Chapter 1658: The Royal Palace
The Royal Palace was not so much a building as a city in its own right, walled away from the rest of Gaalen behind a high curtain of pale stone and patrolled at every gate by men of the Royal Guard in the sapphire blue and silver livery the house had worn for more than two hundred years.
Henri had grown up inside those walls and still sometimes forgot, when he was outside them, just how much of the kingdom’s wealth had been pulled inward across the centuries to make the palace what it was.
The Grand Court dominated the southern side of the inner walls with not only a vast, echoing chamber that could hold hundreds of barons, more than a dozen counts and the dukes of the Ruling Council for the rare occasions when the king summoned every lord in the realm, but also the quiet halls of power where the Ruling Council met as well as their personally appointed ministers who oversaw the administration of the vast kingdom of Gaal.
The Royal Library crowded against the south-eastern corner, holding the archives of every decree written by every king since the founding of Gaal, along with a treasure trove of texts too rare and valuable to be handled without the express approval and supervision of the royal archivists.
There was even a small temple to the west, nestled amidst the sweeping expanse of the Royal Preserve’s manicured gardens, orchards, and carefully maintained hunting preserve, should the royal family ever need the comforts or guidance of the Church away from the prying eyes of the Great Temple at the center of the city.
In a crisis, the royal family could rely on their own smiths, armorers, and an entire village worth of servants and attendants to grow crops, tend to livestock, and support the royal family even if a siege dragged on for more than a year. It was a world of its own, walled off from the rest of the world and completely self-sufficient if it needed to be.
There was a level of undeniable paranoia that had gone into transforming the palace compound into such a fortress, and it had required the destruction of an entire district to make space for the sprawling Royal Preserve, but Charles III, or Charles the Mad, had been not only ruthlessly paranoid but incredibly cunning when he launched ’surprised’ the kingdom with his plans to remake the city of Gaalen into a ’true seat of royal power.’
He’d died before the new walls were completed, to a sickness that even the Saint couldn’t cure, leaving behind notebooks filled with mad ravings about the Gnawing Death tearing at his mind, stolen suns burning out men’s eyes, and trees that wept for their long lost brother.
Henri had seen the notebooks with his own eyes, and the writing on the pages grew more and more stilted over time, with pages torn by the pressure of the quill on the parchment, where the ailing king had underlined something to the point of covering a third of a page in lines of emphasis. What he meant when he wrote ’The Depths of Darkness sing of our sins’ was anyone’s guess.
No king or prince had borne the name ’Charles’ since then for fear of inheriting the curse that plagued the last man to bear the name.
"Whatever he was afraid of," Henri muttered as his carriage approached the family wing of the palace proper. "We’ve never seen it throw so much as a stone at the walls."
Henri wasted no time once the carriage pulled to a stop, opening the door himself and hopping down from the carriage before Pierron could retrieve a stepstool for him.
"Do I have time to change, or is it urgent?" Henri asked as he hurried through the cold to the warmth of the palace halls. The snow was falling faster now, in fat, heavy flakes that swirled around his legs like tiny knives of ice, piercing through the thin, fashionable hose he’d worn for the masquerade and reminding him of how... ostentatious his outfit for the masquerade would look in an audience with his father.
"A change of clothing has been prepared for you in your chambers, your Highness," Pierron said, hurrying to keep pace with the young prince. "Something significantly more somber."
"As long as it’s warm and Father won’t scold me for it," Henri said, taking the spiralling steps to his chambers two at a time while his fingers started working at the intricate knots of his half-cape.
Two attendants awaited him in his dressing room with a fresh set of clothes laid out for him. Fine silk breeches lined with thick wool that had come all the way from the mountain lowlands of Lothian March matched with a silk doublet dyed a deep sapphire blue, covered with so much silver embroidery that it was difficult to see the fabric underneath the twisting scrollwork that covered the garment.
Combined with boots polished until he could see his reflection in them and an intricately tooled sword belt, the outfit transformed Henri from a young dandy out for an evening of drinking and dancing with the young ladies of the realm into a stately, proper prince.
"A ribbon for your hair, your Highness?" One of the attendants asked as he prepared to gather up the prince’s long, light-brown locks.
"Leave it down," Henri said, allowing himself this minor act of rebellion. "I only tie it back for fighting and facing the court, and unless father has summoned me for a public audience, this is neither."
"If, if you’re certain, your Highness," the attendant said, though his fingers still twitched toward his charge’s hair with a black satin ribbon in hand before he made himself step back. The king would see the work that had gone into polishing the silver buttons on the young prince’s doublet and the precise folds of the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket... He would understand that it was his son’s defiance of protocol and not the carelessness of the staff that led to his son’s slightly disheveled appearance... or at least, the attendant hoped he would.
"Now," Henri said, rolling his shoulders back to settle the heavy doublet across his broad, muscular chest and shaking his hands to settle the lace spilling from his sleeves around his sword-calloused hands. "It’s time to see what prompted Father to summon me away from the masquerade..."
