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Once upon a time, when tigers hunted in packs, there lived two princes with their grandmother the Queen. Both were fair of face, although the youngest one was so handsome that flowers bloomed when he looked at them. The elder could only manage a slight blossom in April. Their sister had a dark magic of her own, on account of her being a Changeling and beholden to both the fairy realm and the human; but this story is not about her.
The youngest prince was named Henry, and his eyes were cornflower blue. His brother’s eyes had been just as pretty, once, but time spent with the Queen had made the cornflowers wither.
They were both called to her throne one morning, and she told them that the vampire prince of the neighbouring lands desired a marriage treaty, and they were to travel together at first light to his palace of bone to seek common ground.
“He wishes for a wedding,” the Queen said. “I offered your sister, but he has seen portraits of you all, and chosen his man.” And although her eyes lingered on Henry for a moment, she named Philip - Pip - as the one who should be wed.
Philip had learned to be quiet and obey, but Henry was young enough to be an idealist.
“Your Majesty,” he said, polite even if rage bubbled up inside him. “Why send my brother, when he is not beloved of the idea? I will go in his place.”
The Queen ignored this, and only said they should return to her that night, for she had special gifts to bestow upon them. The princes retired; Philip to sit in the window and choose comforts for the trip, and Henry to stand at his father’s grave, covering it with flowers that would last. His sister would do her best to keep up the maintenance, but Henry knew her; as a Changeling, her nature was flighty.
After the going-away feast, where roast boar and peacock was served, the princes came to the Queen’s private quarters. She handed them both bottles filled with a certain potion, and urged them to drink deep; Henry saw his was a darker blue, almost indigo, to his brother’s cornflower blue. When he turned the crystal bottle this way and that he thought he saw something green and shifting within it, like a snake in tall, thick grass.
“Drink,” his grandmother said tightly. “It is for the journey.”
He did not want to. His brother was the obedient one; Henry knew in his heart of hearts that behind all the princely moulding there was some part of him that could never be caged and that part was screaming at him not to drink the potion.
“Please, Henry,” whispered his brother, the bottle to his lips. Henry knew the part of him that longed to be free from the trappings of royalty was also the part most sensitive to love, and he loved his siblings with the ferocity of bears and lions and wolves.
The potion tasted of desperation and fear and worry; he gagged on it. Next to him, he was dimly aware that Pip had fallen to his knees at the taste of his own bottle; and the Queen, standing before them, triumph on her face.
He saw the darkness rushing up to meet him, and with strength he did not know he possessed, he coughed up some of the infernal syrup before he fell into oblivion.
+++
Henry awoke to the great grey sky above him. The first thing he noticed was that he felt even more uncomfortable than he usually did; the second was that he was moving. When he rolled onto his side, he saw the bags he had so carefully packed, and then his own mournful face looking at him through a carriage window.
He screamed; the wagon halted, and the Henry-who-was-not opened the carriage door and spoke with Pip’s voice.
“Get in, brother. We have much to discuss.”
When Henry, astonished, stepped into the carriage, a looking-glass was being held up to his face. He looked… different. He looked like a missing brother, one born between himself and Pip, with Pip’s nose and his own eyes and thinner lips than he’d had before. He looked into the face of his brother-who-was-himself and felt his lips form a question.
“I saw you vomit up the potion,” his brother said glumly. “I did not - and now look at me. Why, I am a copy of you.”
“Why would the Queen do this?” Henry asked, stunned. “What could she have to gain?” His head felt chilled - he reached up to find his thick locks of hair were thinning.
“I believe she sent the vampire prince a selection of our portraits,” Pip said. “Evidently, she had her mind made up on who she would send, and it didn’t matter much who the prince chose.”
“Well, we must go back,” Henry said, reasonably. “We will find the antidote and become ourselves again.”
But his brother looked at him in horror. “You forget that our grandmother rules the kingdom. She has spies everywhere; she has had hedgewitches rooted out and destroyed. Our only hope is to quietly find the spell when we are in the realm of the vampires, and to do it without alerting the prince. He will surely send an army for our people if he finds he has been deceived. Besides, his country is known for sorcery.”
Henry did not agree with his brother, but as everyone knows, you cannot break half a spell; both must go together.
The journey to the land of the vampires was not as long as Henry had wished; he had hoped to convince Pip to turn back. They passed from lush greenery through to sad yellow fields and finally to the rich red of autumnal fare, where gates were made of expensive black iron and the cows in the fields watched them boldly as they drove. Henry used much of the time to think.
Everyone knew of the vampire prince; he was deadly in battle, and his mother ruled in her own right. They had recently seen off a marauding army from one of Queen Mary’s allies, news reaching them by messenger-bird that the king of the attacking force had been beheaded, too disgusting to even feed from. Vampires only drank blood, in the place of rich wine; it gave them a lifespan beyond humans.
Queen Mary had decreed them sinful and evil, until the harvest failed and she had to make alliances to feed the country. The vampire queen, who ruled over humans and supernatural creatures alike, had a human husband; intermarriage was common in her court.
Henry knew that Pip was not a bad man. Not as bad as their grandmother, at least. He also knew that Pip would sacrifice almost anything to keep the peace, and now that involved wearing his face and wedding a man he did not want to love. Henry knew where Pip’s heart lay; back at home, with a girl who helped in the stables.
But the prince was unlikely to be an idiot. Pip would refer to his ‘younger’ brother, or make a comment about his looks, and the prince would know he had been had. People whispered that punishments in his kingdom were fierce, hard even for supernatural creatures to endure. Henry wanted to avoid that fate.
So they stopped at towns and villages along the way, where people were ruddy-cheeked and happy to talk, and Henry enquired about the quality of their magic and crossed his fingers. He noticed how people looked at his-brother-with-not-his-face, and it made him feel strange, and sad, and awed. Back at home he had not thought people noticed him in that way, and he wondered if he might have had his own stableboy romance if they did.
People spoke to Henry of a fairy who lived several dozen leagues away from the palace of bone, and he made sure that he noted down directions and prayed for a storm to delay their journey. Almost as if the land heard his wish, a terrible rainstorm blew a tree down further down the road, and they were forced to make camp. He pretended as though he was tired, but secretly he planned to take a horse that night, ride to the fairy, and see what could be done.
The fairy lived in a bell-shaped cottage that looked to Henry like mutant flower petals, colours of a bruise. Sap lay sticky upon the ground, and it was a challenge to guess one puddle of rain from another of tree-liquor. He barely needed to knock; despite the hour being late, a bird chirped a note of warning to the fairy, who swung her door (thousands of acorn hulls) open.
“Come in, youngest prince,” she said, stepping back into her home. They were miles from the sea, yet shells were inlaid in the floor. Vials of potions were neatly stacked in one floor to ceiling bookshelf, and yet another was taken up with scrolls and scrolls.
“What may I call you, mistress?” Henry asked respectfully, for the first rule of magic is to know that power can be dangerous. The fairy smiled. She was robed in a gown all of white, from rose petals preserved over the long months.
“Call me Nora,” she said. “But I cannot spell you in the method you require.”
Henry’s watercolour blue eyes filled with tears, for he did not want to be told this was all in vain. He despaired for his brother; for himself; for his sister, since the vampire prince’s rage would surely not stop at just two of the siblings. He also cursed his grandmother the Queen, in a way that was feeling less and less treasonous the more he did it.
“The spells your grandmother used are powerful magic,” Nora continued. “She has killed many, and their blood fuels her work. The palace of bone, though, is full of blood. Try your luck there.”
With that, Henry knew it was no use searching more on the road. He knelt before her to show his gratitude, gave her a shining gold necklace as a thanks for her help, and was on his way before first light.
If Philip noticed the change in his brother, he stayed silent. The whole company quieted down as they entered the land of the vampires. The land was rich, and fertile; there were fields in abundance, and those fields were toiled over by farmers no matter where they looked. If one in ten of the farmers had a broader hat to protect them from the sun, and a greyer complexion, no matter. Henry saw how Philip prayed harder the further they went into these unfamiliar lands, and it made him uneasy. Surely his brother would have stood up to his grandmother if he knew the journey would have taken such a toll on him?
Five days after the encounter with the fairy, a delegation on coal-black and bone-white horses came to meet them, towing a carriage the colour of old gravestones. In it travelled the Crown Princess; yet another thing Queen Mary did not approve of, having a woman be the next in line when there was a perfectly penised man in the succession. She waited for them both to bow to her before she curtseyed in reply.
“My name is June,” she said smoothly; Henry was reminded of times when Bea would go into a trance after staring at fairy rings; June straddled a similar boundary between the real and the not. “I am your intended’s sister, Philip.”
He bowed, jerkily; all his learned prince grace had deserted him. Henry bit his lip as they climbed into the elegant carriage to go along the Ossuary Road to the palace.
They learned of the prince. June had a lot to say for her brother; that he had not wanted to wed but the beauty of the portrait transfixed him; that he was undertaking affairs of state in the capital city and besides, thought it romantic they would not meet for a few weeks.
“Weeks?” croaked Philip in a voice as weak as it was relieved. Henry frowned at him, and noticed June doing the same.
“Weeks,” she affirmed. “We are really a nation of farmers underneath all our bloody finery, and there is a problem with the drainage.”
“I should love to walk outside,” Henry said, wistfully. His thought was real, though he might not have voiced it if Pip was doing well. “Much as I love to ride - one cannot get the feel of a new country through roads alone.”
June turned her bright eyes on him, her sharp gaze penetrating. Henry wondered if she could see past the magic.
“You will get along with your brother-in-law, then,” she said in a voice that sounded pleased. Pip shuddered, but he did not pray where she could see.
The palace was grand. Henry had not expected it to be made from true bone, though evidently Pip had. June explained that the vampire warlords of old might have had skeletons hung around the hall, the grand chandelier was the cause of the name. Made of crystal which looked like bones, the castle had been built around it.
“The lower levels are still dark caves, no matter how much our craftspeople have carved away,” June said, shrugging. “And what are caves, if not the bones of the earth?”
“My lady,” said Henry, impressed, and bowed once more. “I must prevail on you to tell me more of this architecture.”
She directed him to the library, which was three times the size of the one at home. Pip immediately took himself off to the histories, but Henry lingered.
“What is it?” a sharp voice said. He started and spun around to find himself facing a handsome woman who looked extremely irritated he was in her way. Her skin had the full-blooded look of a human; Henry had found himself counting the mix of humans and vampires. It was closer to half and half in the palace.
“Madam,” he said, and bowed low; this seemed to please her. “If it please you, I was looking for information on magic - curses, hexes, undoings.”
She stood back and looked at him. “You’re the one to marry the prince?”
Henry shook his head. “Not me. My brother.” He gestured to Pip, whose miserable face was entirely too familiar. Henry noted with distaste how his rosebud lips stuck out in a pout.
The woman followed his gaze and nodded. “Is he under some sort of enchantment?” Then she held up a hand. “Forget it. I don’t want to know.” She took Henry to the very eastern side of the library, where the stacks were piled high with tomes, and turned to leave.
“Wait,” Henry said, and took out the earring which his mother had given him; a tiny ruby planet, adorned with stars. “For your kindness, madam.”
She regarded it critically as she took it. “Zahra. And if you wish for more help, I’ll take the matching one.”
They dined that night with the Queen, her human husband, and her daughter June. A place was not laid for the prince. The Queen and her daughter sipped from goblets, but the humans ate. Henry learned that the Queen’s husband was a human inventor, and had come to be known to the royals by inventing a machine that could draw blood without vampires needing to be involved at all.
Pip looked a thousand times relieved at the news. Thankfully, he had the diplomacy not to say anything to the Queen’s face. Perhaps her beauty - spun-silk hair and a voice like honey - had been the real thing to stop him. Later that night, though Henry offered to spend time with him as good brothers should, he shook his head.
The next morning, Henry rose without much an idea of what to do. As the spare - the one to be offered to the prince if Pip were to die on the journey - he was a spare piece now they had arrived safely. Pip had a long schedule of work, people to meet, fittings to endure. Henry rather thought he enjoyed it, sometimes; it kept him from having to act like a person.
Henry roamed.
He went to the top of the highest towers of the palace of bone, and borrowed a flaming torch to explore the vast caverns below. He looked out over the great Ossuary Road, seeing the wagons that trundled down to sell their wares to the palace inhabitants and in the capital. He looked at the lush grass of the Northern forest, and eventually, on the third day, he was granted leave to roam further out from the citadel.
Some would have gone to the city with heavy purses and returned with light. Others might have ridden out to the grand forest for a hunt. Henry went looking for farmland.
It wasn’t just farms he was interested in; some of the tomes Zahra had showed him to had pointed to a warlock who lived that way. He rode out, chestnut mare trotting prettily beneath him, as he savoured the fresh air.
He had set up by a fast-flowing river for lunch when a gentleman joined him; he looked up at the crunch of leaves under his boot. The man was a vampire; he held a sunshade, and his skin had a faint pallor. He had clearly been working in the fields, as his forearms were streaked with dirt, but his voice was rich and educated when he asked Henry if he would mind sharing his resting place.
Henry, who had a lot of time for handsome strangers, immediately agreed. The man sat down in the shade gratefully.
“I suppose it must be hard work,” Henry eventually said. “Working under all this sun.”
“It would be hard if I drank blood or wine,” the man replied. “I rode out with the prince’s retinue to inspect the fields and lend a hand. Our harvests are good, but neglect will make them wane.”
Henry thought of the winter last year, and shuddered. Years of Queen Mary ignoring requests for repairs and help had all coalesced in a near-famine. If it weren’t for these lands, he might be a skin-and-bones prince begging on the streets for help.
He looked sidelong at the man. “You know the prince, then?”
“Very well,” the man said, adjusting the shade. “You’re with the marriage delegation?”
“I am his brother,” Henry said, the not-lie aching in his chest. “We arrived two days ago.”
“I am sure,” the man said, a slight smile on his lips, “It must be a great disappointment to him that his future husband has not yet greeted him.”
Henry demurred too long in an answer, and the man’s dark eyes flashed blood-red. “He is disappointed!”
“No, sir!” Henry said, hastily, his cravat suddenly feeling a little too tight - but loosening it was akin to a proposition towards a vampire. “Just that, it has been a great adjustment for him, and I bid that your prince does not hear of any worry on - on his part.”
“If I know the prince,” said the man, “He won’t love the fact that his betrothed is full of nerves. Perhaps he should hurry his work.”
“I think he would not,” Henry said shrewdly. “I think this work is more important than soothing the ruffled feathers of a prince.”
The man raised his eyebrows. “Mayhap. Well. You have my silence, for now. What are you doing so far from the palace of bone?”
Henry reddened, not wanting to let on that he was to see a warlock. The man grinned, fangs flashing white in the sun.
“Alright, don’t tell me. I shall let you keep your secrets, Your Highness.”
He stood to go. Henry knelt up, getting grass stains on his hose.
“Thank you. And - we know the prince is, is a good man.” It might have been a lie, they didn’t know much about the man, but it was important the prince’s confidante had a positive view of Pip.
The man left. After packing his horse up again, Henry rode on to the warlock’s dwelling.
It was a rickety shed propped next to a tree. In all honesty, Henry might have thought it just a pile of wood had not the map shown him the way. It seemed likely the mage had packed up and left long ago, perhaps carried off by the fae as they did with so many people in Henry’s kingdom. He would have thought a vampire queen might have scared them into submission. He sighed, and knocked on the door just in case.
A man of great beauty answered; he wore a coat of spangled rubies and smiled like a wolf. “Darling!” he cried, and ushered him in, the pile of wood proving to be much bigger on the inside and indeed, full of treasures. Henry’s eyes were drawn to the uncovered mirror in the middle of the room; it showed both him and his brother, both with the wrong faces, and the handsome stranger he had met earlier in the day holding a crown and baring his fangs.
Henry gulped. He ought not to have found that so thrilling.
“I have been waiting for you,” the man proclaimed, eyes bright in his dark face. He paused as he looked Henry over. “Although I suppose you haven’t been having much luck, have you, dear one?”
Henry flushed a bitter pink, aware it would have looked much more attractive on the face his brother was wearing.
“I have not,” he confirmed, and then pointed to the stranger in the mirror. “Why does he hold the crown?”
“Ah!” The man turned towards the mirror, and Henry noticed that neither of them appeared in the glass. “You’ve already met the bridegroom.”
Henry’s eyes widened. “That’s the vampire prince? The man Philip has been told to marry?”
“I know him, not well,” the man said. “Enough that this deception, if uncovered, will not be well-received.” He paused. “The simplest thing might be to stay silent.”
“And condemn my brother to misery?” Henry asked, incredulously. The mage smirked.
“And yourself to being the consort in the palace of bone. No, no - please don’t blush again, I find it tiresome.”
Instead of blushing, then, Henry took a deep breath. “Are you able to help me?” He took the sapphire and opal bracelet from his wrist, and placed it in the warlock’s hand. The man examined it, then set it down with an indulgent smile.
“You do not even know my name, Your Highness.”
“I do not,” Henry observed. “I wondered if perhaps you didn’t want to share it.”
The man’s smile widened. “Call me Pez.”
He twitched a great velvet curtain to cover the scrying-mirror, and then stoppered a bottle of some yellow-gold liquid and tossed it to Henry.
“What is it?” Henry asked as he caught it, nimbly.
“The solution to one problem, the cause of others. Share it between you and your brother,” he said, and in the blink of an eye Henry found himself back not only outside but also horsed, and already riding back to the palace of bone. His hand still held the bottle of potion; it was warm, as though he had been holding it for an age.
He arrived back to the palace to find Pip in a state of agitation.
“He’s coming tonight, Hen. The prince expects to see me at dinner and – gods above, I’m not sure I can do it.” He swallowed hard. “I keep thinking of Martha, back home.”
Henry stood before his older brother, without his jewels, clutching the potion. Wordlessly, he held it out, and Pip didn’t even ask, but took a swallow from the bottle before gasping and holding the rest of the bottle out to his brother. Henry took it.
The potion tasted like butter melting on the edge of a tattie scone, like a lungful of air after a rainstorm, like a meadowful of sunflowers on a summer’s day. Henry fell to his knees and might have laughed, were it not for his brother turning round, suddenly, with his own face finally upon his head.
There was laughing and rejoicing, of course, for Henry had broken the curse; but they quickly wondered aloud what they should do now. They settled on trickery; a forged letter asking for Philip to come home, leaving Henry behind as the one to be betrothed to the prince. Philip covered his head with a great hooded cloak and promised to ride carefully; Henry had to trust that he would.
“And when you’re good and wed, how about we see if the Queen can’t be convinced to step down?” Pip asked, laughter in his eyes, before he rode away.
It left Henry alone in the great castle. He inhabited his own body once more, his face with its familiar faults and freckles was the one staring back at him in the mirror. No servants who were assigned to the prince’s groom seemed to notice; or, at least, they didn’t say anything. Henry’s doublet was a shade of blue that at once set off his eyes and his hair; he felt like a sweet confection whipped up for the prince to eat as he climbed the stairs to the intimate dining room where they would dine together.
The man who sprawled in the chair behind the table was the same stranger that Henry had met on his ride to the warlock; he bowed low, as one prince should to another, and was gratified that the vampire prince returned him the same courtesy.
“We are to dine alone, Your Highness?” Henry asked, curious; the vampire prince smiled with smouldering eyes and replied.
“I have heard tell that I am regarded as intimidating. I thought informality would suit us, betrothed.”
Henry felt his eyebrows raise at the use of the pet name, and although the vampire prince (Alex, he reminded himself, I must be willing to use his name) met his gaze, he also grinned somewhat sheepishly.
“Well, we are,” he said, a little defensive, and then grew serious. “But I hope you do not find this fact - displeasing. I met your brother, you see; he said –”
Henry shook his head, cutting him off. “My brother says many things, Highness. Alex.”
The vampire prince smiled, and raised a goblet; they dined on their separate meals and found that they had much in common. And here is where the story could end, if the reader is so inclined, with promises for the future. It is usually the ending we tell the children.
But it is not the end of Alex and Henry. For, you see, in drinking the potion, the brothers had not discarded of the bottle. They were princes, and often did not have to think of such ordinary things as keeping their rooms tidy. A day after Alex and Henry’s first meal together, a maidservant found the bottle with the tiniest glimmer of liquid in it; being diligent, she brought it to the woman who oversaw the cleaning of the palace. She brought it to the cook; she brought it to the butler; and he notified the Queen and asked the best of the court magicians to test it.
The Queen said nothing to her son or his betrothed, but she watched them, falling in love deeper each day, going for long, shady rides together, or her son returning from Henry’s rooms a little mussed. And her heart broke when the magician told her the news that the potion was a powerful one, and they could not trust the grandson of Queen Mary was who he said he was.
It fell to her to inform her son, who was due to go riding with his betrothed that very day. Alex might have raged to the skies if he had been younger or more naive, but instead he drew himself up, cold and proud, and ordered his horse be readied.
“Betrothed!” Henry said cheerily as they met at the stables. “Where might we go today? I thought - perhaps - to the place where you were before we met? I have heard there is a river there.”
“We will ride to the forest,” Alex replied coolly. “It is shadier there, and I wish to ask you something.”
Onward they rode. Henry was not a fool; he had learned to read moods well in living under his grandmother’s roof, and so he was quiet as they trotted. Suddenly, Alex dismounted. With haste, Henry did too. He was beginning to fear the vampire prince’s wrath.
Before he could even ask what the matter was, Alex was holding the glass bottle out and demanding what he knew of it. And whatever else, Henry was not a natural liar.
“I procured a potion,” he eventually said, sensing the vibrations of anger coming off Alex like seismic waves. “I drank it. It was to–”
But the prince abruptly walked away from Henry, his own anger deafening his ears.
“I should have known any scion of Queen Mary would never have accepted my offer in good faith,” Alex said, voice cold as a winter night.
“You don’t understand!” Henry said, striding towards Alex with alarm on his face. “I was bewitched - and the first time I met you–”
“At dinner?” Alex spat, imbuing the words with vitriol.
“Before - at the river - ” Henry said, and then stopped. Alex’s eyes flared with anger and sorrow that Henry had somehow tricked him, that he had been on the back foot, and he moved as far away from the prince with the cornflower-blue eyes as he could.
Alex mounted his horse again as some of the royal guard rode up, and ordered Henry taken to the dungeons.
It was, reflected Henry, a rather dismal change in circumstances - from the spare, to the groom, and now prisoner. Alex led the procession back through the forest, and despite Henry’s calling out to him he refused to turn around. The grief struck Henry’s heart so hard that the cornflower blue of his eyes began to wilt.
The dungeons were appointed well - Henry remembered being told as a child that only the worst people went to the dungeon, and they only went there to die. The Queen had arranged a tour two weeks after his mother’s death, when she grew tired of the children crying. It had worked; one look at the slimy walls and the rusted chains and they never cried loudly again. Here, in the palace of bone, there were fresh rushes on the ground and the bed had a real mattress on it.
His first visitor was the fairy, Nora, who had helped him on the way to the palace. Whether she came to him in dreams or in real life, Henry could not say; she frowned to see his predicament.
“This is not what was foretold,” she told him quite seriously. “What occurred?”
“I broke the spell,” Henry told her unhappily, “But I neglected to tell the vampire prince I was under one in the first place.”
She tutted, fingers twining in the gold necklace he had given her for her help before. “This will never do. Since you paid me far too much to tell you not enough, I will extend a kindness, and plead your case in the vampire prince’s dreams.”
His second visitor came at the break of the second day, when he woke to find the librarian Zahra hammering on his door with a stack of books for him to read - as she put it, “no doubt you’re bored in there while the prince comes to his senses.”
He wrinkled his nose as he took the books from her through the slot in the door, grateful that his voice hadn’t changed. “I think that might take some time.”
Zahra sighed. “The ruby in that earring paid for my own betrothed to leave a mercenary army and settle home with me. I will speak to the idiot boy.”
On the evening of the third day, Henry opened his eyes to find a man in his cell. He was floating in the middle of the room and observing Henry critically.
“I did warn you,” said Pez with a sigh. “But you look much better with your own face. Let me see what I can do. It’s the least I owe you for that pretty bracelet.”
So it was that barely an hour after Pez had disappeared in a cloud of glitter, the vampire prince strode into Henry’s cell. Henry looked up from his book and was stunned to see the prince looking a little sheepish.
“It has come to my attention that –” He cleared his throat. “That perhaps I should have let you explain.”
Henry closed the book slowly, thinking this over, and watching the fearsome prince avoid his eyes. “How much will you believe?”
Alex raised his eyes to the heavens. “In the past few days, I’ve had a member of the fae, my least favourite palace librarian, and the most powerful mage in the country say I should pay attention to you. My tolerance is rather high.”
So Henry told him. He told him about his mother’s death, and his sister the Changeling, and how his grandmother had blamed her most of all for queering the family line. The portraits they knew were being sent away to catch spouses with. Of the potion they had been forced to take, and how Pip was ready to become his husband even though he didn’t want to.
Alex interrupted - “And you did?”
Henry only smiled, and continued the tale. Of the fairy, and the librarian, and the mage, and the stranger by the riverbank whose smiles had made him dizzy. Switching back with Pip, and his galloping off to his true love. Since they both knew the part about the ride and the imprisonment, he tried to skip over it; but Alex held out a hand, wincing, and requested Henry tell the whole truth, even if it hurt.
When he finished, Alex knelt before him. “My temper is one of my worst qualities,” he admitted gruffly. “June says so. So does the Queen, my mother. You know you are well within your rights to return home - to wage war on a kingdom which imprisoned you.”
“It wasn’t the kingdom,” Henry pointed out, enjoying the sight of Alex on his knees. “It was you. And an army for one man seems a little over the top. Besides, I like your Queen better.”
A hopeful look spread over Alex’s face. “So you’ll stay? If not as my groom, then as –”
Henry held up a hand. “Whyever would I not choose to be your groom?”
There were reasons that Alex could have said. ‘Because I imprisoned you’, perhaps. ‘Because you deserve better’ was one he thought of. But, he reasoned, when paradise is opening its door to you, you needn’t shut it prematurely. They embraced, and Henry left the cells, and Alex spent the night and all the nights apologising for it.
The two of them were married within the year, and then soon after Queen Mary died in mysterious circumstances no-one cared to investigate. The ascendants to the throne were Prince Philip and, soon after, the former stablegirl and now Queen Martha. And so the realms lived happily ever after, a fearsome pair of allies against the world.