Chapter Text
"I have news," said James urgently.
The queen continued the conversation she was having, ignoring her son completely.
"I said I had news," James repeated, tugging on her sleeve. The banquet was in full swing, and the sound of voices, clattering forks and clinking goblets rumbled like distant thunder all around them. "Mother?"
She brushed his hand away as if it were a fly. "Once the new lawns are finished, the league can reconvene—"
"Mother?"
"—without much delay, I hope. I wouldn't like to start after September and cut down the number of matches, though dear old Perkins is quite particular about the lawns—"
"As he should be, Your Majesty."
"Mother?"
"Our Quidditch pitches, on the other hand, are quite ready for the season—"
"MOTHER!"
"I believe the prince requires your attention, Your Majesty," said Lord de Mimsy-Porpington, who was the marquess of some place or other that James didn't care to remember. What did Lord de Mimsy-Porpington matter? He was as dreary and dull as a funeral, whereas James had very important news. World-altering news, in fact; news that would change the very fabric of their existence forever, yet here was his mother, more concerned with croquet lawns and Quidditch pitches than the tidings borne by her first and only child.
James had interrupted a banquet to bring her this news. A banquet. In the middle of dessert, too. There was a treacle tart sitting untouched on his plate that Peter or some other greedy swine could easily snatch up and eat. Then they'd have to be put in the stockade for stealing and James hated seeing people in the stockade, except for the time he'd trapped Sirius in it. That had been hilarious.
Euphemia looked at James, candlelight reflected in her dark eyes. Her expression was impassive.
"You have news for me, I believe?" she enquired.
James stood up straight to deliver his shocking report. McGonagall always said that a prince who slouched was a prince not worth respecting. "I do."
"Important news?"
"Very important."
"So very important that you felt it incumbent upon you to push out your chair with an unholy screech, race up here like an unfettered horse and interrupt your mother?"
Lord de Mimsy-Porpington hastily disguised his laugh with a cough and James's face burned with embarrassment, but he didn't dare blink. The queen was a stalk-and-ambush predator of the most sophisticated kind, attacking when her prey was weak and unsuspecting. It was no surprise that her Animagus form was that of a sleek panther. James had to appear strong in the face of adversity.
"Yes," he said firmly. "That important."
"Once of our guests has died, then?"
"No."
"Been taken ill?"
"No, but—"
"Then it can't be so important that my son would act in a most un-princely manner," Mother concluded. "Do you not agree, Porpington?"
Lord de Mimsy-Porpington blinked rapidly. Perhaps he was startled to have been called upon for an opinion, when it was common knowledge that he'd never said a single interesting thing in his life. "Well, Your Majesty—"
"I have fallen in love," James loudly announced. "So there."
The queen's sharp black eyebrows shot right up to her hairline.
Victory, James thought.
He had known that this was bound to get his mother's attention. She was always waffling on about how finding a suitable bride was a responsibility of utmost importance for any young prince, and how James needed a good wife to make him behave, for god forbid her clever and talented and ludicrous son (all words McGonagall had used—he didn't know what the last one meant but he'd been meaning to look it up soon) be left to rule unchecked once she and his father were cold in their graves. The way his mother talked, he'd sink the realm's money into Quidditch tournaments, cat sanctuaries and not much else.
It was deeply unfair.
Mostly that he couldn't turn the castle into a cat sanctuary, but also the marriage thing. James had scores of good ideas for the future of the kingdoms, like pig farming, for example. Pigs produced the tastiest meat of all the animals. So versatile. So delicious. But his mother simply didn't care for his thoughts.
Though James had found the woman of his dreams now, so he supposed he could cheerfully bear having a wife.
"When did this happen?" Mother asked him.
"Just now, when I saw her."
"Is that so?"
"Very so."
"And where, pray tell, may I find the object of my sweet son's affections?"
James turned around and pointed further down the table, where a beautiful girl in a pale blue dress was contemplating her dinner, wedged uncomfortably between lords Wolpert and Wood.
As James watched, she speared a carrot on the end of her knife and examined it rather glumly.
"There," he sighed, making sure to sound dreamy and smitten, like the characters in the romance novels his mother kept stashed around the castle. "The girl with the red hair."
Of course, James's beloved was far prettier than any of the ladies in his mother's books. Her skin was as pale and luminescent as a new moon, and her long hair fell in elegant curls about her face. He had known that he was in love from the moment he'd first seen her.
"I see," said Euphemia.
"Decidedly red," muttered Lord de Mimsy-Porpington—who had brought all four of his unmarried daughters to court—his lips pursed in distaste.
"A rare colour in this part of the world," the queen mused, "though quite beautiful, it must be said. Don't you agree, Porpington?"
Lord de Mimsy-Porpington opened and closed his mouth like a fish. "Well, now—"
"I love her," said James.
"B—but the complexion, Your Majesty," said Lord de Mimsy-Porpington, trying again. The queen's sly rebuke had set his cheeks aflame. "A sickly pallor, to be sure—"
"Nonsense," the queen cut over him. "Hair notwithstanding, the girl is bound to be pale, living in that jagged wasteland with all of that ghastly snow. She must see the sun but rarely."
"She's a Ravenclaw?" James questioned, watching in awe as she took a bite from her carrot. The kingdom of Ravenclaw spanned the north of the country and boasted several mountain ranges.
"On her father's side only," Lord de Mimsy-Porpington piped up. His face was still puce. "Her mother was a woman of very little consequence, Your Majesty. A Hufflepuff, if you can imagine, with no real connections to—"
"Her late mother was a lady by birth, and she is the youngest daughter of the 16th Viscount of Rowena," said Euphemia coldly, which caught James's eye at once. She smiled at him—one of the sly, secretive smiles she liked to share with James whenever she saw through a simpering sycophant's ill-advised scheme. The queen was the cleverest woman alive besides McGonagall. There was nothing any lord could tell her about one of her guests that she didn't know already. "And you, darling son, have chosen to fall in love with her?"
James nodded.
"How convenient."
That was music to his ears. "Can I marry her, then?"
"She is quite close to you in age, I suppose," his mother mused. She raised her goblet and studied the girl with narrowed eyes as it was refilled by a footman, her brow furrowed in thought. "She'll have a substantial dowry, of course, I cannot find fault with her lineage, and she hasn't been entered into any other engagement, as far as I can be certain…"
James bobbed up and down on the spot, bubbling with excitement.
"I suppose I don't see why not," the queen concluded. "Her father would certainly be amenable to the match, so I'm sure we could pull it off—"
James punched the air with gusto and let out a whoop of delight, startling many.
"—just as soon as you turn twenty-one."
His fist dropped to his side at once.
He gaped at his mother, but she only smiled back and took a sip of her wine.
Why, but his dreams were ruined!
Ruined! Obliterated! Smashed to bloody smithereens, like the time he and Sirius had stolen into the Potions chamber and burst that sow's bladder.
"What?!" he cried out.
"You know that I dislike repeating myself, James."
"But why?"
"My darling, you're far too young to get married right away—"
"But that's not fair!"
"As is commonly practiced—"
"That's torture!"
"Twenty-one is the age at which a prince of Gryffindor should marry, per tradition, as well you know." The queen set her goblet next to her plate. Her voice was firm. "Or should I ask our esteemed professor to teach you our kingdom's history once more?"
"No!" James yelped, balking at the idea of it. McGonagall was frightening when one of her lessons did not, as she liked to put it, permeate his thick skull the first time around. The way his teacher spoke to him was really quite disgraceful at times. "I know the traditions!"
"Then why are you so incensed, child?"
"Because that's—that's eight years away!" James cried out, the injustice of it all rattling his bones raw. He was not some common lord of somewhere or other, he was a prince—the crown prince, destined to be king one day—yet he could not have whatever he wanted, when he wanted. He was in love, damn it, and when people fell in love they got married. That was the rule. "It's too long to wait!"
"You shall just have to learn to bear it, I'm afraid."
"But what if I die of a broken heart before then?"
"Then you will be dead, so it won't be likely to trouble you."
"But what'll you do for an heir if that happens?"
"Name my ward to the throne, I suppose," said his mother. She brushed James's cheek with her thumb and smiled indulgently, ignoring Lord de Mimsy-Porpington's unconvincing laugh. "Cheer up, sweet one. It won't serve you well to wish your childhood away."
"Why not, when you're the one wishing my happiness away?" James sulkily retorted.
His mother laughed through her nose and patted his face. "Is my son not adorable, Porpington?"
"Indeed," said Lord de Mimsy-Porpington tightly.
"Such a handsome boy," she cooed, then dropped her jewel-encrusted hand into her lap. "Now, off you go. Back to your seat, and we'll talk about it later."
"How much later?"
"Your seat, James."
"But I don't want—"
"There's plenty of time to be wed when you grow up."
"But I am grown up!" James protested. Which he was. His voice had already started to break. "Why can't you—"
"Return to your seat," his mother warned, with a look that said don't you dare test me, "or I shall have McGonagall sent for."
If his mother was willing to threaten him with McGonagall to make him behave, James didn't need to be told twice. He fled, retreating to his empty chair a little further down the table and throwing himself into it with gusto and rage. The honourable Professor Pomona Sprout of the Hufflepuff marshes threw him an odd look when he sat down, so he stuck his tongue out at her and hoped his mother didn't see it.
The redheaded girl did see, however, and threw her eyes down to her plate, suppressing a smile.
Quite at once, James's dearly departed hopes sprung blithely back to life.
A smile!
A smile from his glorious future bride, no less!
Well…only if James could find the patience to wait for another eight years.
Blast his mother, and Lord de Mimsy-Porpington, and the stupid Gryffindor traditions.
He had to take matters into his own hands.
*
When the banquet ended, the royal family and their guests moved to the ballroom for dancing and drinks, both of which James was deemed too young to partake in.
Not that he wanted to partake in all of that bowing and waltzing and kissing of hands.
Usually.
His formal dance lessons were due to begin on his fourteenth birthday and James had been concocting schemes to prolong the inevitable—whilst laughing at Sirius, who was due to start in November—but he was a changed man now. He knew what love was. He had beheld the daughter of the 16th Viscount of Rowena, and the art of masterful dancing now seemed like a vital skill which had been callously denied to him.
"Isn't she pretty?" he asked Sirius, watching her talk to her father on the other side of the ballroom.
Sirius shrugged. He'd snuck his wand into the feast and was trying to level a hex at Professor Slughorn—who had labelled his latest efforts at a Shrinking Solution merely "passable"—without being noticed. Sirius was the royal family's ward and a cousin of some distance—third, perhaps, and something removed—but James's best friend, most importantly, and had a talent for mischief that couldn't be equalled. "I don't know."
"You must know, she's right over there."
"I've got better things to do than stare at some girl."
"You think staring at old Sluggy instead is better?"
"Who said I was staring? Watch this," said Sirius, and turned his back to Slughorn, positioning himself so that the tip of the wand he'd stuck beneath his armpit was pointing directly at their Potions master. The grip end was sticking out the other side, rather like the toy swords they'd used to "stab" one another with as children. "Tell me if anybody gets in the way."
James double-checked the path between them and Slughorn. "You're in the clear."
"Your parents aren't watching?"
"Don't worry about my parents." The ballroom floor was longer than its ceiling was high, and the windows alone were four times the height of James's father. "They're at the other end of the room."
Sirius grinned, and gripped his wand tightly.
"Igniloquitir!" he whispered.
A narrow beam of light shot across the ballroom, casting the marble floor in a pale white glow, and hit Slughorn squarely in the back. He immediately belched out a jet of bright red fire which caught hold of one of the curtains and set the entire thing aflame.
As the orchestra came to a screeching halt, terrified screams began to erupt around him and noblemen scattered in all directions, a horrified Slughorn clapped his hands to his mouth and dropped to his knees.
"You set the drapes on fire," James pointed out, watching the flames savage their way through the fashionable gold brocade with interest.
Sirius glanced over his shoulder. His wand was already tucked into his sleeve. "Whoops."
"Mother loves those curtains. She'll kill you."
"She won't if I tell her you did it."
James glared at Sirius. Behind him, Slughorn had let out another flaming belch and set his trousers on fire. He was rolling around on the floor while Countess Vector of Eaglefield sprayed him with water from her wand. Yet more people were working on the curtains. "You wouldn't dare."
"I would, and she'd believe me."
"No she wouldn't."
"I'm not the one who pitched a fit because she won't let me marry some girl."
"Some girl..." James whirled around and found her in the crowd almost at once. She was standing alone—her father had rushed to assist with the drapes—and trying to suppress a laugh as she watched Slughorn thrash about.
"Attention!" cried the queen, who had appeared before the now-smoking curtains, hands lifted into the air to signal to the crowd. The cuffs of her gown sleeves were so wide that the purple velvet trailed below her waist. "Attention, everyone!"
Now was his chance. His moment. His one window of opportunity.
"See you," he muttered to Sirius.
As his mother began to assure her guests that everything was under control, James darted across the room, weaving between stationary pairs of dancers, and found himself standing directly before the girl of his dreams.
She blinked at him in surprise but said nothing. Perhaps his sudden appearance had alarmed her, or perhaps James was so handsome that she was overwhelmed by love. That was the more likely scenario.
"Hello," he said, drawing himself up to his fullest height.
"Hello," she replied, and immediately coloured, her cheeks glowing almost as red as her hair. "I mean, good evening"—she sank into a neat curtsy—"Your Royal Highness."
"Oh, you shan't have to curtsy to me," he told her grandly.
"I shan't?"
"Not ever."
A little crease wrinkled in her forehead. "Why not?"
"Because," he said, and put on his most charming smile, "you're going to be my wife."
She immediately burst into tears.