Page 6 of The Prince and His Stolen Throne

Sweat beading my brow, I finally just held the damn mirror against the wall with one hand. I took a deep breath and let the air settle in my lungs before speaking. “I call on the Lord of Grimnight as your—” the next part stuck in my throat, but I pushed past the discomfort to complete the summons “—as your loyal son.”

I waited.

And waited.

Annnnd waited.

Five minutes later, my own freckled face continued staring back at me. “Dammit, Old Man, answer your mirror!”

My reflection rippled like a stone tossed in a lake, and the image changed. The background shifted from my darkened bedroom, lit only with a few dim candles, to a mage’s study. Books and half-finished projects crowded every surface. Something bubbled ominously in the background, either a magic potion or burnt coffee.

The figure standing before me wore a black cloak with a hood obscuring their face. The cloak sat askew on their shoulders, clearly thrown on in a hurry. A hint of striped pajamas peeked out from underneath the cloak until they fixed it.

A stranger meeting them on the street would have turned in the other direction, eager to avoid whatever disaster they brought.

But it was hard to be intimidated by someone who you knew had just rolled out of bed.

“Ahh, my treasure,” they hissed.

I pursed my lips, unhappy with the possessive. Like I was an object rather than a person. “Can you take off the cloak, Old Man? I feel like I’m talking to a bedsheet.”

“I will not,” he replied, straightening to his full height—which was less impressive when the reflection started at his knees and was only three feet tall.

The mirror was supposed to be hung on the wall, so that we could look each other in the eye, but I stopped doing that after the last time it fell and shattered on the ground. I’d found broken glass for weeks afterwards, usually in my feet.

“And will you stop calling me Old Man?” he grumbled. “I’m barely fifty.”

I arched an eyebrow at him.

After a moment, he said, “Fine, I’m almost sixty, but I’m notold. Sixty is the new thirty. Besides, you should address me respectfully.”

“I’m not calling you ‘my lord’ or ‘my liege’ like one of your minions.”

“Then call me ‘Father.’”

The gilded frame dug into my clenched hand. “I can’t call you Father because that’s what I call Brendon, and I don’t want to confuse you two in my head.”

“What about ‘Dad?’”

“That’s what I call Rick.”

“I am yourrealfather! I deserve the first choice of names! Not these scraps you offer me.”

Here we go again. For someone who gave up his only child as part of a long-con, he sure liked reminding me of our blood relationship every chance we spoke. When he’d sent me out the door with that fake letter from my ‘mother’, he’d reminded me, “No matter what, I will always be your real father.”

The problem was: this scheme had taken longer than he’d expected. After twelve years, I’d spent more time with Brendon and Rick as my fathers than I’d ever spent with him.

“Names aside, I have something toreport.”

He stopped whining and leaned closer to the mirror. Then backed up because leaning closer only gave him a better view of the embroidery on my waistcoat rather than my face. “What news have you brought me?”

“I know how they keep the Kingdom Defense Spell active.”

Before the morning meeting with my fathers, I’d known two things about the spell. What it did—keep the evil mages out. And how it did it—by creating an illusory pocket dimension superimposed over the primary dimension, where everyone appeared miserable, and the Desolated Lands matched their names.

My old man had learned the happy, prosperous truth of the five kingdoms when he’d met my mother, who had been exiled for studying the ‘wrong’ kind of magic. Unfortunately, knowing the truth didn’t get him any closer to the real kingdoms. No matter how many years he spent traveling through them, he saw only what their names promised: desolation.

Then another nanny suddenly quit, and he had to bring me along on his next attempt. While I was with him, he realized we were experiencing two different places. Where he saw ruins, I saw happy homes. When he smelled the putrid rot of garbage in the streets, I smelled fresh baked bread. The baker even gave me a little hand pie and, with a pitying look, told me to let her know if I needed any help. I still wasn’t sure if she could see my father, confused and frustrated, or if she thought I’d been narrating my surroundings to myself.