There’s a hush that runs through the room when the royal family enters. The nobles wait with bated breath to see exactly how splendid the garb is and, more importantly, how to emulate it. Excitement courses through the room as dread courses through me. My body’s on point like a foxhound in the reeds, waiting for the slightest movement to send me into a frenzy.

There—King Sref and Queen Kolissa come out first, dressed in matching maroon velvet with deep gold threading. Queen Kolissa looks as beautiful as ever, dark eyes as sharp as her children’s and yet soft with obvious happiness. King Sref’s long salt-and-pepper mane is braided with red velvet ribbon, but it’s the only thing that tells me he’s the same man I’d seen before the Hunt. Everything about his face has transformed with Varia’s return; his wrinkles are eased, his amber skin glowing from within. His gray eyes, once so exhausted and apathetic, now brim with life. He nods and smiles at nearly every noble he passes, sweeping his grin over them all. He looks like a much, much younger man.

And then, the inevitable.

I can feel Lucien’s very presence cut the air like a heated knife as he walks in. Dressed entirely in deep indigo silk laced with platinum beads, he looks like the night sky itself. But there’s a strangeness about his outline—something missing I’m used to. His hip is absent of his usual white mercury sword. It was originally Varia’s. I wonder—did he give it back to her? We spoke of it, didn’t we? Keeping our family’s swords so that when they might return, we could give it back to them.

But that’s a distant memory.

His midnight hair is combed back, short and slick, and a wave of horror moves through the crowd when they see it.

“Who would dare cut the prince’s hair—?”

“I heard he did it himself, at his Hunt—”

“Does he want to be a commoner?”

“It’s repulsive and shameful—Cavanos’s prince, with the hair of a servant!”

I watch Lucien’s obsidian eyes, but they’re staring straight ahead without so much as a flicker. He won’t give them the satisfaction, and part of me swells with twisted pride. He cut his hair that night at the Hunt in front of all his noble peers as a message—fragments of his speech still ring in my mind. He wanted to eschew Vetris’s reliance on tradition, and on the tradition of hate. Cutting the long hair that marked him a royal had been a gesture. But the nobles don’t see any of that. They simply scorn someone daring to do something different.

“Should I ask him to fetch my tea?” a nobleman whispers to another man just beside me, and they share a snicker.