he would have guarded more closely otherwise. Nearly all Somhairle’s contacts at the palace had ceased to reply to him—so if he was forced to undertake a little subterfuge to get news of his own country, that hardly seemed without justification.
“You needn’t worry, Your Royal Highness,” Faolan said. There were miniature dogs embroidered on his slippers—no doubt the ancestral Ever-Learning hounds. “I expect we’ll be out of your hair soon enough.”
After two weeks, Morien was still entrenched, Faolan was eating all the cheese, another mourning dove had been found dead in the rosebushes, and Somhairle was no closer to divining the reason for their presence in Ever-Land.
Something had to be done. Somhairle needed to try a different tactic.
He buried the dove with the others, whispered his useless apologies to the roots, and, though it felt like too little too late, wrote about the mysterious deaths to his mother and brothers, the few he thought might bother to write back.
Although the four youngest princes had been schooled together, they weren’t close. Each had his friends, his favorite advisers, all of whom were convinced the other princes wanted their prince dead.
Somhairle expected to hear from Laisrean if he heard from anyone, but it was Guaire who wrote back first, surprising him.
Don’t be a child. Though at nineteen he’d lived only one year longer than Somhairle, Guaire never lacked for confidence. Our mother has more important lives to consider. She doesn’t care about a few sick animals, nor should she.
Perhaps the best solution is to stop feeding them. Then they’ll die elsewhere, and won’t disturb your sensitivities?
The backhanded accusation revealed by Guaire’s suggestion reminded Somhairle of the many ways he’d proven unsuitable for his mother’s Silver Court. He imagined the other chidings that would arrive. He was a fool to have bothered with letters.
Then, the next morning, his mother granted him an audience.
Moments past sunrise in the solarium, when the light was softest, gilded. To keep birds from flying into the glass and snapping their tiny-boned necks, Somhairle’s few servants had hung flowering plants along the windows. Bright orange and yellow honeyflower, vibrant scarlet trumpets—all the sweet nectar the birds once loved.
Catriona Ever-Bright appeared resplendent in the midst of the blossoms. The sight of her filled him with awe and fear. Her full white gown, so encrusted with diamonds and pearls that it could have stood on its own, shone with the reflected color of a thousand far-off flowers. She looked younger than Somhairle remembered, but also more distant.
The portrait of a queen, not the queen the portrait was based on.
For she wasn’t really there, flesh and blood, in the solarium. The Queen loved her sons best when they gave her time to miss them. What Somhairle saw sitting across from him was merely a reflection, the creation of one of her sorcerers.
Still, it was rare that she could take time to speak privately like this, even with the assistance of mirrorcraft.
“We would never allow any harm to befall our own.” Catriona’s voice rang like struck steel in the tiny solarium. She pitched for great halls and grand pronouncements—too grand for these more humble surroundings. “It is admirable that your care for Ever-Land extends to even its most insignificant details, but do not allow your dovelike heart to mislead you. The land prospers.”
The difficulty Somhairle often felt in speaking to his mother was that she was responding to a different son: the one she wanted rather than the one she had.
The birds weren’t insignificant to him. Perhaps Guaire had been trying to spare him the embarrassment of bringing his small concerns before their mother, whose kingdom consisted primarily of actual people, not doves and starlings.
Somhairle shifted on his overstuffed velvet chaise. It was a chair best suited for afternoon naps and late-night reading, less so for receving one’s mother, the Queen. He’d dressed for the occasion, white shirt fastened high around his throat, a gauze flower opening under a delicate waistcoat wrought in filigree silver. The pattern of scrolling vines tinkled when he moved, creating visual and aural distractions from his leg brace.
On his head was a silver circlet. Around his throat, the sun-sigil medallion of House Ever-Bright.
It was too hot. He’d never felt his station less. He missed his loose gardening trousers, the drowsy bumble of bees, the smell of warm dirt.
“I’m not afraid for Ever-Land.” He was too aware of the crooked set of his shoulders, the relatively short span of his eighteen years compared to his mother’s many decades. Worst