The Founder Who Ruled A Country

Chapter Ten: What The Old Prince Built

His grandfather was waiting by the window.

Lucien had walked there with the note folded in his fist, through corridors where the palace was only beginning to wake. Servants hurried past with fresh linen for the Council chamber. Somewhere a clock struck six, and a guard straightened as he passed and did not dare meet his eyes.

Prince Florian sat in the same chair as before, wrapped in a grey blanket, and behind him the sun had cleared the peaks so that the whole range blazed white against the sky. The chessboard was gone from the table at his elbow. In its place lay a heavy leather household book, the kind Aurelio kept locked in a cabinet below stairs, open to a page of narrow columns in faded ink.

Lucien knew the name at the top of the page before he was close enough to read it. The Chamberlain, written in the same faded ink as everything else on the page, as if it were nothing more than another household expense.

He stopped in the middle of the room. For a long moment neither of them spoke. Somewhere below, a door closed, and footsteps crossed the courtyard toward the Council wing.

"Sit down, Lucien," Florian said. "You look as though you haven't slept."

"I haven't."

"Then sit, and I'll spare you the trouble of asking." The old man rested one thin, spotted hand on the open book. "I opened this account myself."

The words did not land at first. They hung in the air between them, too simple to mean what they meant. Lucien sat, mostly because his legs had decided for him.

"I paid Senator Rayne to start his investigation," Florian went on. His voice was dry and even, as if he were reading out the morning's appointments. "I made certain Bastian Vail found an engineer at your company who was willing to sell. Vail was always going to want what you built. All he needed was a door, and I made sure someone opened one for him."

"The lawsuit," Lucien said.

"Yes."

"The board. The bank accounts. All of it."

"All of it."

Lucien stared at the book, at the neat columns of payments in a clerk's careful hand, and felt something inside him go very quiet. He thought of the investors laughing around the glass table. He thought of the maintenance man unscrewing the Lattice sign from the wall, and of forty people packing their lives into boxes.

Then he thought of Zara, and the quiet broke.

"They put her in handcuffs," he said. "In front of everyone we worked with. They told her she was looking at twenty years."

"I never ordered anyone to touch her." For the first time, the old man's voice sharpened. "Men like Vail and Rayne will always run further than they are paid to run. That was their greed, not my instruction. And the call in my voice, and the men waiting for her in your garage, those were Casimir's." Florian's mouth tightened. "My son saw the fire I had lit and decided to warm his hands at it. He took advantage of the chaos I made, as I suppose I should have known he would."

"But you made it."

Florian held his gaze. "The lawsuit, the collapse, the empty bank accounts," he said quietly. "Everything else, I set in motion with my own hands."

The room was so still that Lucien could hear the clock on the mantel. Out past the glass, a hawk turned slow circles above the valley, riding the morning air.

"Why?" he asked. It came out rougher than he meant it to.

The old man drew the blanket a little tighter around his shoulders, and when he spoke again, he sounded tired rather than cold.

"A war is coming for Valmorre," he said. "Not with guns, not yet. With money and contracts and votes in rooms like the one down that corridor. Every fund and every government on earth wants what we hold, and they are lining up to take it from us one piece at a time." He leaned forward. "I needed the Prince on his throne, not in a garage in Harbridge. And you would never have come home while you still had something of your own to stay for."

Lucien looked at him. He looked at the thin wrists and the sharp eyes and the hands folded over the ledger, and he tried to find the grandfather he had known.

It was this man. That was the worst of it.

This was the grandfather who had walked beside his pony in the palace stables when he was ten, holding the reins long after Lucien begged him to let go. The grandfather who had read with him by lamplight in the long library, tracing every word with one finger until Lucien could read them on his own. The grandfather who had told him, the summer before his mother died, that a Varenne could lose his money and his lands and his crown and still be a Varenne, so long as he kept his word.

Lucien had kept it. He had kept it through every humiliation they had thrown at him, and this man had known that he would. He had counted on it.

"I made Mother a promise," Lucien said. "You knew that."

"I knew it." Something moved behind the old man's eyes, and for an instant he looked almost sorry. Then it was gone. "And I knew you would keep it until there was nothing left to keep it for. So I made sure there was nothing left."

Lucien thought of every night in that garage, when he and Zara had believed they were building something no one could take from them. All that time, an old man in a palace had been waiting patiently for him to fail.

Florian closed the household book gently, the way a man closes a story he has finished telling.

"I needed you to lose everything you built," Prince Florian said, "so you would finally come home to what I built."

Lucien did not answer. He could not have said a word if he had tried.

Down the corridor, the Council bell began to ring for the vote, slow and heavy, each stroke rolling through the old stone walls.