The Royal Curse

“Absolutely not. Look at me! I don’t need a nursemaid. I’m a mage, a perfectly competent adult, I’m, I’m tall, for fuck’s sake—”

“You’re a mage who can’t use his magic, and you’re a prince, which means you require a royal guard if you wish to stray outside the gates. Don’t even get me started on what your height has to do with it. And you hardly need me to tell you any of this, Nikola.”

Philippa didn’t bother setting aside her correspondence or so much as glancing up at me, her pen continuing its steady, if obnoxiously scratchy, journey across the paper on her desk as she spoke. A long, shining coil of hair the same mahogany shade as mine hung down over her silk-clad shoulder. My fingers twitched with the desire to reach over and give it a good, hard yank the way I would have fifteen years ago.

Well, all right. Ten years ago.

A few weeks ago. Whatever.

Instead, being a grown man of twenty-eight in the presence of the crown princess of Surbino, I gritted my teeth to keep in a reply that would’ve been beneath my dignity—and more to the point, have badly undermined the argument I needed to make—and strode to the window, turning my back to her so that she wouldn’t see my red cheeks if she deigned to look up after all.

That I was now blocking the light and making it harder for her to finish her letter could be considered a happy coincidence.

A long, put-upon sigh from behind me made my lips twitch. I opened my mouth, wanting to say something teasing, but the words died on my tongue. If I opened my mouth, I wouldn’t tease. I’d say something Philippa didn’t deserve.

Breathing deep, I gazed out at the garden beyond Philippa’s window, a sea of bright green peppered with the orange and pink and white of the mild winter’s small crop of out-of-season roses. They’d been lovingly nurtured by a palace mage with a botanical bent, and they practically glowed in a flood of honey-golden sunlight. Lovely. Everything within the palace walls was lovely, right down to the polished brass curlicues of the ornate frame holding the windowpanes and the high sandstone walls around the garden that glittered with flecks of mica.

In short, every part of my cage gleamed and sparkled, for my mother the queen would have it no other way.

Although no one else appeared to mind their circumscribed lives, from Her Royal Majesty all the way to the smiling kitchen maids. Everyone in Surbino seemed disgustingly happy to remain there indefinitely.

And why wouldn’t they be? Good harvests, thriving trade along the coast and across the mountains, strong but just rulers, and half a century of peace with our neighbors had left everyone in the city and the surrounding lands as happy and fat and dull as could be. No one bothered to have adventures.

Though, to be fair, almost all of them had more ways to enjoy their leisure time than I did. If I saw one more happy couple kissing in a corner of the courtyard, or emerging from a bedroom all rumpled, I might scream.

“You’re going to lose all your teeth before you’re thirty,” Philippa commented casually. Fuck. How had she heard the faint crunch of my molars? She’d always had ears like a bat, damn her. A rustle of paper and the soft shake of sand suggested she’d finished her letter despite my best efforts. “Perhaps you ought to wear that helmet at night—”

“Shut up, Phil,” I snarled, goaded past my patience. I spun around to face her, gripping the window ledge behind me with both hands so hard that my fingers ached. How dare she refer to that contraption the court physician had recommended to help with my habit of clenching my jaw? The moment I’d been forced to try it on, at the sensitive age of fifteen, had perhaps been the most humiliating of my life. “You wear the bloody thing.”

She blinked up at me, pale green eyes wide and limpidly innocent in a way that only infuriating elder sisters could manage—and all the more irritating for being a mirror image of mine when I decided to be a pain in the ass.

“It’s not the most flattering item, I admit,” she said. “But as you refuse to take anyone to bed with you, it hardly matt—”

At that, I saw red, an actual, literal wash of crimson in my vision that obliterated Philippa’s stupid smug face for a moment. “I don’t refuse, I can’t! Who would—I can only—don’t you dare tell me what matters! If Mama had only pushed me out a little faster or a little slower, it’d only have been an hour’s difference either way, then I’d be—” I broke off, panting, knowing that if I tried to spit out the word normal my voice would crack.

I could’ve been either a normal mage or a normal man with no magic at all, but either would’ve been infinitely preferable to being born a cursed oddity.

Outside the window the snick of a pair of clippers carried on the soft breeze, a gardener tending the already perfect flowers. Gods, the peaceful beauty of my home would be the death of me through sheer boredom. Usually I didn’t care. Most days, I simply drifted. But my mother’s decision to take away the very last bit of my independence had somehow brought the rest of it into glaring focus.

“You know damn well a woman can’t simply decide when to push a baby out,” Philippa said, her words falling into the stretching silence and pinging off of my overstrained nerves one by one. She sat back in her chair and sighed. “Niko, love, it’s no one’s fault. And there’s nothing wrong with you. You are what you are. That’s reality. You need to work within it, not against it.”

I let go of the windowsill at last, bringing my numbed hands to my face and scrubbing them up and down. It didn’t help.

Philippa loved me at least as much as I loved her, damn her—and I adored her. It was so hard to stay angry in the face of her open affection. If I didn’t at least try, though, I might cry—tall, grown man though I might be.

“As if you know,” I mumbled through my hands. “You haven’t had any babies.”

“Not only do I have the body parts to do it eventually, which you don’t, I’m a trained midwife, and just because you can theoretically heal with a thought and a touch doesn’t give you the right to minimize the skills and knowledge I had to work for!”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. That theoretically had been a hit below the belt, but perhaps I deserved it. I lowered my hands and met her flashing eyes.

“You know I didn’t mean that, get off your high horse. Phil, it may not be Mama’s fault, but I’m broken, I can’t take anyone to bed while I’m using the potion, and I don’t want to be another man’s helpless dependent if I stop. Who and when I—that’s the only aspect of my life I’m apparently allowed to choose for myself, do you understand?” She nodded grudgingly. Of course she understood. The crown princess had even less freedom in some ways. If I eventually married, I’d be expected to pick someone suitable, but she might not get a choice at all. “I can’t hand that power over to someone else. So that’s that.” She opened her mouth, no doubt to keep arguing, and so I cut her off at the pass with, “And I wouldn’t wear that horrid helmet even if no one but me could see it. Anyway, I burned the fucking thing years ago.”

That earned me the reluctant laugh I’d hoped for, and a shake of her head, along with yet another deep sigh of the kind she reserved for me and our two younger siblings.

“And I don’t need a nursemaid,” I repeated, bringing us back to the point, damn it all. “I’ve been riding out in the countryside alone for years, and I won’t have it. I simply won’t.”

Philippa shrugged and leaned forward, setting aside her finished letter and taking up a new sheet of paper and her pen.

“Only because no one had noticed and everyone assumed you were taking a guard with you as you knew you ought to. Go and argue with Mama and leave me alone, Niko. I need to work.”

Her small smile indicated that she knew precisely how far that would get me—and also that she knew I’d already tried and failed before coming to her. My efforts to change Mama’s mind had resulted in a withering glare and a hint that if I didn’t want a guard, she’d assign me a noble husband instead.

I’d run like hell.