Page 1 of A King’s Trust (Heart-Mage Trilogy #1)

1

WHAT IS REQUIRED

“I f you keep ignoring every summons from the king, he’s going to have your head, you know,” the young guard said. “Or more likely, he’ll have my head.”

Prince Beauregard lengthened his strides, speeding toward a side exit of the palace, the quickest escape to the stables. “He’ll have to catch us first, Elias. And I won’t make that easy.”

“Well, he won’t be chasing you, will he? He’ll expect me to drag you back.”

Beau threw a sideways glance at his old friend. “Whose guard are you, anyway? Some loyalty you have.”

“Just because you added me to the prince’s flight doesn’t mean I don’t answer to His Majesty,” Elias said. His hand closed around Beau’s arm, and Beau’s skin tingled under the warmth of his palm. “Please, head back and hear him out, Highness. I’ll get shin splints keeping up with you all the way to the horses.”

“I know exactly what he’ll say,” Beau said, huffing out an annoyed breath. “You’ve got responsibilities now, Beau. You’ve got to step into the shoes that—” He choked, his throat unwilling to form the name that had been about to fall from his lips: Charmant .

His late brother, who’d left behind such big shoes to fill.

Beau couldn’t afford to think about Char now. He needed to get out of the palace and as far as his loyal mare could carry him.

Elias sighed, and Beau knew his guard would’ve ridden faithfully out with him, complaining all the way, if the two other guards from Beau’s flight hadn’t emerged breathless from a doorway ahead to cut them off.

“Your Highness,” Oria called, her constant scowl deeper than normal as her pale eyes flashed, “your father insists on your presence. We will bring you to him. Now .”

The third guard, Jude, said nothing. With his hulking form braced for a fight and his arms outstretched to catch the prince should he try to run past, he made his position clear. Beau groaned in exasperation and slowed to a halt.

“Fine,” he snapped.

He let them bracket him, Elias trailing silently behind. As they plodded toward his father’s chambers, the stone walls with their tapestries and sculpture niches closed in around Beau. The silence of his guards was oppressive, the air too thick to breathe. He didn’t want to be here. He shouldn’t have been. If Char hadn’t slipped off his horse, that stupid, stupid accident, Beau would still be breathing the free air on the islands northeast of the capital.

Beau’s eyes no longer heated with the threat of tears at the image of Char’s blond curls, just visible as they had been through the column of nobles on horseback, vanishing from sight. The intervening months had cooled his grief somewhat. But a knot of pain remained under his ribs if his thoughts lingered on Char too long.

When they reached the ivory-inlaid doors to his father’s chambers, Beau tried to paste a cocky smile on his mouth. “You wanted to see me, Father?” he said, nodding briefly to the servant who held the door for him.

King Fortin looked up from his ledgers, deep lines graven into the skin around his mouth and eyes, close-cropped hair more grey than brown. He hadn’t looked this old four months ago, but of course four months ago he had a glorious golden son as his heir: well-spoken, intelligent, skillful with a blade and a horse, respected by every noble who met him. Now, he had only Beau.

“I see your guards managed to catch you before the stablehands had to turn you away,” Fortin said. “And yes, they would’ve turned you away. No one in this palace is going to let you run for the isles, no matter how often you act like a common child.”

Beau kept quiet, though his smirk dropped into a mulish, flat expression. The king continued, “Your mother and I have been discussing how best to address your preparation. We weren’t as diligent as we ought to have been in your education. Your mother especially has always been too quick to allow you to wallow in mediocrity.”

“Why would you be diligent?” Beau asked, voice deceptively mild. “You had an heir and a spare. I wasn’t supposed to get this close to the crown.”

“Beau, please. This is a hard time for us. Please, don’t make it harder. You have responsibilities now, and—”

Beau snorted and glanced at Elias, who was doing everything in his power not to make eye contact. “Do you really want me on the throne?” Beau said. “You’ve told me time and again what I am: a prodigal bird of passage, a sot, a philanderer. I’m nothing like Char. I can’t be what you were training him to be.”

“No, you can’t,” the king said flatly. “But you must be better than you are. I’m sorry to drag you out of your cups and into some semblance of respectability. But the loss of whatever wayward plans you had for your life is the least of our tragedies.” His father only ever got that sharp, sardonic tone of voice when he spoke to his second son. “You’ve dodged this long enough. You will sit with the tutors. You will attend when I hold court. And you will talk to your mother about the marriage prospects she’s arranged.”

Beau shook his head firmly. But the king rolled on, stabbing toward Beau with a pointed finger. “You’re twenty-five years old. You’re not a child anymore. You are the crown prince.”

“Then I’ll abdicate,” Beau said. “This kingdom would be better off with no one at the helm than with me. I don’t want—”

“Beauregard.” The queen’s clear, quiet word sliced through her son’s protests, silencing the room. She took a halting step into the parlor from the bedchamber. Wrapped in a dressing gown despite the late hour of the morning, Queen Acier commanded attention even in her grief-weakened state. Her once-beautiful face had greyed and thinned to that of a wraith and the gold of her hair had faded into a pale, silvery blonde like morning mist, but the strength in her reddened eyes spoke to a core of steel in her. “Come here.”

Beau was loath to argue with his mother. He approached her reluctantly, eyes on the floor so she couldn’t stare reproach into them. She set a gentle hand on his arm and squeezed, but her words were firm. “Look me in the eyes when I’m speaking to you.” Beau obeyed, though her piercing green scrutiny made him sweat. “I know it can’t be easy to lose Charmant and your freedom in one fell swoop. I—” Her voice broke, and a tear slipped free to track down her cheek.

The prince started to speak, but his mother shook her head, swiped at her face, and said to the guards, “Leave us. I need to speak to my family alone.”

The three from Beau’s flight filed out first, Elias casting Beau worried glances, followed by two from the king’s and the queen’s sole guard. Stripped of the minute movements of a half-dozen people shifting from foot to foot, the room seemed very empty.

Into the silence, the queen dropped the words, “Your father is in poor health.”

“What?” Beau spun on his father. “You’re sick?”

Leather creaked as the king leaned back in his chair. “Yes.”

“How sick? How long?”

“I’ve been monitoring the situation for a couple of years. In recent months, it’s gotten worse. My personal physician has impressed upon me the importance of having my affairs settled. My heir settled.”

Beau absorbed this with a long, slow exhale. Like Char had been, his father was tall, broad-shouldered, perfect-postured. His brown eyes were sharp and clear. He didn’t look sick. But perhaps the fresh grey in his hair and the lines on his face were not just from grief and age.

The queen’s hand tightened on his wrist until he looked back at her. “There’s no clear next in line. If you abdicate, your father’s uncle Gereux will press his claim, as will the Macabrie and Courdur families. They will fight. There will be civil war, and our neighbors will take advantage of the chaos to carve strips off Granvallée, allies or no. You’ll have assassins on your heels until the day you die to ensure you never come back and seize the throne for yourself.”

Her voice softened and she released him. “You must know this, even without the teaching you should’ve had. You’re fighting the inevitable because it doesn’t seem fair. But facts cannot be changed, however much you dislike them.”

Beau crossed the room to sit heavily in an antique armchair. Of course he knew these things. That’s why the cavernous rooms of this place felt so small, why the hallways threatened to collapse and crush the air from his lungs. That’s why he had to run.

He knew what Charmant would do if the situation were reversed. Ever dutiful, Char would be comforting their parents, offering up ways to improve and hasten his instruction, studying the names and positions and politics of all the lords and holdings in the realm. In short, he’d be the perfect crown prince that he was.

Beau couldn’t do that.

He looked at his father, withered by the loss of his golden boy, his pride and delight. He looked at his mother, barely holding together the scraps of her noble dignity around the molten core of mourning and anguish.

Closing his eyes, he swallowed down his own grief and anxiety. He hadn’t been trained for this. He wasn’t equipped for this. He didn’t have the talent or the charm or even one-tenth of the perfection his brother had had.

But if he was truly all there was…

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll see the tutors. I’ll sit in court.”

“And you’ll marry as soon as a suitable match is made,” his mother added.

A jolt of horror ran through him. “Mother, please. I don’t need a wife. I don’t want a wife, certainly not the sort of woman who’d tie herself to the crown prince.”

“You don’t have a choice,” Acier said sharply. She closed her eyes, moderated her tone, and said, “When you ascend to the throne, your wife should already be at your side, with her own training in how to be queen. How to deal with nobles. How to run a nation.”

Beau could hear the silent reasoning: if they found a woman skillful enough to rule through him, they wouldn’t have to depend on Beau to be a good king. He pretended that didn’t hurt. “There’s no urgency for that. Any woman you’d deem a suitable match has already been trained. Every parent in the kingdom must’ve been angling to put their daughter in front of Char, ready to sit at the king’s side.”

Acier shook her head in calm disagreement. “It is urgent. The training is different; it takes time to build connections. If you would consider Lady Penamour—”

“I will not marry my dead brother’s fiancée,” Beau said flatly, not for the first time. “I refuse. It’s sick.”

The queen tried and failed to suppress her eye roll. “She was Charmant’s best option by a mile, Beauregard. Duchess of Veritelutte in her own right and with strong ties on her mother’s side to the Courdurs—stop making that face, for gods’ sake. They had a political agreement to be married, not a romantic attachment.”

Beau threw up his hands. “That’s worse! You don’t see how that’s worse? What kind of woman agrees to marry a man and then just moves that engagement over to his brother when he dies? It’s psychotic. How could anyone be that cold? I could never trust her.” If she controlled the second-largest holding herself and had close ties to the largest, she was the most powerful and probably most conniving noble in the country; he couldn’t trust her anyway.

“Beauregard—” the king began sternly, but the queen raised a hand to stop him.

“I understand,” she said. She crossed the room to look down at him. “You picked up all sorts of common notions about love in the isles. I’ll endeavor to find someone you can trust and come to love, but—”

“That’s not good enough!” Beau said, anger welling up in him. Now tears did threaten, to his mortification, and he fought them down. “I’ve lost everything . My brother, my life in the isles, my future. I’m not agreeing to a lifetime in some cold contract with whoever offers the best deal for me.”

The king slammed his hands down on the desk. “You will do what is required of you!”

“If you try to force me, I will abdicate,” Beau said, staring his father down glare for glare. “I’ll choose a successor and take my chances with the assassins. At least I’d die free.”

A tense silence held the three of them in stalemate.

Queen Acier broke it. “Fine, Beauregard. Fine.” She looked so, so tired. “I’ll make arrangements for you to meet the ladies starting next week. So you can find yourself a love match.” The last two words twisted in her mouth. “But you will choose someone by the end of the season, or one will be chosen for you. Is that understood?”

She was furious, Beau could tell, but he rose from his chair to kiss her cheek anyway. He ignored her flinch. “Thank you, Mother.” He straightened, tugging the cuffs of his sleeves down more comfortably against his wrists. “Father, I’ll see you tomorrow in the assembly hall.”

He left before his parents could speak again. If he lingered, his father would keep the fight going and one of them would say something to further fracture their fragile relationship.

Elias was by his side in an instant as he shut the chamber door behind him, and the other two guards of the prince’s flight fell into step behind them. “Are we making a run for it, Your Highness?” Elias asked lightly.

Beau sighed. “No.” He scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed again. “No.”

The march from the king’s rooms to Beau’s in the south tower was long. When he’d been called back from the isles for Char’s wedding, he’d insisted on a guest room instead of his childhood suite in the royal wing. He wanted to be as far from his father as possible.

When tragedy struck and preparations for the wedding became preparations for a royal funeral instead, Beau was even more grateful to be away from all the reminders of Char there—or worse, where the reminders would have been, the spaces now empty, trinkets and toys long since packed away into storage, hidey-holes now free of dust and draped with soulless décor.

He sincerely hoped the steward didn’t notice his still being in the small guest suite now that it seemed he was trapped at the palace for the rest of his life. If he had to move to the royal wing and pass his parents in the halls every day, he’d lose his mind.

Elias preceded him into his room, giving it a cursory inspection before nodding for the prince to come in. As they had since he’d inherited them from Char, Oria and Jude stayed in the hall to guard the entrance. Beau was glad of the distance; they made him uncomfortable.

He watched Elias stoke the fire in the parlor’s fireplace, long, dark hair tied half back as it always was, with a swell of deep gratitude for his long-time friend. Elias was the guard of a second son with no ambition: skilled and alert, but quick to crack a joke or have a drink with Beau in his downtime.

The crown prince’s flight wasn’t like that. Jude and Oria were the intense, stoic, duty-and-honor type who got assigned to a future king. They weren’t thrilled by their new charge. They’d been unhappy when Beau kicked a third guard out of their flight to make room for Elias. They’d been furious when he bumped Oria down in rank to make Elias the First of his flight.

With them outside and Elias in here with him, he could relax back into someone more like himself. He let the tension fall out of his body, kicked his boots off by the door, and threw himself face-down onto the down mattress of his ostentatious bed.

“Fuck my life,” he said directly into the stuffing, muffling the words into incoherence.

Elias understood the sentiment anyway. Unbuckling his sword belt and leaning his weapon against the wall, he sat in his chair next to the bed, stretched his legs out long before him, and said, “Well, Highness, what do we do now?”

With great effort, Beau turned his head far enough to the side to see his guard, the rest of him sprawled like a starfish. “I pretend to be a king-in-waiting long enough for you to figure out a plan to get me out of here,” the prince said with a smirk that said he was—mostly—joking.

“And what does that look like?” Elias’s hazel eyes were reassuringly steady, calm.

“We’ll hold court with my father once a week. The tutors will come here to teach me. And…” He let out a long, frustrated sigh through his teeth. “My mother will be arranging for me to meet every eligible lady in Granvallée until I find myself a bride.”

Elias’s eyebrows rose as he teased, “You? Married?”

“Me, married,” Beau grumbled. “I got my mother to agree that I can find someone I actually care about, but I don’t know how long that’ll hold.”

“Were you planning to test how long it would hold?”

Beau shot El a wry look, then dragged himself up the bed with his elbows and flipped heavily onto his back among the too-numerous pillows. “She said I had until the end of the season. Knowing her patience, I might get half that time.”

Elias yawned and stretched, and Beau looked away from the taunting inch of skin that appeared beneath his shirt hem as it pulled free of his waistband. “Maisie’s heart’ll be broken.”

At this, Beau reluctantly laughed, fingers tracing the scars on his forearm absently as he stared at the wall and not at his guard. “Maiz probably doesn’t even know I’m gone. She’d already dropped me from her rotation before we left the isles in favor of that popinjay who wears his captain’s hat to bed.”

Elias chuckled, and they settled into an easy silence, lost in private thoughts. Beau pictured Maisie, one of his occasional lovers, full of laughter and light and frivolity. There was no one like that at court. They came to the palace guarded, buttoned up, and politicked.

How could he possibly fall in love with one of these sly, power-hungry people?

“You’re going to need a few new suits made,” El said. He held out his hand like he was offering a dance, and Beau followed his train of thought: the balls. The dusty, insufferably dull dances he’d endure night after night for the six months of the season. There’d be brunches on the lawn, card games, trail rides, salon evenings, and a thousand other entertainments, but at the balls, he’d be on constant display. He almost leapt out a window at the thought, but defenestrating himself sounded like too much effort.

“Should I teach a few nobles Toothy’s famous reel?” Beau asked, summoning a grin.

Elias chuckled at the thought of Granvallée’s finest joining hands and kicking their feet at each other. “I’d pay good money to see their faces when you start bouncing around on your toes like Toothy. Maybe it’s a good test? Any noble willing to shuck his or her dignity long enough to dance that with you in public is probably worth getting down on one knee for.”

“I’m afraid this particular position is open only to women,” Beau said. It was no secret that Beau dallied just as enthusiastically with men as women, but as heir, he’d be required to marry someone with whom he could make pretty royal babies. “And, having met this kingdom’s noblewomen, I know not one of them would spend an ounce of dignity even to win a crown.”

“Pity,” Elias said. “Whoever you marry, you’ll have to laugh enough for both of you. When does the season open?”

“Night after tomorrow, which I’m sure was the prompting for my dear father finally cracking down on me,” the prince said, elbowing the pillows until they reshaped to cradle him.

“Want me to send for a barber?”

Beau raised an eyebrow at Elias. “Why, you think I need to clean up? Not good-looking enough to win a wife?” He said it jokingly, but he was altogether too invested in Elias’s answer.

The guard was focused on loosening the straps of his leather vambrace. “I can’t speak to the taste of noblewomen, but the other lords all seem to have the same idea of grooming.”

Beau frowned. It was true. Beau’s close beard didn’t fit the fashion of the mostly clean-shaven nobles, and the unruly brown waves falling in his eyes lay somewhere between the young lords’ fashion of long hair tied back at the nape of the neck and the older lords’ preference for shorn hair like the king’s. With a sigh, the prince shrugged. “Folk on the isles liked my look well enough. The highborn’ll have to put up with it.”

“Hmm,” Elias said, a neutral sound of acknowledgement. “Whose ball is it?”

“Lady Abadie’s black-and-white ball is always the season opener. Bland as hardtack, but everyone shows up.”

“Well, it’s been a few years since you did,” Elias said, tugging off one arm’s bracer and setting it neatly on the bedside table.

“Seven glorious years of freedom,” Beau said wistfully. “Almost eight! I need a drink to toast the best days of my life, now gone.”

Elias sobered, working the straps on his other vambrace. “Do you? Need a drink?”

Looking down at his callused, thick-fingered, very un-royal hands, Beau traced a scar across the back of his thumb before saying, “I…don’t know.”

He wanted a drink. Badly. He’d wanted to drink himself into a stupor since Charmant fell. But Char didn’t drink to excess, and Beau wasn’t great at moderation. Char was always in control of himself, as a good crown prince ought to be. And if Beau was going to make any attempt to fill his brother’s shoes, he’d have to try not to be a drunken lout.

“I think I’d better not. At least for now,” he said at last. He pointed a finger at his First. “And don’t you tempt me!”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Highness.” Elias said it almost mockingly, but it was a kind, indulgent sort of teasing, and El’s hazel eyes were soft and sad above his smile as he dropped the second vambrace on the table.

Gods, Beau was glad to have him here. Elias understood. The prince didn’t need to explain why he was raging one moment and sniveling or cackling or staring blankly into the ether the next. He didn’t have to tell Elias how badly he wanted to be good and right and proper and at the same time how awfully all of those things chafed. There was no need to describe the dizzying cycle of grief and fury and panic and warm fondness and manic energy that Beau’s mind spun through constantly. The guard just understood.

“Thank you,” Beau said quietly.

Elias stood, rested a callused hand on Beau’s for a moment, then crossed to the fireplace to poke the smoldering embers back to life again. “Any time, Highness.”