“We should probably go downstairs,” he said very quickly, looking at everything but me.
The décor on the ground floor was very similar to that above: gold leaf, murals, and high ceilings, with windows flooding the whole place in light. As he had done upstairs, the prince led me to the very end of the hallway, where a set of French doors opened out onto a covered deck. Seated around a wrought-iron table at one end were his uncle, aunt, and Lady Elizabeth; Prince Alfie lounged at her feet on a set of wooden steps leading down to the garden.
“Just in time,” Fallon’s uncle said as we joined them at the two empty seats. A servant dressed in a white shirt, complete with starched collar and a jacket emblazoned with the Athenean coat of arms, was serving tea and coffee. A stand of scones and jam had already been placed in the center of the table. I asked for tea, and watched out of the corner of my eye as Prince Fallon loaded his coffee with sugar.
“It is all vegan, dear, don’t worry. We are quite strict about that here. Do have one,” his aunt said as soymilk was poured into my tea, and I took a scone to be polite, though I wasn’t hungry. As I spread jam onto the crumbling scone, I took in the princess and duchess through my eyelashes. She had immediately struck me as very well put together: her light hair was smooth and glossy, and everything from the jewels around her neck to her eye shadow complemented her mint-green jacket and long skirt. She looked out of place compared to the others, who all wore informal trousers or jeans.
Lady Elizabeth Bletchem was what I could only describe as a plain Jane. Her hair, light brown, was parted in the middle and tied up in a ponytail, and her eyes seemed to be too small in proportion to her other features. She was very tall—almost as tall as her boyfriend—and had a similar boyish figure—though, unlike him, she still looked about eighteen, despite being almost a decade older. Over and above all that, she seemed to quite easily capture princes, but then again, her father did have a very firm and wealthy hold on the Home Counties.
Fallon’s aunt saw me looking and smiled just before she pressed her teacup to her lips. My gaze shot down and I took a bite of the scone, wishing I didn’t have to eat it. All was quiet, other than the tinkling of spoons on china and a bird twittering in a nearby bush. I knew it was my cue to say something.
“This is a beautiful spot, and so tucked away. I had no idea it was here from the road.”
Always keep conversation light, child. Avoid politics, and don’t give opinions.
The princess smiled again, and placed her teacup down. “Yes. It was one of the reasons we chose here. But it was in an utter state when we first purchased it. We had to stay in London right through the summer recess to supervise its repair.”
I glanced at Lady Elizabeth, wondering if that was when she had met her second prince. “I was in London during the summer, too.”
“We heard, and must apologize for not calling on you. We were trying to keep a low profile.”
“Of course.” I smiled, reassuring her that no offense had been taken. The truth was that if I had known their whereabouts, I would have fled the capital.
She seemed satisfied that I had participated enough for the meantime, and turned to her husband, whose face had shaped itself into an expression of polite interest, while his eyes were firmly trained on the pastries being loaded onto the cake stand by the servant. “We really must go back to London soon. I have not even started buying Christmas presents for the children, let alone the grandchildren.”
“Yes, dear,” was his only reply, as his son’s head popped up over the rim of the table.
“Presents are easy. Get a year’s supply of diapers for Nari and her bump, a romantic getaway for Clar’ea and Richard—”
“A punching bag for Chucky,” Fallon interrupted, grinning.
“Don’t joke about your brother’s anger problem, Fallon,” his aunt said, but Prince Alfie was already talking over her.
“How to Talk to a Girl for Henry, and Politics for Dummies for Uncle Ll’iriad—”
He was promptly cut off as his mother smacked him on the top of his fair head. “Behave, young man, we have guests.”
He bobbed up to stick his tongue out at his mother and then settled back down, looking every bit like a child sitting on the naughty step. I didn’t mind his joking. I thought it funny that he had just called the king “Uncle Ll’iriad.”
Prince Lorent had just polished off a cream cake, and was sliding flakes of pastry around his plate, trying to catch them on his finger. “I don’t know what all the hype about Christmas is. They say it’s peace and goodwill to all men, but it’s most definitely hell and gray hair to all Sage in Athenea.”
His wife slapped him playfully on the knee. “Bah, humbug!”
He raised an eyebrow. “You are not the one chasing the devils you call toddlers around.” He turned to me and Lady Elizabeth, shaking his head. “I don’t remember a year when dinner did not end in a food fight or somebody setting fire to the decorations.”
The winter season, beginning with the Autumnal Equinox and ending at New Year, was a grand spectacle, and everybody who was anybody attended the larger court events. But Christmas Day was always private; the palace was taken over by the entire Athenean family—all hundred or so of them. It was a recipe for chaos.
Lady Elizabeth laughed in a surprisingly girlish way—I had expected something deeper. “Never ask me to be your plus-one at Christmas, Al.”
He muttered something back to her and kissed her hand. I quickly looked at my plate, pretending I hadn’t seen and taking a nibble of my hardly touched scone.
I became aware of voices again and tuned back in to hear the princess speaking to her nephew.
“Fallon, why don’t you take the Lady Autumn around the gardens before the light fades? Dinner will be ready by the time you return. Don’t worry, dear, it’s not a formal affair,” she added to me.
The prince stood up, and I hastily followed, leaving a crumbled half a scone behind.
A gravel path snaked around the side of the house, and I walked in his shadow until it was utterly eclipsed by the house and a wall of ivy, between which a garden was sandwiched. The wall was actually a cliff, rising high above the house and sheltering us from the searching wind. The flower beds were full of more wire and trellis than actual flowers, dispersed among young shrubs, but once it matured, I thought, it would be a very pretty garden.
We walked side by side along the path, which mirrored the course of a small gurgling stream, occasionally crossing it on miniature arched bridges.
“Sometimes I think I must be crazy, but I actually prefer England to Australia,” he said quietly.
“You do?” I replied, very surprised. How could anyone prefer somewhere as barren as here to somewhere as vibrant and Sagean as Sydney?
“Maybe not the lack of tanning.” He pulled his hands from his jacket pockets and extended his arms so his sleeves slipped up, revealing very obvious tan lines on his wrists. “But I like the greenness, and I like the peace.”
“You don’t miss Australia at all?”
“No.”
I stopped and chewed on the tip of my tongue. He took two steps before he realized I was not beside him.
“Autumn—”
“Do you not miss Amanda?” I blurted out, almost stumbling over the name of the prince’s former girlfriend.
He swallowed hard; I saw his Adam’s apple rise and fall an inch. “No. Not how you think I should, anyway.” He span on his heel and kept walking.
It seemed hopeless, but I called after his retreating back. “I don’t understand.”
He had disappeared through a veranda and around a corner, and I jogged after him, rounding a large, concealing fuchsia bush to find him leaning against the railings of yet another small bridge. I approached him slowly. He was staring at the water, and it was as though it was a portal, because snatching a glance at his eyes I could tell he saw things in the liquid that I could not see and thought thoughts in which I could not share.
&n
bsp; “I never loved Amanda.”
I gripped the railing tightly. “Pardon?”
With my harshly spoken word, he was back with me, and the water reflected nothing but the shadow of the overhanging bridge. “And she never loved me. We were . . . I don’t know how to explain it, but friends with benefits, I suppose.”
“Oh,” I breathed softly. “I . . . I hadn’t realized you were like that.”
“No! No, it wasn’t like that.” He dropped his head into his hands, muttering to himself. I couldn’t discern what he was saying until he removed his hands from his mouth and ran them through his bangs. “It was a mutually beneficial partnership.”
Sighing, he straightened up, crossed the bridge, and half turned back, inviting me to join him. I hesitated.
“Let me explain,” he offered, and then added, “Please, duchess.”
Something in my stomach stirred my legs into moving, and I found myself falling into pace with him. His hands found his jeans pockets and he exhaled in one long breath, then took a shallow one in.
“Perhaps you won’t know what I’m talking about because of what happened to your grandmother at the time, but do you remember feeling very impatient to be grown when you graduated from the juniors?”
I was confused by how his question was relevant, but understood his meaning. At fourteen, I thought I had done my growing. I had thought I was an adult. I doubted my younger self would accept that I could mature more in eighteen months than I had done in a lifetime; that by the eve of sixteen, I would be an utterly different person. “Yes, I do.”
He closed his eyes briefly and laughed drily. “My fourteen-year-old self had far too much of an inflated sense of maturity. I was tired of being under the thumb of my parents at the Athenean school; I thought I was above that, so I chose to be a guardian in Australia. I had high expectations of what was to come. But so did the media.”
He looked quite pitiful, staring at the cliff but not seeing it, his hands buried so deep in his pockets his arms were rigid. I wondered if this was how I must look when my mind was otherwise occupied. I did not want to be pitied.
“I was placed as guardian in a boarding school in Sydney, with a flock of security. It wasn’t a large school, but there were still ten other Sage acting as guardians, and I fell in with them and a group of humans pretty quickly.”
I already knew that. As a preteen wired to have crushes on celebrities, I had dutifully been obsessed with his every move—I wasn’t about to reveal that to him now though.
“Everything was great in the first year. I had friends; I was doing well in school; I was finally able to manage aspects of my life I had previously had no control over, like my money . . . but then everything got nasty at the end of the year. I was fifteen and . . .”
He trailed off, and creases appeared between his brows as he cocked his head slightly, looking at me. “Lords of Earth, I was your age . . . but you’re more mature than I ever was.”
I didn’t know how to respond—I thought he had just complimented me, yet his voice remained too distant for me to be sure that was his intention. I stayed quiet.
He shook his head slightly. “I was getting older, and that meant the paparazzi were paying me more and more attention. There was report after report about girls I had supposedly been on dates with, or even slept with—none of which was true,” he hastily added. “But they did notice how close I was getting to Amanda. We were just good friends, dating had never crossed my mind, yet the media read more into it than there was. Suddenly, I was under enormous pressure to create the next big royal romance, and she was being chased around by reporters. Life was impossible.”
He fixed his gaze on me every other sentence, and I was left with the sense that he was searching for a reaction. I kept my face as blank as I could.
“Mandaz . . . Amanda, even then, was ambitious. She wanted a court career, like any noblewoman, and she was fiercely interested in politics. But her family had made their money from the bottom up, and she knew that background wasn’t going to be enough to gain any immediate influence at court, which is what she wanted. And I . . . I needed to give the media what they wanted.”
The sound of roaring water reached my ears as we continued through a canopy of roses and I was processing what he had said and what I thought he was suggesting.
“You struck a bargain.”
He winced. “We never meant it to last. It was just supposed to be a few dates and some pictures of us kissing. And it worked: the paparazzi went crazy for the first few weeks, and then everything died down. I took her back to Athenea over the summer and she was able to network. My family liked her. They helped her. But I think they knew what was going on. They knew it wouldn’t last.”
“But it did last.”
He laughed nervously and ran a hand down the back of his head, ruffling his slightly damp hair—there was a fine mist in the air. “I guess neither of us wanted the hassle of a breakup. And we were . . . we were sleeping together at this point.”
“Ah. And you’re sure you had no feelings for her?”
Again, he chuckled. “Please stop looking so perceptive. It’s making me feel like a naughty schoolboy.” I didn’t know what expression my face held for him to say that, but I smiled bashfully at the path. He carried on. “I admit that I had some. I cared for her, and would protect her, but there was never any passion or need involved. We spent almost two months apart during the summer of last year, but it wasn’t painful. We didn’t yearn for each other.”
We had finally emerged from the veranda and I gave a gasp—not that he or I could hear it over the rush of water plummeting thirty feet down the cliff, and then even farther down through a hole in the ground. I could hear it hitting stone, great splashes bounding back up. It reminded me of the storm the prince had driven me home in.
“This place is an old quarry!” he shouted over the water as he came to a rest against the railing that ran in a crescent around the drop. He placed his elbows on the metal and swayed back and forth on his heel slightly—he was such a fidget. As I watched him, he spoke again, though I could only see his lips moving.
“What?” I yelled back. He only looked bemused and repeated whatever he had said. I laughed. I couldn’t hear a word he was saying and tried to tell him so, but he just started laughing as well.
Bending down, he tucked my hair behind my ear and spoke, still quite loudly, from right beside me. “Would you like to see the view?”
I froze as his hand made contact with me, aware of how, if I leaned just slightly to the right, my shoulder would be touching his chest. My eyes focused on the white shirt he was wearing, framed by his tan jacket. I could see him breathing. I nodded.
He pointed skyward and started backing around the waterfall, narrowly avoiding a splash of rebounding water that appeared to curve in an arc over the railings and toward him. The affinity it showed for him snapped me out of my trance and I laughed, batting the water back as it tried to reach me, too.
Suddenly, with a running leap, he had disappeared into the fine mist. I carried on a little farther beyond the dampness and bent my knees, springing directly up. Even this far away from the waterfall there was vapor, and I broke through the suspension, spotting the prince standing behind another set of railings along the edge of the cliff. I dropped down beside him.
I was glad I took his suggestion. The view was magnificent. The cliff was high enough to look right over the top of the house and down into the hollow with the meadow at its bottom. The pine-tree perimeter looked like a funnel from our vantage point, tapering toward the road. In the distance, I could just make out the green line becoming gray and disappearing back toward Princetown.
The lively stream that plummeted down into the old quarry was to my left, and I traced its path upriver, turning behind me. It ran down a gentle incline across moss and scrubland; in the distance, I could see gorse and faraway granite tors.
I lowered my brow and felt my right cheek tug at the outer corner of my
lips as I circled to take in the full panorama. “Are you not a little vulnerable here?”
He grinned in his usual cheeky way and crouched down. His hand brushed the ground until he closed his fingertips around something. Standing up, I could see it was a small stone. He lobbed it from waist height in the direction of the nearest tor.
Abruptly, it halted in midair and dropped to the ground. With its sudden stop came an eerie crackling sound; and with that, a humongous dome shield revealed itself. The point where the stone had struck looked like it was fracturing, splitting into shards, divided by lightning-like forks of bright blue; these faded and it glowed paler, like it was healing. I could see its quickly disappearing boundaries stretching right across the quarry and stood in awe of the setup they had. It was like Athenea—it, too, had massive dome shields, through which nothing but the elements could pass without permission.
When the shield had become invisible again, I leaned down on the railing and debated how to steer the conversation back toward Amanda. The whole thing intrigued me: they had pulled it off very well, and his story was a revelation. But in hindsight, it made sense. They had never appeared to be that lovey-dovey.
“So when you and Amanda broke up, it wasn’t as big a deal as the papers made out?”
He looked surprised that I had returned to the topic. “Essentially, yes. Technically, it was me who ended things, but it was all on good terms. She knew I wanted to come to England and I think she was ready to move on, too. We’re still friends. Just friends.” He blushed very deeply again, though it didn’t reach his eyes.
A buzzard hovered at our height to the left of the house, and I admired its brown plumage, determined not to seem too intrigued by my next question. “Your Highness, why are you telling me all this?”
I heard him exhale. “Remember what I told you about treating you as my equal? I didn’t want you to be under the same illusion as the rest of the world.”
I was flattered; properly and wholeheartedly this time, unlike in the car. He seemed to be ashamed of this particular chapter of his life, and definitely embarrassed about telling me, but he had still done so despite that.