Vhalla bit her tongue and swung open her door, hoping Larel would be waiting and would save her. She was not. The prince caught the closing door with a hand, and Vhalla turned sharply.

“I am still recovering, my prince, and would like to rest. Please, excuse me.” She mustered the last of her polite decorum.

“I am trying to help,” he said.

Vhalla saw concern marked across his pained expression. “Oh?” Her patience ran thin. “Like you helped the last time we had a little chat?”

“Everything I told you then was true.” Something in his tone gave Vhalla pause, she swayed slightly. “Vhalla, please sit. My brother and Father will give me hell if something ill befalls you on my watch.”

Vhalla eased herself onto the bed, pulling off her boots and lying down. She rolled on her side, her back to the prince. Everything hurt the moment she began to relax, but there was not much opportunity to do so as the prince rounded to sit on the edge of the bed, facing her. Vhalla glared at him.

“Vhalla, please listen. I want to tell you something,” Prince Baldair implored.

She sighed. “If I listen, will you go?”

He nodded, and Vhalla waited expectantly. “My brother and I are three years apart, which is a significant gap when you are five and eight, or twelve and fifteen, but at fifteen and eighteen and up it becomes less and less significant.” She wondered why he was exhausting her with trivia about their birthdays. “Not long after my ceremony of manhood there was a year where my brother and I decided to engage in some friendly competition.”

“Friendly competition?” Vhalla braced herself for what that meant between these men.

“I’ve always been ... charming.” Prince Baldair smiled at her, and she didn’t even refrain from rolling her eyes. At least he laughed. “My brother grew as a strange, sad child. At one point it seemed as though he hit a new low and just gave into the darkness and distance surrounding him. To be honest, I never saw him leave it.”

Vhalla found it interesting how Prince Baldair’s and Larel’s descriptions could be both similar and different.

“At some point we had a row, and doesn’t really matter about what, he was eighteen and I was at the ever hot-headed age of fifteen. I said he could not even get a woman to so much as glance at him because of how he was.” Vhalla stilled, beginning to listen intently. “For whatever reason, my brother took the challenge.”

“Challenge?” she repeated softly.

“For one year, it was a challenge for who could have the most women agree to share their bed.”

Vhalla’s eyes widened. “That’s ... awful.”