Chương 166: Chapter 162. The Prince

The boys didn't even change. There wasn't time, and Adom wasn't in any mood to spend what little they had. Road-dust still on all of them and the trout barely touched, they left coin on the table and were in a hired carriage inside the quarter-hour, rolling out of the inn district with Caelen seated across from them and the city sliding by the windows. It took about twenty minutes to reach the prince's estate, and Adom spent most of it looking out, because the way there was worth looking at.

The streets gave over to green before long: wide cultivated grounds where the city loosened its grip and let things grow. Some of it was ordinary: oaks, tall pale birches, the sort of trees he could have found anywhere. The rest was nothing of the kind. Trees rose along the road with trunks striped like sweets and crowns of soft fluff in colours no oak ever wore — pink, orange and a deep, improbable blue — swaying gently in the wind. Also, there were pixies.

They came in little drifting clouds of light, none of them bigger than a thumb, threading between the strange trees and the carriage windows and leaving faint trails that hung a moment in the air and faded. Caelen scarcely glanced at them. They crossed over from the Fae Realm in great numbers here, he said, once Sam proved unable to stop staring — had done for longer than anyone could remember.

There was old history between them and the people of Oriscael, older than any record, and simply understood by everyone here. In this place, unlike most, the fae were not that rare. Then the trees opened, and the estate stood in front of them. It announced itself with high walls, a gate worth more than most homes, and guards who stood a little straighter as the carriage drew up. One came forward as it rolled to a stop.

"State your business." Adom leaned toward the window and let the borrowed voice carry it.

"We're here to see the prince. It's a matter that won't keep." The guard's face said precisely how often he heard those words, and precisely how little they usually meant. Then Caelen leaned across into the light of the window.

"Caelen Baelys, son of Oberys Baelys." He provided.

"The prince knows the name. He'll want to know I'm here." The guard held his eyes a beat longer, then stepped back and gave a short nod to someone out of sight. The great gate began, slowly, to swing open.

"He'll see you," the guard said. That was fast, Adom thought. He filed it away. Caelen's name had opened that gate quickly enough to tell him plenty — how much House Baelys was worth to this prince, and how much the prince stood to lose with Oberys in a cell — and then the carriage was moving again, up a long drive, and there was no time to sit with it. A maid met them at the doors and asked them to follow, leading them not inside but around, along a path that curved between hedges toward the back of the estate.

The air changed as they walked. Thinner here, cleaner too, with a faint sweetness to it and a lightness that finally made the height real; a reminder, somewhere in the lungs, that they were standing a very long way above the world. The sky overhead was blue, but it was a near sort of blue, close enough to feel like a ceiling, and the clouds drifted low enough that Karion, beside him, reached up without quite meaning to and ran his fingers through one.

It came apart around his hand like smoke and closed again behind it.

"Huh," he said quietly.

"Don't," Damus murmured, though he was looking too. Sam said nothing at all, which from Sam was its own kind of statement. The path opened onto a garden: a quiet, green place built around a wide, still pond. At the edge of it sat a young elf with his trousers rolled and his legs in the water, a line loose in his hands. He was fishing, and hadn't heard them come.

"A moment," the maid said, and went ahead. She bent and spoke low. The elf nodded without turning, murmured something back, then glanced over his shoulder at the cluster of dusty travellers at the edge of his garden, and lifted a hand to wave them in.

"Come on," Caelen said under his breath.

"Together." By the time they reached him the prince was rising out of the water, a fish caught and flapping in one fist. He handed it off to the maid without ceremony — she took it as though this happened most days — and stood barefoot on the grass, drying a hand against his shirt. Caelen bowed properly, with the full courtesy a prince was owed, one hand flat to his chest. Adom and the others followed half a beat behind, copying the shape of it as best they could manage.

"Caelen." The prince's voice was even, and frayed at the edges. Not quite cold. Only very, very tired.

"I'm sorry about your father. Truly. You should know I've had people on it since the hour I heard, and I'm doing everything that can be done."

"I know, your highness. Thank you." The prince glanced down at himself — the wet legs, the grass, the maid carrying his catch away — and something close to rueful crossed his face. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"Don't take the fishing for indifference," he said.

"It's about the only thing that keeps my hands still, these days." Then he looked them over, the four strangers Caelen had walked into his garden without a word of explanation, his gaze touching each of them in turn.

"Now. Who are your friends?" But before any of them could answer, the prince… frowned. It came over him all at once, the easy tiredness gone, his head tilting, his attention narrowing onto Adom with a suddenness that pulled every eye in the garden his way.

"... Is there a problem?" Adom asked. The prince didn't answer. He stepped closer instead, studying him as though the road-dust and the borrowed face were a fog he was trying to see past.

"This is— your highness, these are associates of mine," Caelen tried, "they came with me to—""Mage." The prince's voice cut across him, almost wondering.

"Is that you?" Adom held his composure. A sensitive, then. Some people could feel the shape of a spell, and the print of a person's mana, the way others could pick one voice out of a crowded room. It wasn't impossible he'd caught the edge of something.

"Uuh, I am a mage, yes," he said evenly.

"If that's what you're—""No. Not a mage." The prince shook his head, and now there was something close to urgency in it." The mage. The one who—" He stopped himself, then came another step closer, close enough that Adom could see he was the shorter of them, looking up.

"You don't remember me?"

"... Should I?" Adom said, very carefully.

"That signature." The prince's eyes hadn't left him.

"I'd know it anywhere. I have a feel for these things — always have, it's half of what I'm good for — and one like yours doesn't come around twice in a life. The mask is good. It's very good, but it does absolutely nothing for me." He took a breath.

"It's you." Busted, Adom thought, wearily. And then the prince reached up — he had to reach up a little, shorter than Adom by a head — and took him by the shoulder, and said, simply:"The Undertow, you freed me from there." Adom looked at him properly this time. Past the rolled trousers and the bare wet feet and the worn-thin look of him, down to the eyes, and the eyes were amber.

A warm, strange type he had seen once before, a very long time ago, looking out at him through the bars of a cage in the Undertow, when he was trying to escape Helios and the Children of the Moon. Holy shit.

"You're the elf," Adom said, and for a moment nobody moved. Then the prince's whole face broke open." Ahah! Yes! Yes!" He had Adom in an embrace before Adom could do a thing about it, gripping him hard, laughing into his shoulder.

"It's you. What are the odds, after all this time, that you'd walk into my garden, of all the gardens in the world? Do you know what that is? That's fortune. That's nothing but good fortune, and I won't hear otherwise." Over the prince's shoulder, Adom caught his friends' faces, every one of them utterly lost. Sam in particular was staring at him with both hands spread in a frantic, silent what — in the name of everything — is going on.

Adom could only glance sideways and give him nothing back, on account of not being entirely sure himself. Caelen cleared his throat.

"Forgive me, your highness, but… I think the rest of us are rather lost. How exactly do you two—""You remember," the prince said, letting Adom go and turning to him, lit up with it, "the story I've told you about the boy? The one who got me out of the cage, back in Sundar?" Caelen's eyes went wide.

"... That was him?"

"That was him." The prince laughed again, looking Adom up and down with open delight.

"He's grown a fair bit since. But the mana doesn't lie, and neither do I, that's the boy. That is the boy who saved my life." Caelen looked at Adom as though seeing him for the first time, which, to be fair, he more or less was.

"Right." The prince straightened, and remembered himself all at once.

"And here I've left you standing in the grass with the road still on you. Where are my manners." He swept an arm toward a low, grassy rise a little way off, where a table sat under a broad parasol with chairs set round it, the whole garden spread out below it.

"Up there, sit, all of you, make yourselves at home. I'll have food and drinks sent out at once, anything you like. You look like you've had a long road and a poorer welcome than you deserved, and I mean to fix at least the second of those."

"Your highness, that's really not necessary." Adom began.

"A moment, that's all. Let me make myself presentable, I'll not receive the man who saved my life with pondwater to my knees." He was already moving, already half-turned, beaming over his shoulder.

"Sit and eat! I'll be straight back." And he was gone across the grass before Adom could get another word in. The moment he was out of earshot, four heads turned to Adom.

"All right," Karion said.

"Explain." Adom dropped into one of the chairs — no sense standing on ceremony with the host gone — and rubbed his face under the edge of the mask.

"There's not much to it. Seven years ago I ended up somewhere I had no business being, the Undertow. Long story, and not a pleasant one." He waved it off.

"Eren and I were getting chased through it by a vampire and his gang who'd taken an interest in me, and on the way out we passed a row of cages. Slavers' stock. One of them had an elf in it. So I let him out." He shrugged.

"Didn't think twice about it. We were rather busy not dying at the time, and I never saw him again. Until now, apparently." There was a silence.

"... A vampire," Karion said.

"Yeah, his name was Helios, God rest him somewhere inconvenient."

"... He was chasing you through an underground slave market when you were twelve?" Karion sat back and stared at him.

"Dude. What kind of life have you been living? Honestly. Every time I think I've finally got the measure of you, you mention something like it's the weather."

"It comes up less often than you'd think."

"And Eren was there too," Damus said quietly.

"That explains a fair amount about Eren, actually." Caelen, though, had gone still somewhere in the middle of it, and now he was nodding slowly to himself.

"I see," he said.

"Now I see." He looked round at the others.

"You should understand what you just heard. Veyslav didn't end up in the Undertow by any accident. It's an old, ugly thing, what was done to him." His voice dropped.

"His own brothers had him drugged. Then they sold him. Handed him quietly to slavers with orders to carry him off the continent and leave him to die somewhere too far away to ever trace back. That way no blade in the family was ever raised, nothing needed explaining, and a prince who'd been alive at breakfast was simply, by nightfall, gone from the world." Hearing that, Adom could laugh as he pinched the bridge of his nose, realizing that yes, it was him who'd changed the timeline after all. Of course it was.

Who else could it have been? Silly Adom.