time-weathered and dressed in foliage.

These were not children’s toys, she realized.

They were graves.

Coming to sit beside her, Dmitri exhaled as he began, “I brought you here because…because it is unfair of me to ask for your trust, without first offering my own.” The prince kneaded one of his palms and considered the marble rabbit in the dirt. “As history tells, the line of Thoarne has ruled the last centuries during steady conflict. Reasonably, it’s difficult to produce heirs during wartime. Over those years, the line became ever narrower, most monarchs lucky to sire two healthy children. Eventually, each sired only one, generation after generation.

“My father accomplished what no other could. He secured Orynthia’s peace. Yet here we sit, at the start of an age that ought to be defined by renewed vitality…among my nameless brothers and sisters, who will never see it.”

Luscia’s forehead furrowed as she followed his line of sight to the carved figures.

“My mother became skilled at hiding her pregnancies while I grew up. The court couldn’t be allowed to see a pattern, lest the Peerage lose faith in our line. The youngest of my siblings would’ve turned five this summer, had he or she lived to their birth.”

“Dmitri, I—” Luscia knew loss intimately, but struggled to form an adequate response to his pain. “My brother, Phalen, is everything to me—everything left of my mother. I cannot imagine the agony of losing him. But…” She paused, genuinely baffled. “I still don’t understand. Why entrust me with this secret?”