He had the decency to look ashamed. “I’m never my best self after a night with those cigarettes.”
“Perhaps you should stop smoking them, then.”
“Perhaps I should,” he agreed with more ease than I’d anticipated. “I did recognize you, you know. Not this morning, but last night. All those freckles.”
He fell quiet for a moment, leaving me to grasp at what he’d meant.
Leopold sighed, shifting around on the coach seat. “I’m sorry I threw those coins at you. That day in the marketplace.”
I was stunned, shocked into silence.
He waved aside his words, a red stain of embarrassment creeping up the sides of his neck. “You probably don’t remember. It’s fine.”
“Do you really think my life so exciting that I wouldn’t have occasion to remember a crown prince making fun of my freckles and then hurling a fistful of money at me while an entire village descended on us, grabbing and fighting over it?”
He picked at his fingernail, a fidgety gesture I’d never have guessed him capable of. Fidgeting meant you were uncomfortable. You were uncomfortable when you were in the wrong. I wondered if Leopold had ever thought himself in the wrong before.
“I am…,” he began, and a flash of doubt washed over him. “I am deeply sorry for that. For the coins and for the insult. I actually…” Leopold sighed. “I rather like your freckles,” he admitted.
“You like my…freckles?” I wanted to laugh.
“They suit you. They give you character, make you stand out as your authentic self.”
“I’m glad you enjoy them so,” I said. “I’ve always wished they’d disappear.”
The coach clattered over the moat, then slowed to a halt as the iron gates were opened.
“I had a…something once,” Leopold confided once we were off again, heading up the winding drive to the palace. He gestured to the spot below his earlobe. “A birthmark, not very big, but such a rosy shade that my parents knew it needed to go.”
“Go?” I echoed in disbelief. “It’s a birthmark. Where exactly would a birthmark go?”
“Away,” he laughed. “Far, far, far enough away that it would never dare to come back and visit my royal personage again. I don’t remember all the treatments, all the ways the healers tried to remove it, but Bellatrice does. She’s told me all about the horrid pastes and lotions, acids and cleansers.”
“There’s nothing there now,” I noted, feeling flustered as I studied the sharp line of his jaw, the curve of his ear. It was a strangely intimate spot on the body, out for all the world to see but a curious place to fix your focus on. I wanted to reach out and feel the skin there but kept my hands in my lap, unsure if the impulse was professional or personal.
The dream I’d had the night before still danced in my memory.
He nodded. “When they couldn’t lighten it, they had a surgeon take a hot knife and just—” He swished his fingers through the air, a quick flick of the wrist.
“That’s barbaric!” I exclaimed, my anger bursting from me before I could stop it. “And it worked?”
“See for yourself,” he said, angling his head back to better showme. There wasn’t a trace of a birthmark, and the scar was tidy enough to be nearly invisible.
The coach stopped outside the front entrance, all sculpted colonnades and gilt tracing, but even its ostentatious grandeur could not pull my attention away from the crown prince.
“They did good work,” I finally admitted. “But I’m sorry you were put through it, even as a baby.”
He shrugged good-naturedly. “It was a lesson, I suppose. One that needed to be learned. Anything less than perfect, anything less than the idolized ideal, has no place at court, no place in our home, no place in our family.” He shook his head, and I couldn’t tell if this truth made him sad or merely resigned. “So yes, Just Hazel, despite what my brattish younger self may have implied, I rather like your freckles.”
The carriage door opened and Leopold hopped out, seemingly unaffected by the private confidence he’d just shared with me. He went straight inside without looking back to see if I followed, not even once.
Chapter 34
I stared after Leopold’s retreatingfigure and felt a strange restlessness. I knew I ought to go inside to check on the king, but I’d been stuck behind walls all day, a feeling I was wholly unaccustomed to. The thought of wandering through the maze of identical halls, feeling the weight of the bricks and marble and the eyes of every golden bull, made me want to scream. I needed fresh air and open spaces, room to stretch and walk through all the problems weaving in my mind.
If I’d been at home, I would have set out with Cosmos for a long ramble along the creek that wound round my property. Our walks always helped me gain clarity and see whatever troubled me with fresh eyes, in a new light.
A walk was just what I needed now.
