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“Are you supposed to be here?”

The warm voice stops him in his tracks. He turns around and brushes some hair away from his forehead, nervously.

When he looks into eyes of the most outrageous twilight hue, his curse gets the better of him in an unexpected way.

“Yes,” he answers, and he’s never been more certain of anything.

No one is more surprised than Nicholas Nelson when his stepmother, Dame Fournier, rousts him from her kitchen and bustles him inside her carriage and two (for she cannot afford a carriage and four, to her own disgust, impractical as such a vehicle is in the cobbled streets of the upper city). It feels a little like a dream as his stepmother explains, over the clatter of hooves and and thud-thud of the wheels, that Nick is to be fitted for a fine suit. He hardly listens to her talk of the royal palace’s unexpected city-wide invitations; too filled with a sharp sad longing at the sights and sounds of the merchant district that was once his home and his certain future.

Dame Fournier strides into the workshop of Old Master Pampadillo, who was one of Nick’s mother and father’s oldest friends, not that the former Viscountess would be likely to remember. Nick tears his eyes away from the worn, familiar brocade covering the panelling of the entranceway, to meet the surprised eyes of not Old Master Pampadillo but his son, Young Tom, looking far less young than Nick remembers him.

“Nicholas,” the tailor says, and his eyes look a little misty. The young and older man examine each other under the cover of a barrage of instructions from the lady. Tom Pampadillo cuts her off, exceedingly politely, with promises of a discount for the son of an old friend.

“Oh. Yes,” she says, caught off guard. Anne Harpchet, Tom’s wife (by common law), appears from the workshop. She looks as young and pretty as ever to Nick’s eyes, even though he knows from their housekeeper that she and Tom have five children together, now. Anne offers Dame Fournier a pot of tea and some fresh-baked scones in a sitting room set aside for wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, but Dame Fournier sits herself stiffly on a chair. She doesn’t want to leave Nick alone with them. Who knows what he might say?

Tom makes quick work of his measuring, embarrassing Nick with exclamations over the breadth of his shoulders and the tallness of his frame. He asks Nick questions that are interrupted and redirected by Dame Fournier. Nick starts to feel a burning ache behind his sternum.

“All right, there, lad?” Tom asks, with a kind squint in Nick’s direction.

Nick’s whispered, “No,” eases some of the pain.

Anne is not to be outmatched by the likes of Nick’s stepmother, and two young Anne lookalikes whisk a tiny table, single place setting, and tea cup and plate to the dame’s side.

“What cloth would you choose for yourself, young Nicholas?” asks Tom.

“I hardly know any more,” Nick answers, honestly. “I’m … not a servant, or a merchant’s son. What would I be doing in the royal palace anyway?” he wonders.

Tom twinkles at him. “Dancing, and enjoying the night of the prince’s birthday celebrations, with the rest of the young people of the city,” he tells Nick. “Every one of you from fifteen to twenty-five has been invited, you know.” He clucks as he pats Nick on the shoulder. “Nevermind, young Nicholas, I know just the cloth to use for your suit, and Anne will make your shirt. You won’t feel out of place nor above your station.”

“Thank-you, Tom,” Nick says, gratefully.

“I suppose your daughters will be dressed very fine,” Dame Fournier says, eyeing the set of pretty redheads with a competitive scowl. The two girls giggle.

“We’re not old enough,” they tell her. They don’t seem upset, happily talking about the flurry of customers they have had through the shop, and the orders they’ve placed. They sound happy, ensconced in the centre of their family and their parents’ busy trade.

If anyone asked Nick, he would have to tell them that he was desperately jealous of them both.

The suit is delivered on the very morning of the prince’s sixteenth birthday ball, which, given the city had been flooded with invitations to the populace but seven days earlier, and has only two streets of tailors, is a gift of great generosity from House Pampadillo. Nick, as ordered, has scrubbed and shined himself instead of his stepmother’s mansion, and has nothing to do but don his new clothes.

The suit is just as Tom had promised. Pale fawn pants and crisp but plain white stockings, an exquisitely sewn white lawn shirt, and a green velvet jacket, feathered here and there with darker green embroidery, its buttons neatly covered in the same velvet as the coat. Nick is so relieved: there are no pretentious flourishes of lace or gaudy bits of brass or gold to draw any eyes to him. The stitching is as fine as on any garment in the country, and the suit sits on his frame as though it has been poured there, despite the one hasty round of measurements Tom made. Looking down at himself in his new clothes (it has not occurred to Dame Fournier to lend her stepson the use of a mirror) Nick lets out a sigh of relief. He can feel comfortable in the quality and the butter-soft feel of the cloth closing around him, but he will also be able to fade into the crowd at the party, looking neither too noble nor too poor. He thanks Anne and Tom with all his heart.

The good dame screeches when she discovers that Nick does not fit into his brother’s old shoes. What is she supposed to do with him, she asks. She can hardly announce him to the royal palace in the clogs he wears around the house and in the kitchen! She is working up to full steam of injured rage, when a knock is heard on the door. Nick gratefully makes his escape to answer it.

The young man who is puffing slightly and holding out a package looks familiar to Nick, but he cannot place him. They probably played together as boys but haven’t seen each other in the ten years since the day Nick’s father remarried. The younger lad seems to recognise Nick.

“This is for you,” he says, bobbing his head before he races away, with a still-bulging satchel, further up the avenue. The streets are bristling with carts and burdened errand runners on the day of the prince’s birthday party. Nick has been listening to shrieks of impatience and dismay all the morning, even from behind the thick stone walls of the kitchen.

To the kitchen he brings the parcel, where he unties a long, blue ribbon and unwraps a bright cloth of golden sheen that he is startled to identify as silk. Within a small box of pale wood, nestled among scraps of cloth, is a fine pair of dress shoes, with strange buckles that, when Nick tilts them, catch the light like polished glass. Atop the shoes is a note, in a hand Nick doesn’t recognise.

For Nicholas. From a friend of your mother’s.

The shoes are a perfect fit. 

The arrival of the shoes and the solemn act of getting dressed in her own finery has soothed Dame Fournier’s feelings. They are picked up by one of the lady’s friends in a carriage and six, and two hours later have moved through the queue snaking up through the city and past the palace.

After two hours in a carriage with the Dowager Lady Greene and her obnoxious, gilt-encrusted son, Nick is swift as a needlewoman’s fingers in getting himself lost in the crowd.

As a child, Nick visited the castle gardens with his mother on the days in the spring when the royal family invites the populace to enjoy the ‘public’ gardens. As his parents’ apprentice, he had once or twice visited the service area of the great castle, when his mother or father was summoned to speak with an important servant about an order of finery for some noble or another.

It is an experience out of another world to be invited in through the enormous front doors. Amidst a sea of other young people in all states of fine dress, Nick wanders under blooming chandeliers that cast glittering light on high windows and dense tapestries. Servants in gold and silver livery swarm through the crowd, passing out cups of frothy drink and neat golden triangles of toasted bread. He samples a few, and finds some are savoury, sprinkled with sharp cheese or soaked in oil and herbs, but other slices of bread are sweet, dusted with a sprinkle of precious sugar. Sugar is rare indeed in their kingdom, as there are few suppliers that satisfy the country’s laws. This use of it is so exorbitant and pedestrian at the same time that it makes Nick laugh aloud.

His laughter earns him glances from people standing nearby, and his heart starts to patter. The crowd has carried him through the grand receiving rooms and into a large, brilliantly lit courtyard. He notices that most people around him are huddled in groups, friends and family members whispering with arms interlinked. He looks all around at the bright lights and hears a swirl of bright chatter. In a far corner, a quartet of musicians plays. His senses start to swim. Before he can be overwhelmed, he strikes out for the edges of the courtyard. The open space is charmingly encircled by tall alabaster lattices each supporting a profusion of perfumed roses. Nick vaguely admires their magnificence but is happiest about the sanctuary they offer. Quiet as a fallen ribbon, he slips through a gap between two trellises, planning to hide himself away among the flowers and the moonlight.

No-one is more surprised than Nicholas Nelson when he is asked a question by another young man, about his own age. Clearly he has made the same escape: and somehow, he has chosen the same section of stone trellis for a hiding place.

“Are you supposed to be here?” 

When Nick looks into eyes of the most outrageous twilight hue, his curse gets the better of him in an unexpected way.

“Yes,” he answers, and he’s never been more certain of anything.

Their gazes hold in equal surprise, before Nick’s sweeps over the other’s form. “Are you the prince?” he blurts out, without thinking. On a different track than the one running his mouth, his brain sends the idea: that a very young nobleman, out here, hiding from the party, might indeed be a prince. A prince hiding out, and therefore, not keen on being recognised by anyone.

“Yes,” says the young man in front of him, coolly, and Nick feels some disappointment when the scrunched-up expression smooths out into something impassive and unreadable.

Yet Nick finds himself nodding ... and speaking. “It’s just that you’re wearing that superfine merino with the midnight-indigo dye and Assyrian-style embroidery that no-one does any more and I remember when my father took in the shipment with that bolt specifically, and the buyer came and bought it especially for the royal prince – for the older one – he told us the prince had … dark blue eyes.” He stammers to a stop, irritated to feel the golden pulse of the curse behind his sternum. He would swear that sometimes it emits a sense of pleasure after he finds himself rabbiting on about something in far too much detail.

The prince’s mouth twitches in a smile. “Are you pointing out that my clothes are made of cloth that is long out of fashion?”

“Fuck – shit – I’m sorry – I meant no insult! I just … I remember that day. The shipment. What the bolts looked like in the warehouse, how quickly the merchants and the dressmakers themselves came and whisked them away. Even the aide from the palace had to fight through the throng. And … I didn’t know it then but it was … the last time. That I went to the warehouse.” Nick’s eyes widen as the grip of the curse releases. He drops his head and shoulders into an overdue bow, his neck flushing hot. This is the prince.

“… why was it the last time you went to the warehouse?”

“What?” Nick tries to use a question to drive him on to ask something, anything else, in the desperate hope that a new compulsion to speak will take over from the first one. Even now, the urge to answer with complete honesty is pushing behind his eyes, up his throat.

“Before … you said … your father’s warehouse, that it was the last time you stepped foot in it? Why?”

Nick feels a lance of pain and sucks in a breath despite himself. “He was lost,” he replies, shortly. He tries to stop, but his curse isn’t satisfied. Unable to resist, Nick bites out, “At sea. On a trading voyage, just like my mother was when I was eight.”  

He hears a sad inhale of breath, and wants to beg the prince to ask him anything else, but, of course, he can’t stop what he’s saying.

“After my father died, Cathrinne – my stepmother – she sold it. Sold the business to buy a townhouse—” He gasps in a breath and holds it in for a suffocating moment.  

Nick feels a hand on his arm, and hears a quiet, insistent voice in his ear.

“I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have – You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

Nick wheezes as he gasps in air again. He sags in relief, and finds himself, humiliatingly, trying not to cry.

“Thank-you,” he grinds out, not very gratefully.

“That’s … you don’t have to say that,” the prince says, sounding startled. Nick gives a dry bark of laughter. A look that might be confusion passes over the prince’s face, but he maintains his smooth tone. “It was rude of me to pry.”

“I wanted to escape the party,” Nick tells him, inescapably honest but at least able to change the subject.

The prince lets out a chuckle. “It is a little much,” he agrees, and his nose crinkles as he looks askance, through the screen of the trellis and its flowers, into the heart of the party.

Where they are standing, the lights of the fête just reach in a dimmed sort of illumination that mingles with the faint moonglow. A silver slice is rising and rounding over the far wall of the castle like pale dough above an iron pan.

Nick has been looking at the prince and away again, trying not to stare, but stealing little glances. He has seen enough to take in his tense posture, the drumming of long fingers against the stone, and the way the prince’s gaze keeps searching the dark night, as he looks out past their hiding place into the garden and up at the spires of the castle beyond.

Nicholas Nelson has never been hunting, but he has seen many woven and painted depictions of the hunt. Prince Charles has the appearance of the deer at the centre of all those pieces, a creature arrested in its flight, held at bay a moment away from springing free.

It’s that impression that he blames for what he suddenly says out loud into the night air.

“Do you … want to get out of here?”

The prince is immobile, so still under the moonlight that he might have been carved out of marble. Nick has the eerie sense that he could be standing next to a statue of a fairytale prince and not a real, breathing man at all. Until he does breathe out, very softly, a small gust of words that Nick only just catches at the edge of his hearing.

“… do I want to,” the prince repeats. He is still looking out at the garden, but then he turns sharply on his heel. He studies Nick with a knife-edged sort of intensity. Nick fidgets with the hem of his just-fine-enough coat. “Get out of here … and do what?” Prince Charles asks, low and intense.

Nick meets this with a nervous shrug. “Anything you like.”

The prince takes a step back, and oh, he smiles, slow and blooming, and Nick’s heart stops. When it resumes, the beat is rapid and hammering like the clatter of a roomful of looms moving at once.

“Is there somewhere you’d like to go?” Nick asks in a whisper, and then, belatedly, he adds, “my—my prince.”

“Charlie,” the prince says firmly. He meets Nick’s panicked look with a raised eyebrow. “I insist.”

“I—” Nick starts to say, but the prince cuts him off. He is looking up at where the moon has now cleared the castle wall, and he frowns.

“I doubt we’d have time to get to the town, and back again,” he says. His voice sounds sad. Nick is torn between disappointment for his sake and panic at the thought of being a commoner responsible for one of the royal family wandering in secret about the town. “But there’s enough parts of my own castle I’ve never even glimpsed,” the prince murmurs, as if to himself. Then he shoots another smile at Nick: a rakish, wide smile that pokes dimples into his cheeks. “That should be enough for an adventure, don’t you think?”

“I really do,” Nick yips out, fervently, and then tries to hold the rest of his opinion back with a quick question of his own. “Where do you want to start?”

They skedaddle through the formal gardens, giggling and whispering, to the overlapping break between ancient hedges that conceals the entrance to the kitchen garden. The kitchen is furiously lit and bustling with servants, but the kitchen garden is vast, and they easily skirt its dark edges to make their way into the deserted laundry rooms. Nick’s laughter rings from the stone walls. He’s tickled that a prince would be interested in seeing the palace’s (enormous, and currently deserted) laundry rooms. They barely inspect any of the working guts of the place, choosing to run and chase each other instead, breathless laughter bouncing off the walls.

“Wait!” the prince calls, and Nick stops long enough for him to catch up to him. They have wound up in a corridor. The prince reaches over Nick’s shoulder and pushes open a carved wooden door in the wall. It opens into a covered walkway that folds in a square around another courtyard. At the far end, a light is faintly showing. Nick whistles at the sight of the beautiful bending tree in the middle of the courtyard. Its appearance is wild and wind-torn, which seems impossible within its square border of ancient stone.

“That’s the palace infirmary,” a soft voice says, at his side. The prince nods towards the light, and then catches Nick’s gaze in his own. He smiles, and slips past Nick to hop up onto the stone ledge that borders the courtyard. Nick scrambles up to sit beside him. They both look out into the courtyard, the faint golden glow burnishing their faces.

“So you haven’t told me your name,” the prince observes. Nick revels in a moment of choice. It wasn’t a question, so he doesn’t have to give an answer.

“I’m Nicholas,” he says. “Nick. Nelson. That was my mother’s name, Sarah Nelson. She was a merchant, and so was my father.”

“I’m so sorry. How terrible for you to lose both of them.” He looks so genuinely sad. Nick forgets he’s the prince, and bumps his shoulder with his own.

“I have a brother. I suppose. He was already married when our father died. A contract marriage, like our father had with Cathrinne. She wanted David to do it that way. Luckily he did too, I guess.” Nick pauses. “Our parents had a common law marriage. While they were together, I mean. After Dad met Cathrinne – she demanded a contract marriage over a common one. That was why – that was why all his property passed to her and none to me or David – even though I was already apprenticed to the business and was supposed to run it some day. If it’d been under common law at least some of it would have been mine …” He sighs. “Sorry. I probably sound like a dick, whinging about something like that. It’s all in the past, anyway.”

The prince doesn’t comment on Nick’s embarrassing foray into his grievances against his stepmother. He only stares out at the twisted and turned trunk of the tree. Nick almost doesn’t catch it when he speaks again.

“Did you know that contract law excludes marriages between women and marriages between men?” the prince says, in a low voice.

“Uh,” Nick says, surprised, “I mean yeah. Doesn’t … everyone know that? But, like …  People. Er, most people … they know common law marriages are the real ones, like, the love partnerships. Only aristocrats really use contract marriages and they all seem to be so mercenary … oh, fuck, sorry.”

The prince laughs, clear as a bird call in the night. Then he turns back to Nick. His voice sounds gentle, but curious in tone.

“Your father died. Your stepmother took everything. And you didn’t go to live with your older brother?”  

Nick wheezes a bit. “Oh – fuck – I mean, ahh…” The prince is giggling. Actually giggling. Nick looks at him sideways glance, and suddenly can imagine him being Charlie, like he wanted to be, rather than the prince. Nick sidesteps the subject of his brother, pushing back against his curse with his simple, "No." He shakes his head. “Look, my stepmother makes me do the household baking, but I like baking.”

“What’s baking like?” he asks curiously.

This is a question Nick can enjoy answering in too much detail.

Somehow his descriptions of his boring, daily life continue to make the prince of the realm giggle. He also stops him to ask other interested questions and for elaboration on things that Nick would never have thought he’d need to explain to someone.

They get into an argument over Nick’s tangled failure to remember to call his prince Charlie. Charlie grabs at his new coat, and there’s a scuffle. Nick gets tipped over the edge of the stone wall, goes sprawling, and Charlie lets out a shout of laughter.

A slice of light falls across Nick where he’s tumbled over the roots of the tree.

“What is going on out here?”

The palace doctor, Nathan Ajayi, is not stern at all. In fact, he invites them in, after telling them that he is pleased to have no patients in his infirmary tonight. Perhaps it is because Nicholas is with the eldest prince, but Doctor Ajayi is exceedingly polite.

“You may come in, if you wish,” he says to them both. “I have just made some mint tea.”

“Thank-you, but I would rather not, tonight,” the prince says, with a glint in his eye, and the doctor bows. Charlie does hesitate. “Unless – do you want to, Nick? What do you want to do?”

Oh fuck. What a question. “Stay with you,” leaps out of his mouth.

Could have been worse.

A few moments ago in the moonlight it would have been much worse.

The doctor is nodding and smiling.

“You can enjoy the night with your new friend, Charlie,” the doctor says.

“Yes I can,” he answers back, that same glint, that note of sass, in his voice. Nick guesses that these two are friends. He’s glad the prince has someone in the palace who calls him Charlie.

“Do your sister and brother call you Charlie?” Nick blurts out.

“Mostly they call me annoying. Or get out, you,” Charlie quips.

Doctor Ajayi chuckles. “Your siblings adore you, Charlie,” he says. “You can complain about them if you want to. But you might be wasting your night.”

Something flickers over Charlie’s face.

“I might,” he agrees. “Come – I mean, would you like to wander on?” he asks Nick.

“Yes. Anywhere,” Nick answers helplessly.

“I’ll leave you two to it,” the doctor says. He sounds amused. He shuts his door and leaves Nick blinking away the dazzle of extra light. He feels a warm hand cover his own and his breath hitches. Then he’s being tugged along, through a winding maze, lighted windows flickering past them here and there.

They’re in the prince’s well known parts of the castle now, and Nick couldn’t find his way back to the infirmary or to the laundry rooms if he tried. Charlie mostly keeps them to corridors and courtyards, with quick dashes across wide, handsomely furnished rooms. It’s a marvel that they don’t run into anyone, but everyone, Charlie tells him, is at the party.

“Apart from the guards on duty,” he adds blithely.

Nick has the vaguest sense that they are winding inwards to the centre of the castle. The glimpses he has through open windows show an alarming increase in fancy rooms. After glimpsing one gilded tapestry and a very expensive porcelain vase spilling boughs of jasmine, he tugs on Charlie’s arm, hissing his name.

“Charlie!” The prince turns, raising one brow. Nick whispers, “Am I … allowed to be here?”

The prince sends a slash of a grin his way, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. He could ask to go back to the party … but instead, he follows.

A few passageways later, Charlie halts him. He pulls Nick back to his side with a hand pressed to his shoulder. The two of them are standing in shadow, while before them is a doorway leading into a well lit, well furnished circular room. A floor in one of the castle’s towers, Nick realises. There are high, wide windows, set with panes of glass.

Charlie leans in so their heads are close together. Nick can feel soft strands of hair pressing into his cheek. Then Charlie presses even closer, his lips brushing the shell of Nick’s ear.

“It might be better if we didn’t get found here,” he whispers. Perhaps the danger of that sentence is what makes Nick shiver all over. He starts at the sound of echoing footsteps. Charlie presses firmly down on his shoulder, as if to reassure him. Or warn him. Nick isn’t sure. The footsteps are closer. They have the ring of steel. Charlie’s breath hits Nick’s neck, as he moves even closer. With a warm puff of breath, he whispers an instruction.

A pair of palace guards marches past. Nick thrills with terror and delight. The two guards clank around the corner, then Charlie breathes, into his ear, “Now.”

They cross the lighted space on winged feet, racing through the doorway, and then they are thundering after each other up a staircase. Nick holds his breath, trying to be quiet, but as they spiral upwards he hears Charlie laugh. The sound bounces back; he must be far ahead of him. Uncaring of the noise he’s making, Nick races to catch up.

They emerge in another wide floor of the tower, this one with huge windows all set with glass. It’s dark up here, but Charlie finds a flint and candle and sets them in a lantern of coloured glass. The lantern sends a muted rainbow dancing around the room, transforming it into a fairy’s palace. Nick shudders a little. He’s not sure he wants to touch a realm of magic. It’s difficult not to feel that way, when you’ve laboured for half your life under an inescapable curse.

“Something wrong?” Charlie asks him, softly.

Nick looks at him, his dark hair holding rainbows as his eyes hold a warm, kind smile. “No,” Nick says, and it’s the truth.

They curl up on either end of the most luxuriously cushioned window seat Nick has ever beheld. Nick asks a shy question about Charlie’s life in the castle, and soon it feels as though they could never stop talking. Nick doesn’t even notice the push or pull of his curse. For once he wants to answer someone’s questions, and for once he’s with someone who doesn’t ask too many. Charlie is busy sharing parts of his own life instead.

They talk about their mothers. But not much. As he watches the rainbows leap about the room, Nick wonders, probably impertinently, whether the queen ever told Charlie fairy stories.

“No. That was the nursemaid, mostly. And Tori, but she reads them to Oliver, she never would read them to me.” Charlie leans his head against his arm, staring at his own reflection in the window. Nick watches him, studying the curve of his lips and the shape of his nose. He’s so lovely.

“I could tell you a story,” Charlie says.

“Sure. If you want to.”

Charlie closes his eyes. Nick’s belly twinges with a strange sadness. Charlie opens them again , catching Nick in sky-of-evening blue. The prince adjusts his pose, so he’s sitting cross-legged, with his hands clasped over his knees. In a low voice, he begins to speak.

 “Once upon a time, unluckily, a boy was born. I say unluckily, because this boy, although he was loved by his parents and all the people in the land, was born only to suffer under an evil curse. This boy was a prince, and a bad fairy cursed him, on the morning of his first birthday, with an awful curse, that he must always do whatever is asked of him. If anyone, ever, gave him an order, he could not say no to them.

It was a terrible curse for a prince who was supposed to go among his people. He could be ordered to do anything against his will. His parents, the king and queen, kept him sheltered. He wasn’t allowed to have friends. They trusted almost no-one, with the secret of the curse. The princess knew. The palace doctor. And the prince’s own fairy godmother, who searched for a way to break the curse, all in vain.”

A crooked smile slashes across Charlie’s face. “Of course, the boy was clever. And defiant. It was not in his nature to be obedient. That might be why the wicked fairy selected him of all people to suffer under the curse. Or maybe he was just the weakest soul in his family, after all…” Charlie trails off, and the lantern flickers eerily across his face. He looks pale, as though the story is draining him.

“But still, the boy tried to resist his curse. To twist any order given him in any way he could, away from the speaker’s intention.” Charlie draws a long, pained breath. “It rarely worked.” He stares into Nick’s eyes for a long moment. “The boy, the prince I mean, grew up like this, almost alone but for his sister and a few trusted courtiers.

Then, one day, he was told that his fairy godmother had found a way to lift the curse. For one night. On his sixteenth birthday, from the moment after midnight, until midnight came again, the curse would be lifted, and he would be free.” Charlie’s voice dips into bitterness, so acrid it makes a shiver chase across Nick’s shoulders. “Instead of giving the cursed prince a day of freedom on the one day it could ever be possible, his parents chose to give him a day of duty. He must meet everyone in the kingdom, they told him, since it will finally be safe to do so.” Charlie shifts in his seat, putting his back to the window and swinging his feet to the floor.

Nick is silent, but his heart is pounding beneath his ribs.

“Everyone in the kingdom, of a particular age. They want me to find my match,” he says, tight and furious, “On the one day when I will be equal to them.”

“What about all the other days when you’d have to do whatever they say?” Nick asks him, horrified.

“Well, it’s just a story, remember.”

“No it isn’t. You were telling me the truth through a story. I can tell, I—" Nick struggles, throat closing over, against saying the rest.

“You believe in curses?” Charlie asks him, sounding urgent.

“Well yeah, I have to, since I’m under a curse – just like you are—” Nick gags as he tries to stop himself from saying more.

Charlie is staring at him. “What?”

Nick struggles against answering, gasping, the curse stabbing him in his chest, robbing him of breath. It’s useless. Tears leak from his eyes as he tries to keep his teeth clenched shut.

Charlie’s voice reaches him. He sounds panicked. Nick can feel Charlie’s hands, squeezing above his elbow, stroking frantically at his shoulder. “Give in. Say it. I’m so sorry, I know you don’t want to, but give in, please, I promise, whatever it is, I won’t use it against you, I swear…”

“I have to tell the truth!” Nick cries out. “I can’t lie. Not directly, not by omission … any intention to conceal the truth just … it starts to hurt. And then it hurts more and then … I have to say it. Anyway.”

“…fuck,” Charlie whispers.

Nick feels right on the edge of bursting into ragged tears. But at this, he laughs. Charlie drops one hand away, but the other strokes comfortingly across Nick’s shoulder. Nick stares at him, the beautiful, perfect prince, as the horror of Charlie’s story starts to percolate through to him.

“I mean … my curse … it’s awful sometimes, but, fuck … it’s nothing like what happened to you. I can’t lie but I don’t ever have to … do anything that I don’t want to.” Nick swallows. For Charlie’s sake, he tries to crack a smile. “Bad fairies really dial it up for princes, I suppose.”

Charlie is looking at him in something like shock, and something like hope. “It can’t be easy, for you,” he says. “Never being able to lie when – lies are needed sometimes. To protect us.”

“You, more than anyone!” Nick can’t stop feeling fresh waves of horror. “You have to do anything someone tells you to do?”

Charlie sighs, and settles back into the window seat. “Yep.”

“Do you … want to tell me about it?”

“My parents have been trying to meddle with the curse my whole life.” He heaves a sigh. “They’re always trying to give me orders that will last and cancel out future instructions. You know, like, never harm anyone. Never harm yourself.” His hands shake. “That one’s surprisingly difficult.”

“Can you give yourself an ord—”

“No.” Charlie’s voice is sharp. “That would be too easy.”

Nick nods and subsides into his side of the cushion. “Right. Like me, trying to lie by telling the truth about something I want to talk about instead of something I don’t. The curse always knows. The more I want to avoid it …” he clutches at his throat, feeling the ghostly memory of pain. “The worse it gets.”

“You actually understand,” Charlie says, in a tone of amazement.

“Yeah,” Nick says. “I do.” He is thinking furiously back over the evening. “Did I – have I said something you had to do, tonight?”

“No,” says Charlie, with a smile. “You haven’t.”

“I suppose … not many people give a prince an order?” Nick asks, hoping this is true.

“You’d be surprised,” Charlie says drily.

Nick is thinking about meeting the doctor earlier that night. “Doctor Ajayi,” he says aloud. “He was careful in the way he spoke to you. He phrased everything as an option. Not anything that you would have to do.”

Charlie flushes pink, and an annoyed tone creeps into his voice. “I wish, for once, he hadn’t been! He’s forgotten it’s the one night I can say no, fuck off, to anyone. Yet so far, no one has told me to do anything!”

“Yet you came to the party you just told me you didn’t want to come to.”

Charlie glares at Nick, now. Then he covers his face and laughs. “Yeah. Well. My parents have been waiting a long time for this too. I didn’t want to disappoint them?”

They settle into silence, each trying to absorb the magnitude of the other’s secret. The candle in the lantern gutters.

“I don’t want to be up here anymore,” Charlie says abruptly.

“Then we should leave.”

Charlie leads him down the stairs, and then further down, explaining that they had climbed a few levels without Nick realising it, earlier. He leads him through nested sets of courtyards, until Nick can hear strains of music and laughter, and smell the heady scent of flowers.

“Oh,” Nick says, disappointed. “We’re … back at the gardens.” He even recognises this garden. It’s one of the public ones, famous for its topiary beasts. Perhaps there are plans to show it to the party guests later, because it is dotted with torches, their lights burning brightly behind a filigree of iron.

“Even your garden has fancy lights,” Nick says in wonder. Charlie usually laughs when he says similar things, but he says nothing. Nick turns back to look at him, and in the light of the torches, he can see him biting his lip.

“Are you okay?”

Charlie meets his gaze. His eyes are very blue. “I want to show you a secret.”

Alarmed, Nick says, “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” He gestures to his mouth. “There aren’t many worse people to tell state secrets to, than me …”

Charlie looks at his mouth and crooks a smile. “I suppose so,” he says. He holds out a hand. “Will you come with me, anyway?”

“Yes,” Nick whispers, and the truth being tugged from him doesn’t seem to hurt when it’s answered by Charlie’s smile.

They travel to the edges of the garden where the light from the torches doesn’t reach. There, deep within the ancient hedge, is a small, hidden door. It leads to a tunnel, and at the other end, is another door hidden in the tunnel wall. When Charlie presses a stone to open it, the two of them tumble outside the very castle wall itself.

Nick hears the shush of waves upon the shore. They’ve come out on the seaward side of the castle, onto a tiny slice of sand. The moon is sailing high above them now, her light so bright it almost hides the stars.

Nick looks around the moonlit beach.

“Why do you think the secret door leads to here?” Nick asks, puzzled, and Charlie laughs.

“Aren’t you a merchant? For smuggling in goods, I would guess. Probably brandy.”

“I never became a merchant, I was just the son of two merchants and the stepson of a merchant’s widow,” Nick says, barely noticing the answer leaving his lips whether he will or no. He’s striding down the beach, peering at the rocks and glancing out to the silvered movements of the water. “This seems like a terrible place for smuggling, though, that water looks shallow, how would you get the boat—” There’s a soft splash, and he breaks off, turning around to see the prince of his country standing barefoot in the shallows, dark head dipped down to look at the lap of the water against his legs. He reaches down and belatedly rolls up his sopping wet trouser legs, muttering curses at his wet silk stockings.

Nick sees he has kicked his dancing slippers off onto the sand.

“That silk will never be the same,” he sighs to himself, and the prince catches the words, looking up with a manic grin. It knocks Nick back a pace or two, except only metaphorically, because in fact he walks closer, trailing back over the sand towards him.

“You should come in the water,” Charlie says, with a grin. “It’s not freezing at all.”

Nick kicks off his new shoes, and stops to save his stockings. He fails to roll up his trousers, defeated by Tom’s too-perfect sizing. Nick stops before the edge of the water. Judging from the way the wet sand bites at his feet, Charlie is lying.

“You have not been cursed to tell the truth, have you, Prince Charlie.”

“Oh no. Please never say Prince Charlie again.”

“I’m not sure you can stop me.”

Charlie splashes him.

Nick dances away, but after adventuring up and down and over and under a large castle, he no longer has the energy to start a game of chase over the moonlit sands. He stays where he is as Charlies surges back out of the shallow water towards him. Charlie laughs and grabs hold of Nick’s shoulders.

“Are you regretting going in the freezing ocean?”

“No.” Charlie grins. He’s so beautiful in the moonlight that Nick has to look away, tilting his head up to the sky.

“Look, the moon is starting to set again,” Nick murmurs.

“What? No,” Charlie whispers. Nick looks back at his face, and feels dismay, to see Charlie’s laughter wiped away. Nick starts to step backwards, up onto the firmer sand. Charlie grabs his shoulders tighter. “Wait – it’s almost midnight.” He sounds panicked. “At midnight, I’ll have to do whatever anyone tells me to. Again. Until I die.”

Fiercely, Nick tells him, “You don’t know that. Curses can be broken.”

“Shut up,” Charlie says. He pulls himself closer to Nick, wobbling on the sand, and Nick puts both his hands under Charlie’s elbows to steady him. Charlie looks at him, his eyes huge and dark. “Before it’s over. Ask me to do something. Anything. No. Make it … something I have to choose. And just for once, I’ll know – I’ll know I chose it.”

“Do you want to kiss me?”

Nick doesn’t know if his curse is responding to ask me with the most honest reply in his soul. Or if what he is saying is simply all he wants to say to this man with the sparkling blue eyes whose smiles are so tender.

Lit up by moonlight, Charlie blinks. A tiny scowl flashes across his beautiful face.

“That’s not an order!”

Nick swallows.

He has to tell the truth.

“I don’t want to give you an order,” he admits. “Even if you want me to.” He feels a wash of guilt like the tide sweeping and curling across the shore, grating against him like sand. “Even if you need me to.”

As he finishes his confession, Nick can hear the first chime of twelve o’clock roll out from the bell tower in the centre of the city, sounding faint from the other side of the towering castle.

“Oh,” Charlie says. Another frown crosses his brow. He looks deep into Nick’s eyes. “Do you … want to kiss me?”

The clock chimes.

“Yeah,” Nick whispers, but the word is swallowed up, as they sway together, and their lips meet.

The breeze scudding along the sands is cold, but Charlie’s mouth is warm against his. Nick kisses him, and feels his chest fill with a wild delight. Charlie presses close, as close as he can get, placing his hands on Nick’s neck with gentle urgency. His hands and even his cheek are cold. Nick turns his head to drop warm kisses on Charlie’s cold cheek, and steals his cold hands to do the same. Charlie giggles again. Nick’s favourite sound. Then Charlie drags his hands away, and closes them around the lapels of Nick’s green velvet coat. Charlie pulls him down, and kisses him again. The kiss deepens, becomes passionate. Nick has faint thoughts of regret that the beach would be a cold, wet place to descend to, if they did want to give in to gravity. Charlie whispers his name.

“Nick … That was …”

“Something you wanted to do, I hope.”

“Very much so,” Charlie says. He wraps his arms tightly around Nick’s middle, and leans his weight into him, head resting against Nick’s chest. Nick feels more triumphant than if all his lost wealth and purpose had been restored. All of that anguish seems rather pointless now, in fact. In his arms, Charlie starts to shiver, and it is not, Nick realises, the good kind of shiver. He tries to wind his arms around the prince to protect him from the rising wind.

Charlie hums. “We may eventually have to go back.”

Charlie does in fact begin to disentangle himself. Nick tries to remember there is a world, a country even, beyond this moonlit beach.

“Are you going to have to kill me?” Nick wonders out loud.

“What?!” Charlie’s hands bite down on his shoulders as he looks into Nick’s face, shocked and angry. “Why would you say that?” His voice is loud on the deserted beach, crashing over the sound of the waves. Nick feels sick, hating himself for being the cause of such an expression on this person’s face.

“I’m sorry,” he gasps out, “I didn’t mean to—” Frustratingly, he can feel tears choking his throat.

“Shhh, it’s alright – or, well, it’s not alright for you to say that, because … Nick. I … I do want to know why you would … ask me that?”

Nick covers his face in his hands. Because I know a deadly secret about you, he thinks. One that could destroy the royal family. Charlie’s hands come up, warm and sure and gentle, and uncover his face. “I have to tell the truth,” Nick whispers, brokenly, as Charlie squeezes his hands. “And you …”

“Shhh,” Charlie says, again. Then for some reason, he laughs. It’s not a happy laugh, it sounds a bit desperate and rough, but Nick feels all the same that it’s a laugh offered to him, shared with him, in open warmth. “What a pair we are,” Charlie says. He leans his forehead against Nick’s. Somehow, Nick feels a relieved chuckle escape him, too.

“What will we do?” he murmurs.

“I don’t know,” Charlie answers. He’s still holding Nick’s hands, rubbing his thumb along the outside edge of Nick’s pinkie. “Can we do it together, though?” Charlie leans backwards, letting cold air flow between their faces, without dropping his grip on Nick’s hands. Nick blinks some cold tears away from his eyes.

There’s a rustle, a soft thump. Nick is looking down in astonishment at a prince kneeling in the wet sand at his feet, holding his hands between his own. He looks up at him, and his heart is offered in his smile.

The party for the prince’s sixteenth birthday is as glaringly elegant after one in the morning as it was at six in the evening. When a sandy, dishevelled prince and a damp and windblown merchant’s son walk hand in hand back to the party, an array of glittering heads turn. The murmur and hubbub of the crowd stills and then grows as they pass by.  

Two women in fine dress converge on the couple in a V starting from their different places in the party. By the time the two men have reached roughly the centre of the throng, the queen is a few paces away. She receives a low bow from Nick, who rises and starts to find his stepmother a body-length away from him.

Both Queen Jane and Dame Fournier speak at once.

“Tell me where you have been. What are you doing with the prince, Nicholas Nelson?” Dame Fournier hisses.

“No.”

“Say your farewells to this young man,” commands the queen. “And come with me at once, Charles.”

“No.”

The two men glare at their respective parents for a moment, hands restfully interlinked. Then they suddenly squeeze tightly and turn to stare at each other in surprise.

“Oh,” says Charlie. Nick breaks into a joyful smile and says nothing at all.

The queen faints dead away.

Before the first week of the elder prince’s sixteenth year has elapsed, a law is passed by a relieved Parliament to allow same-sex couples to be married under contract as well as common law. At the urging of the newly engaged Prince Charles, a debate is also scheduled for the development of a new law to allow all couples to adopt children or come to surrogate arrangements under contract law as well. Princess Victoria suggests, to a select few chosen lawmakers, that the time might soon be ripe to include single people in these progressive new laws.

The enforced habits of a lifetime are not easily set aside even with the breaking of a curse. Prince Charlie speaks of this, quietly, to the fairy Alyce when they come to see him in his high north tower. Nick, as well, he tells them, is having to learn how it even feels to hold in a thought, or refuse someone’s prompt to speak on something, or to tell a lie. Charlie doesn’t mind that at all, but he wants Nick to succeed for his own sake.

“We both want it to be a choice,” he explains.

Nick is practicing staying silent.

It’s hard, Alyce agrees, for anyone. Let alone someone suddenly plunged into the centre of a royal court.

Nick has learned Nathan’s trick of never speaking an order to Charlie. He tells Alyce this. He talks about Nick for quite a while, actually. His fairy godmother listens with a delighted smile. It’s some time before the conversation returns to darker topics.

“Do we know who it was, who laid the curse on Nick?” Charlie asks his godmother, curiously. Alyce finishes their bite of a dainty cherry-jam biscuit, and nods, as they pick up their delicately patterned tea cup.

“It was his mother,” they explain. “Before she left on a trading voyage, leaving Nick with his father and brother, she asked him to promise to tell the truth, while she was gone. He was a young boy and she knew he tended to hold things in, and especially to keep things from his father, so she worried. Then, during the voyage, she died. And the promise stayed in place.”

“Oh no,” Charlie whispers.

Alyce nods, sadly. “The last promise given to a mother has so much power. Especially so, in Sarah Nelson’s case. She could have been a witch, if she hadn’t been a merchant. Her sister is one. She’s who told me the story, she had it in a letter from her sister, sent from a port on their way.”

“I didn’t know Nick has an aunt on his mother’s side,” Charlie says, eagerly. Perhaps Nick can have someone nice, at the wedding.

“Oh, well, she’s dead,” Alyce says, sagely, and Charlie blinks.

“Ah,” he says, faintly.

“She wishes you and Nick many congratulations,” Alyce adds merrily. “Are they really making you plan for the wedding, already? And would you like a dragon at the ceremony? It might cheer your brother up.”

“Olly had better be over his mood in two years’ time,” Charlie says, crossly. Olly had been more than a little bit pissed to discover that everyone in his family had known his brother was under a terrible curse, except him. Suddenly, all his parents’ nagging not to ever boss his older brother around made a horrifying sense. He’s been surly and angry and probably guilty about it too. He’s been a bloody handful. Luckily, he adores Nick, who has been able to distract him. To the chagrin of the palace cooks, Nick is teaching Prince Oliver how to bake.

Tori, Charlie cautiously guesses, also approves of Nick. She certainly unwinds around him. A little bit. She gets a glint in her eye around him, like she’s slotting him into her plans as future queen.  Hopefully, Nick and Charlie have a long time before they have to worry about what those plans are.

Alyce looks up, expectantly, at the door. A few moments later, there’s the sound of a gentle knock. Charlie feels his smile widen, and his face heats up at Alyce’s knowing look. The door swings open and Nick steps eagerly into the room. Even though Alyce is right there watching, Charlie can’t help setting down his teacup and springing up to rush into Nick’s embrace.

“Hello,” he says, muffled by Charlie’s hair.

“’lo,” Charlie mumbles into his arm.

“How are you today, Nick?” his fairy godmother asks from across the room. Charlie hears the silence as Nick pauses, taking his time to answer. He feels a glow of pride, and a relief that only he and Nick really truly know the feeling of, when Nick chooses to answer the question truthfully.  

“Pretty happy,” Nick says, and smiles shyly down at Charlie.