A Dove's Tale

Chapter 33

I almost wanted to follow Prince Clavis to the kitchens just to see what he was like with the other servants, but I had a feeling he wouldn't let an audience interfere with his weird teasing and flirting. He probably would enjoy it even more. So, I cut away from him as quickly as possible and went to the laundry to dry off and change. Prince Chevalier's clothes were still hanging neatly on the clotheslines crisscrossing the makeshift drying room. I knew nobody would touch them until I arrived. It was sometimes comical how much he scared the servants. People who'd never had a single interaction with him avoided him and everything associated with him like the plague. Nobody complained about the chores I took upon myself, things that weren't specifically assigned to me, like doing his laundry. I was fairly certain the cook would gladly hand his job off to me, too, if I asked. It was like everybody thought a single mistake would result in Prince Chevalier executing them on the spot.

Maybe he had done that before.

He was hard to figure out. I felt like I knew him better than most, which made no sense, because I'd only known him for less than two weeks. Prince Clavis grew up with him. If anybody knew Prince Chevalier inside and out, it should be Prince Clavis. And yet, the things he told me didn't always line up with the things I'd discovered on my own. Maybe I had fabricated an image of Prince Chevalier in my mind, as Prince Clavis put it. But Prince Clavis had his own fabrication, filtered through a lens of hatred and inferiority, one that blamed Prince Chevalier for everything, justified or not. I couldn't say for sure that Prince Chevalier caused his own mother's death, or Prince Clavis' mother's suicide. I wasn't there. I didn't know. It seemed to me that there were a lot of factors in play, though. Prince Clavis' mother wasn't married to the king, for instance. At least, that's what it sounded like, based on what he told me. Her best friend's husband, a man who didn't return the love his wife felt for him, fathered her child. That had to cause a huge strain on their relationship. And then when Prince Jin arrived with the news of his mother's death, the king should have turned to the queen, the woman who loved him and was right there waiting for him, but he turned away instead. That must have broken her heart all over again. She had plenty of reason to lose hope, and that was before considering Prince Chevalier, a mere child, being weighed down by heavy expectations from the day of his birth, and being targeted for assassination right in front of her.

And then killing said assassin right in front of her.

No wonder he was so cold.

His cloak didn't survive this assassination attempt, despite my best efforts to save it. I left it in the laundry and took the rest of his clothes back to his room. The seamstresses would probably want the original cloak for reference when they made him a new one, so I'd come back to pick it up after I finished in his room. And then I'd sequester myself in the library and finish the polishing from yesterday.

Assuming everybody left me alone, that is.

It was still strange to walk into Prince Chevalier's room and find it dark, but at least I didn't have to worry about waking him up when I lit the candles scattered about the room. He never woke easily. I folded his laundry and left it on the sofa, and then I got into my regular routine. With any luck, that's what today would be. Regular and routine. No surprises, no complications, just me, alone with my thoughts and my cleaning.

At nine o'clock, I opened his drapes and woke him with the usual greeting. And, as usual, he was not quick to get out of bed. He didn't even push back the covers. He was just a lump under the blankets, barely moving in response to my greeting. The tactic I'd developed for this situation was to annoy him with pointless chatter until he got up.

"This is quite the storm, your highness," I started, pulling clothes from the bureau to replace the casualties from yesterday and complete the outfit on the sofa. "I was afraid the carriage would tip over from the wind yesterday."