Chapter 162: Five Men For Princess Lyria
Chapter 161: Five Men For Princess Lyria
Olly tilted his head.
"Normally," he said, "the dukes go first, aye?"
Brianna nodded vigorously, as though she had been waiting for someone to ask this exact question.
"That’s what I thought," she said.
Jacob scratched at his jaw.
"Aye, that’s how it should be," he said. "Dukes first, then the rest in order. That’s always been the way of it."
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
"So why’s he been put at the end?"
A few heads turned. Not all at once — just that slow ripple of attention that moved through Mercer’s Row when something was being said that people wanted to hear properly.
"Perhaps it’s the royal family," one of the patrons said.
He was a heavyset man, the kind who took up space without apology, with rough hands and a face that had seen enough seasons to stop being surprised by much of anything.
"They’re doin’ it to get back at him," he continued. "That’s what it is."
"For what?" someone else asked.
The heavyset man shrugged.
"For bein’ him," he said. "For bein’ the kind of man ye can’t make small no matter how hard ye try."
Jacob hummed at that.
"He is daring," he admitted. "I’ll give him that."
"Daring’s one word for it," Olly said.
Another patron leaned in from the end of the bench — a wiry man with a close-cropped beard who worked somewhere near the market district and was known to know things before most people knew to ask about them.
"Here’s the thing, though," he said, his voice dropping just enough to suggest he was saying something worth listening to. "They can’t touch him."
Olly looked at him.
"Can’t touch him?" he repeated.
"Nae properly," the wiry man said. "Don’t ask me why, ’cause I couldn’t tell ye the full of it. But the gossip — and I’ve heard this from more than one place, mind ye — the gossip says the duke’s family has power. Real power. The kind that doesn’t announce itself."
"Course it doesn’t," Jacob said quietly. "The kind that announces itself is never the kind ye want to worry about."
The wiry man nodded.
"All I’m sayin’ is," he continued, "the royal family can arrange him last all they like. Can keep his people from knowin’ the location. Can put him at the end of the queue like he’s an afterthought." He paused. "But it doesn’t change what he is."
Olly leaned back on his bench and took a long, slow drink.
"One thing everyone knows about Valenridge," he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, "is that they’re rich. Proper rich. And powerful with it."
He set his mug down.
"So none of this is surprising."
"Rich is one thing," said a man near the back. "But I heard something else."
Several heads turned.
The man — older, with silver at his temples and the particular deliberateness of someone who chose his words before spending them — leaned forward slightly.
"There is a fuckin’ power struggle," he said.
The words settled around them like something dropped from a height.
"And it’s between the royal family and Valenridge," he continued. "That’s what I heard. And it’s not recent either. It’s been goin’ on for a while, quiet like."
A hush moved through the gathered crowd on Mercer’s Row.
Not shock, exactly.
More like recognition.
The kind that came when something you had vaguely suspected turned out to have a name.
Jacob exhaled slowly.
"Well," he said, "that explains some things."
"Explains a lot of things," Olly muttered.
Before anyone could say more...
"It’s the handsome Baron!"
Every head turned.
Brianna had risen from her seat entirely, one hand pointing at the scrying veil with the authority of someone making an important announcement that she felt the rest of the street had been too slow to notice.
"The handsome Baron!" she said again, in case there was any confusion.
Olly blinked.
Jacob blinked.
Helen pressed her lips together and said nothing, which was its own kind of response.
On the veil, Baron Redwick had taken his seat. His spectacles caught the light as he settled, his posture straight, his expression the careful composure of a man who had decided in advance how this would go.
Brianna dropped back onto the bench and leaned forward with both elbows on her knees, watching the veil with the focused attention she reserved for things she had decided mattered.
"He can marry Princess Lyria too," she announced.
Olly turned to look at her.
"Too?" he said.
Brianna nodded.
"He’s handsome," she said, as though this were sufficient justification for most decisions.
Olly stared at her for a long moment.
Then he looked at the veil.
Then back at Brianna.
"Lass," he said, "how many people are ye plannin’ on marryin’ to Princess Lyria at this rate?"
Brianna considered this with genuine seriousness.
"Five," she said.
There was a beat of silence.
And then Mercer’s Row erupted in laughter.
The full-throated, unrestrained kind that started in the chest and refused to stay contained, the kind that spilled from one person to the next until it had taken over the entire stretch of benches and chairs and upturned barrels.
"Five!" someone wheezed.
"She’s eight years old and she’s runnin’ the kingdom already!" another called out.
"Get her a seat on the council!"
Brianna did not laugh.
She watched them all with the patient dignity of someone who had said something entirely reasonable and was simply waiting for everyone else to catch up.
"You can’t marry five people," a patron managed, once he had recovered enough to form sentences. "That’s not how it works, lass."
Brianna tilted her head.
"We’ll see," she said. "I’ll make sure Princess Lyria marries five. She deserves all the handsome men, after all."
Then she added after a thought, "She’s handsomer, though."
"Lass, I may be uneducated, but I know there’s no word like that," Olly said, as they all erupted in laughter again.
