“Sebastien was having a tea party, which was something he liked doing,” he began slowly. “He was a solitary, dreamy child with an unfettered imagination. The problem was, he was having it in the library. He was sitting there with all his stuffed animals, babbling about who knows what, when my father walked in with a minor Austrian aristocrat who was visiting. I was too young to be attuned to matters of state, but I had the sense he was someone Father wanted to impress.” Max didn’t remember the man’s name, but he did remember Father had insisted that Max and Seb wear their formal eveningwear at dinners during the visit, which both boys hated. “I wasn’t there at the start of it,” he said, thinking back to that day. “But my father upended the table Seb was using. I came running when I heard the ruckus, and when I got there, Father was in the midst of throwing Seb’s favorite stuffed bear into the fire and telling him that only women had tea parties and that he was an embarrassment to the family and to Eldovia.” Dani winced. “Yes, apparently a tender eight-year-old not adhering to proper gender conditioning is a threat to king and country. Seb had a black eye the next day.” He could still see it, the grotesque midnight-blue blossom against his brother’s pale skin. He could still feel it, too, the shame blooming in his gut when his father’s guest gasped. And the anger when Mother started trying to smooth things over, when she looked at him like he was supposed to help in her twisted endeavor. “I waited for something to happen, for there to be a reckoning of some sort—for my mother to object or for my father to apologize.”

“But nothing happened?” Dani asked quietly.

“Nothing happened,” he confirmed. He remembered waiting again, later that night in the nursery, thinking that even if Father wasn’t going to apologize, surely Mother would appear with some retroactive explanation, some words to soothe and placate. She didn’t come. And when not a word was said the next day, Max had come to understand that he and Seb were on their own. They couldn’t rely on their parents, and since their parents were the duke and duchess, ultimately they couldn’t rely on any of the household staff, either. “I decided then that I would use what power I had to draw my father’s fire, so to speak.”

“So he hit you instead?”

“Not really. A few times.”