Chapter Text
“Did you hear about—”
“Yes,” Reki bites out before Shadow can say another word. The real surprise would be if he hadn’t heard about it. Everyone who’s come in the shop for the last week asked the same question.
“I feel bad for him,” Shadow says, in that way of his, like he’s really given thought to it. “That poor kid.”
And he’s right, it is sad. A year since the prince smiled, the cryer said, and a reward to anyone who could manage it. Reki was too shocked the first time he heard it to memorize it all, but now it’s been beaten into his head like a rhyme: five fine horses to whoever can make the prince smile, a thousand pieces of gold to anyone who can make him laugh. And if he asks for it, if he likes you well enough, if he asks you to stay, his hand in marriage.
It sounds like a bad joke, no matter how many times he hears it.
In all Reki’s life, he’s met the prince three times. Never once was he frowning. Never once was he dour or rude or cold—and that’s what they call him now, Prince of Ice, a year since he smiled, a year since he showed his face at all outside of the palace walls, according to some.
Miya quirks a brow at him. “You’ve been quiet. Are you jealous?”
Reki lurches up. “Jealous of what?”
Miya’s brow angles impossibly higher. “Of all the attention the prince is getting?”
Right, of course. That’s what anyone would be jealous over. “I just don’t believe it. Prince Langa isn’t…” he waves one hand, frowning, “... like that.”
“Ha,” Miya crows. “Like you’d know.”
But he does. And Reki thinks: I could do it. I could make him smile. I’ve done it before.
The once-over he gives Reki is well warranted, in his soot- and oil-stained linen shirt and jerkin. He’s good at what he’s good at, which is fixing what needs fixed, tinkering, putting broken things back together and sometimes better than they were to start with. In practice, it’s mostly putting his little sister’s toys back to rights after they’re broken. Miya is right; he’s not the type of creature that would brush with royalty. A few deliveries to the palace, a few passing meetings—that doesn’t mean all that much.
“What do you think?” Shadow asks them both. “Should we give it a try? They said anyone can go.”
Anyone. Reki imagines Langa sat up on the throne with an endless line of hapless suitors trying for his hand or his family’s money. It’ll take days to see them all. “You just want the horses,” Reki scoffs.
“Palace horses? They would sell for a fortune.”
“Yeah, like you sold the last one you got?”
“She’s finicky.”
“And the dog before that,” Shadow adds, probably thinking about the fact that it spends most of its time sunning itself outside of the flower shop and barking customers away.
“He has a sensitive stomach!”
Reki rolls his eyes. “And there was the cat”
“He’s—”
“What? Socially unadjusted?”
“No.” Miya toes the gravel beside the cart. “He’s really soft.”
Shadow shares a look with him. Reki shrugs. That’s fair. He heaves the box on the workshop counter into his arms and makes for the cart that he’s ostensibly been loading all this time.
“I would sell them,” Miya is saying. “All five of them.”
“Aren’t you both supposed to be working?” Reki grouses. The delivery is Shadow’s, actually, and he’s late by now.
“Yeah, yeah.” Shadow stands and brushes himself off like he’s actually done a moment’s work since he walked in. “I’m headed up. We’ll report back.”
“Don’t. And don’t do anything weird to L—to the prince.”
Shadow turns on his way to the door and gives him the oddest look. “The contest is in a week. No one can get at him before then.”
Get at , like he’s locked up. But Reki has met the Queen, too, and she would never. Could never. They were a good family, and good to each other, which can only mean that this whole thing is by Langa’s choice. Or that Langa agreed to it. Or that he simply doesn’t care anymore.
The thought sours Reki’s stomach.
This isn’t how it starts. It starts like this:
Reki is eight, hanging off his mother's dress. It’s the prince’s birthday, and she’s delivering the toppings for the cake. Reki watched her make them: creatures of edible sugar that look like they’re made of glittering snow—like the prince, or so they say. He waits by the kitchen doors, feeling important, watching everyone bustle and rush back and forth. It’s loud in the palace kitchens. He’s never seen a kitchen so big or so busy.
His mother sets her buren on a table outside the door and hefts his little sister higher in her arms. “Reki,” she says sharply. “Watch these while I’m inside.” He nods.
Keeping watch, it turns out, is much less interesting the longer one does it. After what’s either been five minutes or five hours, he’s sagging against the wall, letting all the wafting smells of fresh baking lull him to sleep. He almost misses the figure that slips in the back door. The boy is plump and no taller than Reki, hat pulled low over his eyes. Too low. The boy bumps into the table he’s trying to sneak under and then bounces back on the floor and groans.
Reki is too dumbfounded to find words. He watches the boy reassess, and then he sneaks out a guilty hand and reaches for the tray on the table—the tray Reki is supposed to be protecting, he realizes only the moment the boy gets his hand on it. \
“Stop!” Reki shouts, and then jumps back as the boy spins, realizes he isn’t alone, and screams.
He jumps back from Reki as if he’s some sort of monster and Reki screams, too, because he’s sure he isn’t that scary. The table jostles as the boy careens back into it. The garden of sugar animals perched on the tray there teeters precariously and then the one on top—the big one, the bear Reki helped shape the eyes and teeth for, to make sure it was so fierce even a prince would be impressed by it—tips delicately and then falls over the side of the table, right onto the head of the boy who is still staring at Reki like he’s at least as scary as a bear. It bursts into a cloud of sugar on impact.
For a moment, neither of them move. And the boy looks down at his hands, and then up at Reki, every inch of him covered in white. He blinks with his big, blue eyes. “I messed up,” he admits.
It’s a bit of an underestimation. But really, it’s Reki that’s messed up. “Why did you scream?” Reki asks and then isn’t sure why that’s the part that bothers him.
“Oh. You scared me.”
“You scared me. ” But he didn’t. Not with the oversized jacket and the big hat and now that he’s covered in white— “You look like a snowman,” Reki tells him, because it seems like something he should know.
The boy looks down at himself again and then at Reki helplessly “I do,” he says, and then, as if it’s the most delightful thing a person could possibly be, “I really do, don’t I?”
He’s the oddest boy Reki has ever met, and he gets only a moment with that thought before he hears footsteps coming, and well. He isn’t sure what the punishment is for destroying the prince’s property but it can’t be good. They’re criminals now, the two of them, and there’s only one thing to do. Reki grabs him by his sugar-dusted sleeve and drags him toward the door the boy came in from.
“Come on!” Reki whisper-shouts when the boy doesn’t immediately follow. This isn’t the sort of thing you get away with. He’ll be in buckets of trouble—they both will, but at least Reki has his mother to discipline him. What they do to little servant boys, he can’t imagine. Turn them into toads. Make them eat mud for a week. Hang them by their thumbs from the castle gates. Something like that. “You have to hide right now.”
Reki tugs him through the door, and this time the boy follows. They trip along together for a corridor and up a set of stairs, and the boy twists his sticky grip so he’s holding Reki’s hand and pulls him down a hallway Reki didn’t see. “This way.”
Of course, a servant would know all the best hiding places. He’s pulled up a set of stairs and then down a different set, through a courtyard, and then the boy pushes through a small door and stops at last once they’re inside.
It isn’t a door, Reki realizes, but a painting they’ve walked through, and the room is nice. Too nice. “Wait, we can’t be in here,” Reki says as panic floods him.
The gold leaf on the furniture is the first indication, and then the sheer amount of it. No one needs three couches. No one needs—Reki counts them on his fingers— six chairs. Actually, no one needs any chairs in a bedroom at all unless they have not-quite-dirty laundry to set on them.
“Why not?” the boy asks.
“Because! Whoever lives here is really important!” Reki tries to drag him back to the painting that’s a door. He stops short when he realizes what the painting is of, gold frame and all.
It’s a family portrait: the king, the queen, and the prince. The prince, with his big blue eyes and pale hair staring into the middle distance. Reki turns back to the boy who led him there and examines his big blue eyes and the few strands of nearly-white hair that have slipped out from under his stupid hat.
“What’s your name?” Reki asks faintly.
“Langa,” the boy tells him without a hint of guile.
Prince Langa is your age, his mom told him, just that morning. A little shorter than you, though.
“Langa, is this your room?”
The boy nods. The movement dislodges a few crystals of sugar from his face and eyelashes and hat. His entire outfit seems like it was intended to be casual and inconspicuous and instead hit somewhere around ludicrously eye-catching. “What are you wearing?” Reki laughs, because he has to, because the boy—the prince—is still holding his hand and almost got caught stealing his own cake toppers from the kitchens.
“Oh. Is this not what people wear?” Langa shrugs in his yellow hat, his green jacket, his blue pants.
Once Reki starts laughing, he can’t stop, and then he imagines Langa ordering him to the dungeons for having the audacity to laugh at him and laughs harder because—it’s so silly.
But after a moment, a grin splits Langa’s face, and then he starts laughing too. By the time Reki can breathe again, he’s on his side beside Langa on the thick carpet that feels like it’s spun out of clouds.
Langa sits up all at once, pulling Reki up with him, since he’s still got Reki’s hand in a death grip. “Do you want to see something cool?” he asks.
Of course, Reki does.
In the end, all they got scolded for was wasting time and his mother’s worry, though privately Reki wondered later why it took her three hours to notice he was missing. It was a good day. Maybe, if he’s honest with himself all these years later, one of the best he’s ever had.
He tries once more to imagine that face and those blue eyes anything but full of joy and can’t do it. He pushes it from his mind.
If the event is in a week, Reki is tired of hearing about it by the second day. Newcomers roll into town in a constant stream. Bored knights and ladies in armor and brocade and enough of both to clothe the entire city over again, craftsmen and traders spotting a fast chance at money, and even royalty. Even kings. The chance to marry into the prince’s family is too good to pass up, it seems. Every cart and carriage that rolls by his workshop tests Reki’s patience a bit more until he's ready to snap.
And then the commissions start rolling in. A new bridle for prince Langa’s horse, a new sword and belt to go with it, a lock and key— To symbolize love, the man tells him, and no. No.
Reki refuses almost all of them out of turn. He sells a windup toy he made in his spare time to a girl who at least is polite enough to ask for it, only because he thinks it will make Langa smile.
He regrets it right after, for the same reason.
“You’re busy,” Miya says when he walks in the door and almost runs into the man walking out of it in a huff.
Reki gives him a dull look. “You have no idea.”
“So I guess we can’t convince you to come? I want a good spot in line.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“Tell a joke,” Miya says with a smirk.
Shadow pushes in behind him. “Isn’t there an age restriction?”
“I don’t know, is there, old man?”
There isn’t, apparently. Not if the range of his hopeful clientele is any indication. Old, young, rich, poor—everyone wants a piece of what’s on offer. A piece of Langa. It’s sickening.
“How old is he, anyway?” Shadow asks.
Reki answers without looking up, “He turned eighteen four months ago. On the eighth.”
The two of them are silent for a long moment, and then, “How did you know that? You really are some fanboy, aren’t you,” Miya says, pity coloring his voice.
“No,” Reki snaps. “I’ve just been to his birthday party before.”
Neither of them ask how a baker’s son ended up at a palace function, and he’s grateful for that, because he worries some part of himself once it starts going about Langa will simply never stop.
“But you’re really not going to go?” Shadow asks.
“The prince is dealing with enough.”
“That’s a sad excuse.”
He’s right. It is sad. Reki picks up the carving he’s working on, a wooden case for another wind-up toy, something to keep his mind and hands busy, and then thinks better of it and gathers up the rest of the items on the counter until he can’t carry more and turns away from them. “I’m—“ a metal file slips from somewhere around his elbow and hits the floor, hard. He winces, “—I’ll be in the back. Have fun storming the castle.”
“Aw, Reki. Come on. Even a peasant like you deserves love!”
“I’m not a peasant,” he shouts back and excuses himself.
It’s only later he realizes he forgot to deny the love part entirely.
What’s love, really?
His sisters have their books about princes and curses, witches and goblins, ogres and onions, magic and massive dresses and mice that turn into pumpkins or vice versa. It’s too much and too silly, like magic or the thought that a whole galley’s worth of suitors could make a man smile who hasn’t smiled in a year.
The second time he sees Prince Langa, he’s fourteen, and keeping a box of letters sealed with a snowflake stamp in blue wax and under his bed. Langa’s handwriting is terrible; it takes Reki half a candle to get through a single one, trying to pick the awkward curls of ink into actual sentences.
Last time it took him all night to figure out one paragraph that ended up being about a mouse Langa saw in the library during his lessons, but it made him smile. In return, he told Langa about the time a mouse got into the bakery, about the snow monsters his sisters built outside their front door, about and hoped it made him smile, and felt bad for the messenger that had to trudge through a mile of snow to bring their notes back and forth.
Sometimes the notes take weeks to arrive. He’s busy, his mother tells him. Think of all the things a prince has to learn, she says in a tone that implies Reki should be doing at least as much. And they’ll have to marry that boy off soon.
This, when she says it, makes Reki’s mood sour, though he’s not sure why. A prince too busy to write letters is at least less busy than a married prince. And married to who? What, he wonders, has some princess or stuffy prince out of Koyomi’s storybooks got to offer? Langa doesn’t like stuffy. He likes stealing food from the kitchens and stories about mice and whining about lessons.
He likes Reki, and that ought to be enough on its own.
It’s too cold to still be up writing. His hands keep shaking over the paper with the cold that’s seeping in the windows.
The palace glitters outside up against the night sky, fires still lit around the guard stations, lights in windows. One, he imagines, is Langa’s, and he’s hit by something sudden, a twinge in his chest. The last time he saw Langa in person was a year ago as he passed by in the spring parade, at a distance so far he could recognize the prince only by the color of his hair. He’d gotten taller, and Reki had been for that moment captivated.
A thump from down below in the street makes him jump.
Ink smears across the sentence he was halfway through penning: a detailed explanation of sledding because how can someone be fourteen and never have gone sledding—as he stands. It sounded like a door. Like someone knocking.
He puts his face as close to the window as it can get and tries to peer down to the street but can’t make out more than the shadows of the big snow beasts guarding the door. An indistinct black shape is moving against the wall and then around it, down toward the gate at the side of the house that leads around to the workshop.
Reki thinks of his sisters asleep a door down and his parents in their room and then throws on a cloak and slips out his door.
The intruder is fiddling with the gate when Reki comes around from the other direction. It didn’t occur to him to bring a weapon. A frying pan might have done the trick. His mother would kill him if he messed with any of her kitchen knives. A frying pan might have done it, though. Soundlessly he reaches down and grabs for a handful of snow and balls it in his fist before he rears back his hand and throws it at the strange figure as hard as he can.
It erupts against the back of the stranger’s head in an explosion of white. The figure makes a strangled scream and then wheels on Reki; they pause in mutual shock for a moment and Reki tries to make out anything below the dark hood, but then the figure lunges for him and Reki has time only to dodge and run.
The cobblestones are covered in snow, and covered in ice under the snow, and his feet threaten to slip out from under him, his steps becoming a precarious slow motion run. He only makes it halfway down the block when he feels a hand grab at the back of his coat and then the stranger makes a sound of victory as he whips Reki around to face him.
Reki screams and swats out a hand blindly. The hood goes flying off and—
“Langa?’
Langa bends over, huffs a breath. There’s snow on his cloak and a red mark on his cheek where Reki slapped the hood off him by accident. “Why were you running?” He keeps one hand on Reki’s coat like he’s afraid he’ll go flying off again.
“Why were you chasing me? What are you doing here?” He grabs Langa back, holds his arms by the sleeves. “Did you run away? Is it the marriage?”
“The—” Langa’s face twists in confusion. “The what? Oh. No, I didn’t run away. Do you think they’ll be mad I left?”
“It’s midnight .”
“Well, it was noon when I left.”
A grin splits Reki’s frozen cheeks. “Noon? Seriously?”
“I don’t know the streets.” He looks at Reki from under his floppy hair. “Are you not happy to see me?”
Reki laughs. “You’re really something. Of course, I’m happy.” He nods back toward his house. “Come on. And stay quiet. If my sisters wake up, they won’t leave you alone.”
Reki leads him around the back of the house, through the gate that thwarted Langa’s frozen fingers, to the workshop. It was a half-used shed before his parents let him take it over as his own. Inside, he busies himself lighting a fire to at least get Langa warm. Langa watches him quietly, without offering any other explanation for why he’s there, and Reki finds he doesn’t want to ask. Langa wanted to see him and that’s enough. Reki is enough.
When the fire is going, Reki sneaks back into the house to steal something from the kitchen—cake, naturally, and then tea, too, because he still isn’t sure what it is princes eat aside from pure sugar, apparently.
Back in the workshop, Langa is seated in his cloak in front of the fire, his arms wrapped around his chest, which is wider than it was, and thinner too. The plate he sets on Langa’s lap and then pours a cup of tea clumsily, the way he’s watched his mother do it. Probably, they have professional tea-pourers at the palace. Everyone at the birthday gala looked like they’d trained their entire lives to be able to set a plate down properly or pour a glass without spilling a drop. Reki’s fingers are clumsy, and wrapped in little bandages from minor burns and scrapes.
But if Langa notices anything amiss, it doesn’t keep him from inhaling everything on the plate and then everything in the cup so fast Reki worries it might give in a stomach ache.
He smacks his lips when he’s done and settles back on the stool like it’s a fancy couch. “Thank you,” he says primly.
“Hey, are you taller?” it occurs to Reki to ask.
“A little?”
The king is tall—but maybe that’s how kings are. In his memories, Reki has to look down at Langa, but now the positions are reversed. He’s still got the chubby cheeks and floppy hair, but he’s starting to look like the prince everyone talks about. The kind Koyomi makes up stories about: horses and armor and crowns. The mental image of Langa armored and crowned fails him. He’d probably fall over in all of it, or fall off his horse, at least.
It strikes him that Langa’s probably not done growing. Not if those shoulders and hands are anything to go by and Reki feels a thrill of something that must be jealousy go right through him.
At least Langa is too busy glancing around the workshop to notice. “Is this where you make things?”
It is. Reki leads him around on the full tour: the tools on the wall, the cold forge, the workbench still covered in the day’s half-finished projects. He picks up the random pieces of metal and fittings to reorganize them nervously, and then Langa’s voice comes from inches behind him. “What are you making?”
Reki jumps. “Nothing. Well,” he holds up the piece of metal carved into a blade that’s sitting there, half of a pair of pairs that’s meant to be a set of ice skates for his younger two sisters. “I was going to try to teach Nanaka and Chihiro how to skate, but I think they’re still a little young.”
“Is it fun?”
“Skating? Yeah. Have you never gone?”
Langa shakes his head, but he’s smiling. “I meant having siblings. You’re always talking about them.”
“Oh.” Reki rubs his fingers over the wood counter, embarrassed. “It’s not bad, I guess. Do you—I mean, do you wish you had siblings?”
Langa looks up to the ceiling. “I don’t know,” he tells it. “It would be easier to see you if there were someone to distract the guards.”
It’s Langa logic. Reki snorts and then a laugh bursts out of him. “I never thought about it like that.” Langa looks pleased to have made him laugh, his head now cocked to one side, eyes fastened on Reki’s face with an animal interest. “It must be hard being the only prince,” Reki tells him, because this is true, too, and he never thought about that either. If Langa weren’t the heir—the only heir—maybe he could see Reki everyday. Maybe no one would care what a second prince did, or a third.
By comparison, Reki has it easy. His parents know he won’t become a baker like his mother or an accountant like his father. He’ll apprentice as a smith or carpenter, or something else useful with his hands. He won’t be a great hero or a fighter, or even a merchant, and definitely not a prince, but he can at least be useful. He can make useful things.
Langa lifts the blades and turns them over, and then sets them back in place, in perfect line, and glances over the dozen other projects sitting there. Cogs and wheels and carved wood figures.
Reki realizes only belatedly that one of them is the wolf he started with Langa’s cool eyes in his mind, a gift he’d meant for the mid-winter celebration but lost his nerve to send. He picks it up on impulse and presses it into Langa’s hand.
“That’s yours. If you want it.”
Langa stands frozen for a moment before he turns it over in his fingers as if Reki carved it out of glass and not scrap wood.
“You’re so incredible,” he says after a moment, from inches away, leaned so close that Reki can smell the mint tea on his cool breath, right against his cheek.
“No, I’m not—“ he turns and is glad for the poor lighting because Langa can’t see his red cheeks. “I’m just messing around.”
He scoots sideways down the counter and puts a distance between them . “Anyway, what are you studying these days?” he asks, and then wants to bury his face in his hands for how lame it sounds to his own ears.
“Mmm… History. And training, mostly.” He doesn’t sound particularly enthused with either, but Langa isn’t the whining type. Reki thinks his mother was right; princes are busy, and Langa has more to learn than anyone else in the kingdom if he wants to be a good ruler. All the responsibilities of the kingdom will fall on him one day. It sounds lonely, but Langa has a good heart, so it must come naturally to him. Suddenly his midnight escapade down into the city doesn’t seem so strange. Well—noonday, as it was.
“Is that… fun?”
Langa purses his lips and fiddles absently with one of Nanako’s dismembered dolls, halfway through a repair. He manipulates the doll’s one arm so she’s got it out like she’s about to challenge the wolf he set on the counter beside her to a duel. “Yeah. I might even be ready to enter the tournament next year.”
“Next year!” Reki shouts and then slaps a hand over his mouth. The tournament? “Isn’t that really soon? Isn’t it, you know, dangerous?”
“Oh. Just some of it.”
“And fifteen? Isn’t that way too young?”
“Not really,” he insists, but Langa looks cagey now. “Have you ever been to watch?”
Once, when Reki was very young. It’s held in autumn after the harvest or something, and he’s aware of it less for the actual fighting or the whatever-it-is they’re fighting to win than the fact that his mom ends up recruiting him as unpaid labor for the whole week’s worth of baking Last year, he made so many hand pies that he still can’t look at one without wanting to be sick.
“A long time ago,” Reki tells him.
Langa looks briefly crestfallen. “Oh.”
“But if you were in it, I would go for sure,” Reki says hurriedly. “I mean, if you wanted me to. If you wanted me to, I wouldn’t miss it.”
The smile Langa turns on him is dimpled and so big his eyes wrinkle at the corners. “Yeah. I would love it, Reki.”
He uses Reki’s name the way he must be learning to use a sword. It cuts through Reki’s remaining composure like a skilled blade and this time when he flushes he has more trouble identifying what exactly is making him so upset—if upset it is what he is.
Reki excuses himself back to the house to pilfer a blanket and more food and let the heat cool from his face.
Between the two of them, they polish off what’s left of the cake and another pot of tea and then Langa settles next to him by the low fire under their shared blanket, cloak around both their shoulders, and listens as Reki tells him about his sisters and all the goings on in the town and all the silly stories they pass around about the prince and the palace. When Langa's head taps against his shoulder it's so late it might as well be early and Reki drifts off right there next to him.
In the morning, he’s gone, but the cloak is still there, wrapped around Reki like someone tucked it there. When his mother asks where it came from, Reki tells her it was a gift from a friend.
It’s even, maybe, the smallest bit true.