I loathe very few things, but among them is the strong scent of a plastic-y, corn-textured purple flower: lavender.
Its fragrance dominates soaps, waxes, and flavorings, all to hide the sweet musk of fresh death. The perfume is haunting, like the gloom just before dusk takes the sky over in moody combinations of blue, orange, and purple.
I torture myself with the scent, because it is the only thing I have left of my mother.
My fingers spread over her dusty bed covers, feeling the stiff down feathers resist the pressure of my palm. They crunch and crackle like leaves in snow when winter has greeted autumn a week too early. As I release pressure, soft particles of dust pool around my hand, leaving the shape of my long fingers behind.
Her humble room has been vacant for thirteen years, but her death hits me like it was yesterday—it's as though I'm still the same little prince who clung to her breast for her maternal love. The maids no longer care for her chambers, yet to honor her life, they continue to supply a fresh vase of tall-stemmed lavender flowers once a year on the anniversary of her death.
I breathe in, slow. The sharp floral stench burns my nostrils, sends my heart to my throat.
Lavender is the ceremonial flower of death, and also my mother's favorite flower. The minimal effort the maids put into their floral arrangement therefore serves two purposes, neither of which pleases me, her only begotten son.
Alone in her chambers, I am at peace. No hiding, no pretending, and the fond memory of my mother lingering in the static air of her bedchamber. If I close my eyes, she's alive and vivid in front of me, her eyes bright and her black hair falling around her face and a smile touches her cheeks when she beholds me. This sort of blessing is rare, sort of like the magic we humans don't possess but would sell our organs for a taste of. Only once a year can I see her so clearly in my memory.
When I open my eyes, she's gone.
I say a quick prayer to our ancestor, Arioch Faundor, who founded our kingdom, even though I know he won't answer my pleas to protect my mother in the cosmos. I'm aware she's more likely to be burning wherever damned souls go, but on a day like today, my hopes are forgiven, and maybe even answered.
Light casts in from a parted window, casting reflections off the disrupted dust like jewels. With the rays of the sun comes the heat of the blistering summers in Arioch, humid and hot and greedy to hold scent captive in its moist miasma.
Pinching my nose, I back away from the large bed and glance around the unused room, covered in webs of dead arachnids and displaced with rotted wood furnishings. The sea-colored vase at the center of her dusty dresser is the one thing living in the room—the only object with any color, and the only object without layers of dust covering it—and yet it is the thing I despise most in her familiar absence.
I make my way back to my own chambers, which are in the left wing of Arioch's monstrous castle, opposite that of the king's consorts, where my mother's chamber rots.
As I pass by uninteresting lengths of walls covered in portraits, my heart returns to its rightful spot in my chest. In a year's time, I will visit her room again, and then again a year after. Even after my brother ascends the throne and our father's bones return to the ground, I will still be the only one to remember her legacy.
No portrait of her handsome face graces the walls, neither mine, nor my brother's. The honor is saved for kings.
I push the golden handles and open the large oak doors of my chambers, which are slightly larger than my mother's but still not as large nor befitting of a prince as are my half-brother's. For the most part, I've learned to live with this reality—that nothing I have will be as great as his, nor as royal, nor as symbolic. But it's only a room; I've faced much worse favoritism.
With a stretch of my arms, I swish my feet across the stone flooring and kick my boots off before flattening myself against the still-cool fabric of my bed's cloth covers. I ought to savor it while I can, before the humidity ruins everything with its hot summer breath.
"Ramiel," a voice calls from the doorway. I twitch at the sound, but I immediately recognize the crackly warmth of my dear maid, Bernadette.
"Come in," I call back, rolling to one side.
The gray-haired woman peeks in through the door and with her small, judging eyes appraises the room to see what needs to be returned to its proper place. This always makes me feel like she's expecting someone uninvited to jump out and scare her. I don't blame her—I wasn't an easy child to raise—but with my twentieth birthday and the coronation of the crown prince coming quickly, she ought to be a bit more at ease.
Anxiety quickly displaces the hazel in her eyes and her skin pales, beads of sweat speckling along her small forehead. My hair goes on edge, too. Her composure stiffens as it used to when she'd disciplined her maids, but the expression in her shrunken pupils and flattened lips can't mean anything good.
Her gaze finally settles on me as she kneels slowly, a few feet in front of my bed where I now rise to attention. She places her hands daintily on her stained apron, brushing the folds down, and looks at me with a soft and sad countenance. It's rare for her to smile, and for just a moment I believe there's a hint of one there, but it's quickly erased by a twitch in her jaw.
"You've earned my audience. Speak." The phrase comes out harsher than I usually say it, reflecting my own paranoia. The maid doesn't flinch at my demand.
Bernadette shifts her small, wrinkly hands and bunches her dirtied skirts in fists. Her breaths come out as weak and shaky as a leaky bellow. Once her eyes lock with mine, they hold me with such intensity, I can't bring myself to look away. "My boy," she whispers dryly, and the sadness in her voice slices through me, cold. It's so sudden that I lose my practiced composure and for a moment, my entire body is weightless as I wait, suspended in the choppy silence of her breath. Her eyes glisten with budding tears. I stand with an abruptness I'm not known to show, not even to those of my own blood, and fall to my knees before her. I grasp her shoulders tightly and pull her head of silver tangles to my chest.
"What happened?" I ask, but in response her body only shivers in my arms as her hands continue fiddling with the edges of her apron, turning them over the dark gray skirt. "Tell me what happened." My voice softens and this seems to help her calm down a little.
Her lip quivers as she barely squeaks the words out, but they're there and they're nothing that I would've expected and everything I've always dreaded.
"Xavelor has been defeated," she whimpers and looks away to cry. "Rami, your brother is dead."
I draw the string of a golden longbow back to my cheek, my fingers shifting slightly over the bamboo arrow resting on the leather grip. Normally, I'd protect my arms from the string's painful whip and my hands from the strenuous precision they're required to maintain, but I hardly had any time between Bernadette's cruel announcement and the meeting my father, the King of Arioch, called into session before the day's second meal.
The sun mocks me, streaks my body with its glower as I keep my desperate focus on the stump of a once-majestic oak.
My heart quickens and my breath shortens as frustrated tears threaten to burst from my eyes. The arrow shivers against my white knuckles, the string dampens from my sweat.
I release the tension and the arrow flies past its target, zipping through a bush beyond the treeline. A growl rips from my throat, but not even I know the emotion backing it. I swing my arm down and the strap of my leather quiver slides off easily, thumping against the ground. Lightweight arrows spill across the short grass, clanging against each other like toothpicks.
The bow drops from my open hand and thuds on the dirt. Then I fall on my back, my arms extending out to my sides.
Xavelor has been defeated.
I shake my head as tears spill over my ears, further dampening my sweaty hair. For Xavelor to have been defeated would mean that our kingdom has been conquered. Since the dawn of Arioch's reign over a thousand years ago, our kingdom has proved itself to be the strongest. I'm not sure which battle my half-brother fought, but with his strength and experience, he's not easily beat.
The funny thing is, I'm not sad. No, far from it.
My brother and I hadn't been close, not after many years of his time spent on the battlefield, away from classes in literature and history, away from everything I know and experiencing everything I never will.
Sure, I can string a bow and aim, but I'm not trained in the arts of swords and strategy. I was never given the chance. Tucked beneath the carefully-embroidered covers of the dirty quilt of Faundor royalty, I am the blemish. The oily rise of skin under a sweaty brow that no one desires to see, but can't help the existence of.
The sky is a frightening blue, and the sun is almost white. I know not the consequences of my brother's death, but for the moment, I don't wish to know.
I try not to be upset at him for dying the day of my mother's death.
I try not to imagine the look on my father's face when he acts like he'll be the first one to share the news.
And most of all, I try to forget that I'm anything more than the sum of my pathetic parts.
The tears dry sticky on my cheekbones. I smile up at the feathery clouds scraping over the sun's unrelenting glow.
Bernadette calls my name. It's time to discuss the future of the kingdom.
"Prince Xavelor Faundor, the warrior who was to claim his title as Crown Prince at the Feast of Undying, has been defeated," the king thunders, sending the news like crackled lightning across the long table of high nobility—it strikes them at staggered intervals.
"He can't be dead," a long-nosed noble quips, "he's your son."
"Indeed," another says, spectacles slipping down from the greasy heat. "Who is to take the throne? Who is to lead our people?"
My father—the king—Azriel Faundor flicks his black eyes to me, his nostrils flaring as though he's about to spit on everyone he speaks over. "You seem to forget I have another son," he grumbles.
All eyes shift immediately to me. The attention is so hostile that the only way I can bear it is to grip the edge of my seat until wood splinters and pierces the flesh of my bloodless fingers. Even then, the eyes burn into me like branding iron.
None seem to notice my paling face, for after only a moment of silence, they begin to debate this logic at once, hollering over one another to make their points known. In a combination of heat and stress, I close my eyes to allow their shouts to numb this strange reality.
The song my mother used to sing to me plays in my head, its rhythm and haunting melody becoming one with the voices of raging men. The words to the nursery rhyme have long since left me, but I remember how it sounds. Her voice, fabricated from years of our separation, hums softly as though trying to calm my racing heart. Perhaps this year, she is blessing me with the reminder of her voice, too.
My father's mouth turns down and I'm sure he's said something to me amid the noise, but everything sounds muffled like I'm underwater and everyone is screaming nonsense. In a sense, this is true, but I think he expects me to hear everything all at once like some magical, multi-eared creature.
I move my lips but I'm not sure words come out. I try to say my instinctive "Yes, your Majesty" but the sound isn't there. Instead, it feels like I'm really drowning, because I start to cough and shake.
Xavelor has been defeated. Bernadette's shaky voice revisits my thoughts, haunts my memory, replaces the purpose for my mourning with a sense of betrayal.
I shrink in my seat as bickering continues, as nobles discuss my life and my brother's life and try to figure out a way to somehow twist two very different threads into one knot.
Some toss around their favorite insult: bastard, as though it makes any difference. Even with their malice, their sharp tongues and quick accusations, I've survived peacefully under the protection of the castle's walls. As long as my brother returned triumphant from battles and wars and other military-related endeavors, I'd remain as the illegitimate brother with no connections nor pride or reason to go on living.
The thought that he's dead and gone doesn't settle yet, and I won't let it. I can't let it. If he's dead, then... then... I don't even know where to begin.
Xavelor, the dragon slayer. The war lord. The promising son of King Azriel. The crown prince. All titles bestowed upon him since birth were well-deserved and as prophesied. As far as the general public knows, he's the only son of King Azriel. My birth was scratched from records, my name a punishment to whoever spake it.
Who am I, to sit with these strategists and military men as though their equal, when I can hardly shoot an arrow?
That familiar word eventually cuts through the babble of upraised voices, thick like the core of an oak. Where it was hushed before, but just loudly enough for me to hear, it almost sounds as though now a chant: bastard, bastard, bastard. While my brother enjoyed many regal, honorable titles in his life, I've always been stuck with one lousy label... one that I didn't even have any control over and one that that I'll never be rid of.
As the bickering over my fate descends into shouting matches, my father's face twists and contorts with anger and annoyance. His dark eyes finally re-align with mine, and it's obvious that he hates me. He hated my mother, casting her aside as a consort while his rightful queen shared his bed and faded away from sickness. He'd always found a reason to blame me for her death, as though I had the ability to accelerate her deterioration.
Banishment wouldn't be terrible. I've crept to the inner villages under the guise of a merchant; I know the workings of the kingdom and how to properly function as a peasant. The only thing currently separating me from such a status is my room in the castle and Bernadette, who refuses to serve anyone else. Perhaps if I were to be sent away, I could take her with me.
To my surprise, my father speaks neither of exile nor condescension; he instead remains calm as he raises a hand. His expression is unreadable, though stern. The lines pressed into his face are from years of rule, so even his resting expression makes him look perpetually agitated. It dawns on me how infrequently I've seen my father, and how the timing of Xavelor's coronation would've likely sped up his ascension to kingship. King Azriel is surely ready to pass the crown on, or at least, he was.
The room quiets down and all eyes are fixed on me and the aging king. The heat rises along my back, soaking my thin clothing slowly with sweat, layer by layer.
In a world where I've been encouraged to blend in, to act as though I were a shadow haunting the walls of the castle, I am not sure how I should react to so many expecting eyes angled down rectangular noses, all trained on the ignoble offspring of a long-dead consort.
"Duke Perri," the king growls, dark eyes flitting to the silver-haired noble seated next to him. The suited man folds a hand over his chest in reverence. "You mentioned your son. Has he returned?"
The duke stands, brushes his shirts courteously and puffs out his chest. "Yes, Your Majesty. He and a few others. He's brought back Prince Xavelor's helm, because as you're already aware, there is no body to bury."
If the room could grow any quieter, it does. A hush befalls each nasally Captain and courtesan. With Xavelor's death fully addressed, melancholy bleeds from the walls and moistens the men's cheeks.
"Ramiel is my son by blood, even if he is not of the blood of the late queen," the king booms, surveying the room of mournful soldiers. When he returns his gaze to me, it is the opposite of looking into the eyes of an equal; he demands an insufferable obedience before he speaks again. "Xavelor is dead, and one of my own blood ought to replace him, as it is written." The energy in the room zings between us and suddenly it feels like it's just me and him—a worthless prince that pales in comparison to his warrior father, the king. I shrink further into my seat, wanting only to do the one thing I'm decent at: disappearing. But he doesn't allow me this comfort. "He is the next rightful heir to the throne."
Never have I ever heard such words uttered from the king's mouth. Am I dreaming? No, surely this would be a nightmare, if I was truly not awake.
My limbs go cold. Maybe I'm the one who has died, and this is my reward. Recognition. Some obscure, nonsensical version of what I've always wanted—acceptance. A torture of my own invention; a branch from my consciousness that pleads to be snapped in two.
"How does he plan on replacing Prince Xavelor, your Majesty?" the spectacled noble growls, voice filled with doubt. I gulp back the anxiety that suddenly floods over my tongue. The question of the hour permeates the air like poison.
The cruel nightmare unfolds into more shouts across the table, some aimed at me, and others at the king, whose face grows redder and redder and whose wrinkles worsen as his eyebrows tighten.
"Silence!" he commands with overboiled anger. The yelling ceases, but murmuring offenses lull around the table like Arioch's receding tides. "We are in a time of war. With Xavelor gone, we have no choice but to find a warrior to replace him before my kingdom discovers his absence. Until then, we have to maintain a proper stalemate with Midra. All of you wish to retain your positions in my kingdom, do you not?"
The men grow quieter still, almost indistinguishable from the warm summer breeze playing with the trees outside. A breeze that wafts in and relaxes everyone around the table. We all know my father is right, but none agree that I'm the best choice for the job.
The king studies my expression. I don't know what he sees, but I'm sure it's far from what he wants to see. Still, his gray eyebrows stay flat over his dark eyes and the lines of his face remain as they are. He's unfazed by whatever face I'm making, and it's one of three—pure shock, fear, or humiliation. I'm not even sure which it is.
"Ramiel must find a master willing to teach him the ways of martial arts. He will have to prove himself worthy of his brother's rightful place, but he will not receive my help, nor the help of any at this table." His voice hardens at the end. Of course I wouldn't receive the training I've always wanted for free as Xavelor had. It had been his birthright as the son of the late queen to fight for damsels and drench his iron fingers in the black blood of dragons. My father turns to look at me, his expression darkening. I can see a devilish glint in the slight movement of his eyes. "Xavelor was expected to return victorious, then make his first public appearance at the Feast of Undying. You have until then to prove yourself, after which you will have earned your place as Crown Prince of Arioch."
My brother's likeness hasn't graced the castle walls, nor have the peasant tradesmen with bristle brushes glimpsed his regal features; his face has remained hidden since his enlistment. If I achieve victory at the Feast, my title won't be the only thing that receives an upgrade...
I begin to object, but one of the men from the table does so before I'm able to utter a word.
"That gives him three months, your Majesty! Not even Xavelor could've managed such a feat!" His voice is filled with mockery and complaint, though my father neither flinches nor rebukes his words.
"Three months," King Azriel echoes. Then, he finally breaks his stoney glare. His eyes relax, and I see that this must not be his decision alone. He lowers his voice, addressing me. "I suppose you ought to find a master soon, then."
I nervously gulp the spit that pools over my tongue. As the group whispers among themselves, I know they're agreeing to make it impossible for me to find a master. Who would want to teach a prince who has no swordsmanship experience, magic-using history, or skills in the martial arts? Others my age have already mastered many of these elements. I'm only good at things like science, literature, and history—fresh from recently finishing school, but all completely useless in battles against dragons and other magical beasts. I've used a bow, but not to any impressive degree. My skills with a blade are limited to the kitchen.
My eyes wander to my father, but his thoughts must be somewhere else, his gaze concentrating on the table. Perhaps he's thinking about who he'll appoint to be king when I fail in three months. Or maybe, just maybe, he's thinking about how the kingdom will celebrate when they discover a new warrior prince in place of the infamous Xavelor Faundor.
I shake my head and the king turns away fully.
"I won't wish you well," the king says. "You are dispensable, as was your mother." The crowd murmurs and the air sizzles with heat. He rarely speaks of the woman he threw away, of the woman whose life she dedicated to my betterment. "Should you decide to revoke your bloodline, I will have no problem finding a much stronger candidate for the throne."
My jaw tightens, hands grip the chair. A scream scratches at my throat, begging to be let loose. But I know he's expecting this reaction, so I do everything I can to cool myself down, even whilst he continues to weave blasphemies into his words.
"But if you do decide to make an appearance and prove that you aren't as worthless as the dust gathering in her room," he says with dripping malice, his lips curling at the edges, "you'll have your crown, and your title."
As he leaves the room—long furred robes dragging behind him—I allow myself to seethe, thoughts of my own worthlessness and lack of power clouding my thoughts. Then my arms relax, the tension quickly vanishing along with the king.
I hate the fire that fuels my self-loathing, the utter disgust I have with my situation and my inability to have overcome it until now. I hate it because it stokes my desire to prove that I have what it takes, so I can snatch the crown from his head and declare it as my own.
I know not the first thing about being a king, but I'd make a hell of a better father, so the trade is equal.
Before the rest of the men leave, I storm past them, smearing my bloody, splintered fingers over my ashen trousers. They can watch me with scornful looks, with hate, with low expectations.
But in three months' time, they'll be groveling before me, begging for me to return their titles.
King Ramiel Faundor.
A smile ghosts over my lips as I blur down the grandiose hall of the castle's public quarters.
Ramiel Faundor, King of Arioch.
I have never genuinely considered the name without sarcasm or hostility.
Not until now.