Lost Destinies

↳ 10: Poor Kingdom Management & Blueberry Muffins

A hundred years ago, give or take a decade or so, Princess Briar Rose had fallen into a deadly sleep. Camilla Foxflower—not her family, not her prince—was the only reason she was alive. And yet it seemed that the man whom she had instructed herself to awake the princess was constantly taking all the credit. Well. That was just the way these things worked, it seemed. Anyway, the point being, Nikolai always irritated her slightly, but today he was getting on her last nerve.

"Why don't we just evacuate everyone? At least until this all blows over—"

Camilla sighed, her head resting in her hand and rubbing her temples. "You mustn't abandon your people, for the last time, Your Majesty—"

"I know what I'm doing, Foxflower. What if they come after us next? They could be after all of us. There's nothing to do but leave." Unfortunately, the skills acquired by trekking through dangerous terrain and beheading great beasts and waking hundred-year-old princesses from enchanted sleep did not carry on into practical kingdom management. The Novikov sons' father had contracted the stardust plague and passed before they ever got to finish their training, thrusting them into the family business without warning. Both Alexios and Nikolai were free spirits, and to them every problem could be solved with adventure, like one of the taglines at those FastTrav portal hubs. Find your destiny—an adventure around every corner! Numerous advisors, bureaucrats, and managing offices had always been there to help, but at the end of the day, Nikolai—the king, and, of the two of them, the one who held seniority—made the decisions.

"And go where, exactly, Your Majesty?" asked Wolfgang de Roches, the head royal advisor to Beauty and Alexios. He, like Camilla, who was there to advise Briar and Nikolai, looked perpetually exhausted. It was one thing to be transformed into an inanimate object for a year. It was entirely another to deal with not one but two entirely incompetent young kings who could hardly keep up with the rising crime, homelessness, and hunger statistics they'd inherited when they both decided to take up the throne together. And Camilla had seen it all, the slow but steady progression in the last two centuries that she'd been alive from prosperity to anarchy. One would think that having two sets of royals would make the monarchy twice as likely to succeed, but while Camilla loved her kingdom and was ever loyal to its rulers, some days Nikolai and Alexios seemed like two halves of a whole idiot.

King Nikolai lifted a finger, then dropped it. He began to pace, his wife tapping her fingers on the armrest of her throne. Nikolai could never sit still. "Perhaps we could... put up a barrier," she murmured, a dreamy expression on her face. Neatly curled strawberry-blond ringlets spilled over her shoulders as she tilted her head. "Like Tech Zone."

"And how, precisely, would we pay for a tech wall?" Queen Beauty snapped. She and Briar rarely got along. The public didn't know, of course. They would go ballistic. They had a perfect image in their heads of the both of them. But Briar and Beauty came from two entirely different nations and two entirely different generations, and it was nearly always impossible to convince them to see eye to eye because of it.

"Tax raises!" King Alexios said eagerly, snapping his fingers. Taxes were his solution to just about everything. The citizens of Rose Kingdom never agreed. Camilla had to admit that while Alexios was probably even better than his older brother at the saving-damsels-and-fighting-monsters part of his job, economics had never been one of his strengths. He also had an irritatingly unpredictable temper, but today he was just jumpy, as if he'd drank far too much tea.

"What are we supposed to tell the citizens?" Beauty added. "Surely we cannot simply say outright that a major monarch has fallen."

Briar worried her lip, looking anxious. She only ever had three moods. Half-awake contentment; mild worry; and a state of unsettled, watered-down emotion, as if she was confused about whether to be sad or angry or nothing at all. Maybe it was a side effect of the hundred-year sleep. It made for a docile queenship. She turned to Camilla, a dainty hand resting gently on her arm. "Fairy Godmother? What do you think we should do?"