In the days that followed, Quincey spent every spare moment before the mirror. From what Edris had told him, he knew he could not command his magic if he could not feel it within himself. Thus each day he would close his eyes for a time and try to find within him the same pulsing he had felt before. Unsuccessfully.

The more he tried, the greater his frustration grew, and he began to wonder whether the entire encounter in the house of the late archivist had been nothing more than a fancy of his mind. Yet he could not allow anything to betray what troubled him, for above all he had to remain a loyal knight and the king’s right hand.

Each morning he therefore rose, attended training, visited the stables, and then made his way to Cassian’s study to receive the orders for the day. Most often the king still kept him within the castle walls, though on several occasions he sent him to settle matters in the Upper City. Afterward Quincey would pass the hours over books or maps, seeking to better himself in the counsel he offered the king.

Slowly it was becoming a routine, and though scarcely two weeks had passed since the knight had returned in time and awakened in his bed with memories of a future that had been undone and a scar upon his abdomen, he had begun to feel as though he were already falling behind.

Edris had sent him one message since last they met, asking how he had progressed. He had no choice but to disappoint her, confessing that he stood again at the very beginning. She assured him that it was well enough and tried to encourage him not to lose hope, yet that proved far easier to say than to do.

The stone walls of the castle held nothing of magic within them, and so it was little wonder that Quincey’s own being showed no desire to stir with its essence.

After several more days, the Messenger-at-Arms resolved to take a risk. Though nearly two years still lay before the day of his execution, he would not suffer the feeling that he had failed to prepare himself for what was to come. Thus he decided to cease focusing so intently upon himself and instead begin watching more closely those around him.

He already knew that Cassian would be the one to betray him, and Leander the one to save him, but he still did not know why either of them had held such intentions.

It was time to find out.

Since he spent each day in the king’s company and still had no notion how to uncover his secret designs, Quincey was left to focus more closely upon the second-born prince. The more he observed him, the more he realized that what he had once believed to be closeness between Leander and the royal mage had in truth been an understatement.

Just as Quincey was the king’s right hand, it seemed that Leander was Alatar’s shadow.

Quincey did his best to remain unnoticed as he began to move more often in their vicinity, yet he knew it was only a matter of time before someone noticed that his usual paths through the castle had changed. He therefore needed a proper reason for why he was seen more frequently in another part of the palace.

Fortunately, the knight was resourceful and decided to place the matter upon orders given directly by the king. First, however, he needed to speak with him so that it would become official.

“I have been thinking,” he said to Cassian one evening when he met him in his chamber. It was the first time since they had both taken on their new roles that they found themselves alone somewhere other than the king’s study, and only today had the Messenger-at-Arms gathered the courage to seek him out so privately.

“Should I be afraid?” the king asked, amusement in his voice. Here in his own chamber, at an hour when most of the castle had already surrendered to sleep, he could afford to be less formal and allow more of his true nature to show.

“When have I ever harbored a poor idea?” Quincey allowed a touch of humor to slip into his tone as well.

They sat in armchairs by the hearth, where the fire burned and the sound of crackling wood filled the chamber.

At first the knight had intended to sit upon the carpeted floor, believing he no longer had the right to sit as an equal beside the king, but Cassian stopped him at once and insisted he take his usual place. It was plain to see that the king was in high spirits, glad that they finally shared a moment for themselves, free from the weight of duty.

“You were thirteen and decided to leap from the window of the eastern tower into the moat because some boys mocked you for lacking courage,” the king replied without needing long to think.

“You speak as if you tried to dissuade me. If I remember rightly, you chose to leap first,” Quincey countered with a smile, finding himself in that inner state where he forgot Cassian’s destined betrayal and saw him simply as his closest friend.

“I was older than you,” the king pointed out. “I could not let you foolishly break your neck. I had to test whether it was safe.”

In truth, Cassian was only a year older than the knight, and it was precisely that which had drawn them so close. While Quincey had spent his life preparing to become a warrior of the crown, Cassian had been raised for the throne. And though at the age of twenty-one Quincey had fulfilled his dream while the long-haired man had still been only the crown prince, their bond had remained the same.

The House of Eldricourt had no fixed age at which the crown prince must assume the throne, but it was always somewhere between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five. By then, it was believed, a man possessed the knowledge and experience required to rule an entire kingdom.

“We were fortunate no one saw us, and that Leander did not decide to join in,” Quincey added, recalling the final detail tied to the memory.

The second-born prince had been eleven at the time, and it was around then that he began to spend less time with them. He had still been a child, while the two of them had already entered adolescence, and so their interests simply changed. Besides, Cassian had been convinced he would appear childish if he brought his little brother everywhere with him.

In the years that followed, the bond between the brothers only worsened, and Quincey remained loyal to Cassian. It had not been a difficult choice once he realized that Leander’s manner toward him had changed as he grew older. The knight noticed that when Leander reached the age of fourteen, he began to avoid him. At first it was subtle, but he spent less and less time in their company, avoided Quincey’s gaze, and though he once promised to show him the maps he had been studying, he never kept that promise.

Their friendship officially reached its nadir when Cassian brought Quincey a charred book—a volume the knight had once gifted to the younger brother. The crown prince offered apologies on his brother's behalf, claiming he had discovered it amidst the flames and had acted quickly to salvage what little remained.

It had been a book Quincey’s father had given him, brought back from distant travels, so that his son might boast of possessing something no one else nearby owned. Yet Quincey later passed it to Leander, knowing how dearly the boy had desired it. When the prince, then only thirteen, thanked him for it, he had seemed to value the gesture sincerely.

The state in which the book now lay told quite the opposite. Even incomplete, it held great worth for the knight, for his father was no longer among the living.

There was something almost poetic in the thought that the very man who once tried to burn something that belonged to Quincey had himself later perished in flames beside him, sacrificing his life in the process.

It made the brown-haired knight wonder whether those moments from his youth had truly unfolded as he remembered them, or whether something else had lain behind Leander’s behavior, something he had never questioned at the time. 

Back then he had simply clung to the belief that Cassian valued him more, despite his higher station. In those days he saw the crown prince’s favor as an honor and could not understand why Cassian appeared publicly at his side when Quincey was not even yet a knight, and it had not been certain he would ever receive that distinction.