[ Sebas ]
I have served three generations of Nimorlin royalty.
I have dressed princes for wars they did not return from. I have stood behind emperors while they signed orders that ended bloodlines. I have carried messages that toppled houses, guarded doors behind which the fate of nations was decided over wine and whispers, and killed eleven men in the service of the crown — each one deserving, each one necessary, none of them forgotten.
I am Sebas Orthen. I have held the rank of General of the Imperial Vanguard, Commander of the First Shield, and — in a brief and regrettable period during the border conflicts — Acting Marshal of the Northern Theatre. I have been called the strongest soldier in the Nimorlin Empire, a title I did not seek, do not enjoy, and cannot deny, because it happens to be true.
And I am currently standing outside a ten-year-old boy's bedroom door, holding a tray of honeyed milk, waiting for him to stop pretending he cannot hear me.
"Young lord."
Nothing.
"Young lord, it is past the fifth bell."
A sound from within. Something between a groan and a protest — the kind of noise that a hibernating animal might produce if you poked it with a stick, which, for the record, I have considered.
"The ceremony begins in six hours. Your garments must be fitted. Your hair must be attended to. Your presence is expected at the family gathering in the east hall before—"
"Sebas."
His voice came through the door muffled by what I estimated to be two pillows and one blanket folded over his head. I knew this because I had catalogued his defensive sleeping formations over the past four years, and this particular configuration — the Double Pillow Barricade with Blanket Canopy — was his second-most-committed position. The most committed involved wedging himself between the bed and the wall, which he reserved for occasions of genuine resistance, such as bath days and diplomatic dinners.
"Yes, my lord?"
"Is the empire on fire?"
"It is not."
"Is anyone dying?"
"Not at present."
"Then it can wait."
I closed my eyes. Not in frustration — I had moved past frustration with this child approximately two years ago and had entered a state that I can only describe as resigned devotion. The kind of feeling a mountain might have for the river that slowly, patiently, relentlessly carved a valley through its centre. You didn't fight the river. You endured it. And in the quiet moments, if you were honest with yourself, you admitted that the valley was beautiful.
I set the tray on the small table in the corridor and folded my hands behind my back.
The assignment had come four years ago. I had been fifty-eight years old, at the peak of my career, commanding the First Shield — the elite guard that protected the inner castle and the royal family. The Duke had requested me personally. Not through channels, not through the military council, not through the Emperor. He had walked into my office, unannounced, sat in the chair across from my desk as if he owned it — which, technically, given that House Adelheim's taxes paid for approximately thirty percent of everything in this castle, he arguably did — and made his offer.
"I want you to raise my grandson."
I had stared at him. The Duke — Lord Aldric Adelheim the Fourth, patriarch of the oldest house in the empire, a man whose personal military force rivalled the royal army, whose wealth could purchase entire kingdoms, whose name was spoken in the same breath as the Emperor's and sometimes before it — was asking me to become a butler.
"My lord," I had said, "I am a soldier."
"You are the best soldier," he corrected. "Which is precisely why I want you making sure my grandson eats his breakfast and learns to tie his boots. Anyone can swing a sword, Sebas. I need someone who can protect the most important person in this empire while simultaneously ensuring he doesn't sleep through his own life."
"With respect, my lord, the youngest prince is six years old. He requires a nursemaid, not a—"
"He requires you."
The Duke's eyes. That was the thing about Lord Adelheim that the histories and the rumours never quite captured. They talked about his wealth, his military, his political influence, the fact that he ruled his dukedom like a separate empire and the Emperor tolerated it because the alternative was civil war. They called him the most feared man in the world, and they were not wrong.
But his eyes, when he spoke about his grandson, were not the eyes of a feared man. They were the eyes of someone who had seen something rare and fragile and was building walls around it not because the thing was weak but because the world was not ready for what it would become.
I took the assignment. Not because the Duke's request was difficult to refuse — though it was — but because I looked at the file on the youngest prince and saw something that I had not seen in thirty years of serving the Nimorlin line.
A child who was still a child.
Not a prince performing childhood. Not an heir rehearsing innocence. A genuine, unscripted, stubbornly ordinary child who climbed things he shouldn't climb, talked to birds, fell asleep in the castle gardens with grass in his hair, and had once told a visiting lord from the seventh house — a man responsible for twelve thousand soldiers and the largest iron mines in the empire — that his hat looked funny.
The lord had laughed. Genuinely. The first genuine laugh heard in the castle reception hall in living memory.
That was Edrin. He moved through a world of calculation and performance and barely concealed hostility, and he did not notice any of it, and the astonishing thing was that the world noticed him noticing nothing and responded by becoming, briefly, a little more honest. A little more human. As if his obliviousness was itself a kind of permission — permission to stop pretending, to stop performing, to be, for a few seconds, something other than a function of the empire.
The first year had been the hardest. Not because Edrin was difficult — he wasn't, not in the way princes were usually difficult, which involved demands and tantrums and the casual cruelty of children who had been taught that everyone around them was a servant. Edrin was difficult because he was kind. Genuinely, instinctively, recklessly kind. He shared his food with the kitchen staff. He memorised the names of every servant in the east wing. He once gave his ceremonial cloak — a garment worth more than most families earned in a year — to a shivering stable boy, and when I pointed out that the cloak was imperial property, he looked at me with genuine confusion and said, "But he was cold."
He was cold.
As if that were sufficient reason. As if the world were that simple. As if kindness required no calculation, no strategy, no awareness of consequence — just the observation that someone needed something and the impulse to provide it.
I had spent my life in a castle where kindness was currency — given strategically, withdrawn tactically, never spent without an expected return. Edrin's kindness had no return. It was not an investment. It was not a performance. It was rain. It fell because it fell, and it fell on everyone equally, and it did not care whether you were a duke or a stable boy or a butler who had killed eleven men and still couldn't figure out how to get a ten-year-old out of bed.
I knocked again. "My lord. Your grandfather will be arriving soon."
A pause. This was new information. The defensive formation shifted — I could hear the blankets moving, the pillows being rearranged. The mention of the Duke was, in my arsenal of motivational tools, the equivalent of a siege engine. It was not deployed lightly, but when deployed, it was devastatingly effective.
"How soon?" came the voice.
"Within the hour."
Another pause. Then: "Did he bring honey cakes?"
"I could not say, my lord."
"He always brings honey cakes."
"Then I suspect the answer is yes."
Silence. The particular silence of a child weighing the competing forces of comfort and curiosity, of warmth and sugar, of staying in bed versus the gravitational pull of the only adult in his life who made every room louder and warmer and more alive simply by being in it.
"Fine," Edrin said. "But I'm not wearing the itchy shirt."
"It is silk, my lord."
"Itchy silk."
I allowed myself the smallest compression of my lips. Not a smile. Generals did not smile at tactical retreats. But something adjacent.
The door remained closed. The boy remained inside. The empire continued turning on its axis, oblivious to the fact that its most consequential prince — the one whose future would reshape everything, though no one except an old duke and an older butler suspected it yet — was currently negotiating terms with his blankets.
I waited. Patience was my weapon. It had always been my weapon — longer than any blade, more reliable than any army, the one tool that never dulled and never broke and never ran out.
The Duke would be here soon. And then the day would begin in earnest.
I adjusted the honeyed milk on the tray. It was getting cold.
It would have to do.