No, not a pity! He was marrying of his own volition, and marrying very well at that. Lady Daylily was rich, well connected, and beautiful too, which didn’t hurt anything, though he wouldn’t have minded much if she were a little less beautiful, all things considered. But still, who was he to complain? How many men in the Eldest’s court had desired Daylily as their bride? Lionheart, for one; dozens more besides. Any one of them would give his right hand to marry Middlecrescent’s daughter.
“Well, I would give both my hands,” Foxbrush growled, though there was no one in the room to be impressed by such avowals. He sat at the desk (he scarcely thought of it as his desk; it had been Lionheart’s for so long) and surveyed his work. Stacks of agricultural reports from every barony and many of the most respected merchants, each more doom-filled than the last. Another orchard failed, another plantation fallen to ruin; export prices rising, reliable sales falling through, competitors out-pricing even the once rich tea trade . . .
Dragons eat those Aja merchants and their insipid green teas! How could they compete with the dark and hearty Southlander brews?
For the right price they could.
No matter which way he looked at it, Prince Foxbrush saw only ruin, ruin, and more ruin. Southlands was approaching collapse. That collapse might yet be a few years away, a decade even. But from where he sat with these reports swimming before his eyes, the final crash even now swept toward them.
“Dragons blast that . . .” Foxbrush stopped. There was no curse quite appropriate to curse the Dragon himself.
This marriage was the last-ditch effort to perform the miracles expected of a prince. With Daylily’s fortune safely sequestered away in the royal treasury, he would have funding enough for his Great Experiment. Foxbrush’s severe mouth softened at one corner with what might have been a smile. His gaze traveled from the reports to a large basket of figs sitting to one side of his desk. The Great Experiment, with which he would prove to the world the rightness of his rule, the justice of his reign, the majesty of his—
“Great hopping Lights Above!”
Foxbrush leapt to his feet, knocking his chair over backward with a thunk. He scrabbled through the papers, his hands shaking with sudden terror. Where was it? Hadn’t he tucked it under the fig basket, out of sight? He couldn’t have left it in the open! Could he? Oh, cruel, cruel fate! Oh, agony! Oh—
“Tortoiseshell!”
His man appeared at the study door. “Your Highness?”
“Did you see a letter among my things when you tidied up this morning?”
“The one addressed to Lady Daylily, Your Highness?”
Foxbrush’s stomach landed somewhere near his ankles. “Yes. Yes, that’s the one.” His gaze as desperate as a condemned man’s, he whimpered, “Where is it?”
“I thought it best to deliver it with all due haste, Your Highness.”
“You thought . . .”
“Yes, Your Highness. This being your wedding day, I wished no delay in any correspondence between you and the lady in question.”
Foxbrush tried to speak. “Uuuah . . .”
“Did I do right, Your Highness?”
With gargantuan effort, Foxbrush swallowed. A continental shift could not have been more agonized. “When did you deliver it, Tortoiseshell?”
“I put it in the lady’s hand not a quarter of an hour ago. I happened upon it while— Pray, Your Highness, where are you going?”
Good Tortoiseshell’s words, spoken with such concern, fell upon deaf ears. Prince Foxbrush, mumbling inarticulate curses or prayers (it would be difficult to say which), was already out of the study and into the hall, where he realized he was in his shirt-sleeves, a state of undress not to be borne even under direst circumstances. So he dashed back into his dressing room, crying, “No time! No time!” to a baffled Tortoiseshell, whom he pushed from his way as he snatched the nearest available jacket. This turned out to be Tortoiseshell’s. As the household livery was not intended to go over a blousy affair such as Prince Foxbrush’s shirt, it was a mercy to everyone concerned that Tortoiseshell was twice Foxbrush’s size. The jacket bagged across the prince’s thin shoulders and flapped out from his sides like wings as he, thus attired, flew through the corridors of the Eldest’s House.
An army of invading guests from across the nation, from as far as Beauclair and the northern kingdoms of the Continent, had fallen upon the House in the last few days. Few recognized the prince, new as he was to the title and half clothed as a valet. Those who did spot him each had some congratulation to make, some remark upon the occasion, the newly rebuilt Great Hall . . . something to stop Foxbrush in his tracks. He, squirming with embarrassment (for he had been brought up to be polite), squeezed and sidled and dodged like a mosquito skimming the surface of a pond.
At last he came to Middlecrescent’s series of apartments. And here he faced another, more dreadful obstacle.
“Great Iubdan’s beard and mustache!” Foxbrush gasped.
The hall was flooded with women.