Fated Eclipse: The Illegitimate Princess And Her Alpha Suitors

Chapter 66: The Duke’s Hidden Blade

Lyria’s POV

The Queen gave the Duke a long look as though she were carefully deciding whether the man standing before her was merely insolent or deliberately provoking her.

Beside her, Jacinta shifted slightly.

Almost immediately, she lifted a hand and adjusted the delicate crown resting upon her head. It had indeed tilted a little to the side.

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.

The Duke noticed the movement as well. A slow smirk curled at the corner of his mouth, though he said nothing.

”Your Grace,” the Queen said, ”I trust you do not mean to suggest an insult to the Princess.”

The Duke tilted his head.

”Your Majesty is admirably swift to identify insult,” he said pleasantly. ”It is a quality I find most admirable in a ruler. Vigilance of that nature protects a great deal.”

He paused, then added,

”However, since the matter of insult has been raised — I find myself compelled to observe something.”

His voice remained even. Conversational, almost.

”I am the current Duke of Blackmere,” he said. ”By the established order of precedence — an order, I should note, that this very court has maintained for generations — I rank second only to the royal family itself among those gathered here today.” He gestured lightly with one hand. ”And yet I was called last. After the Marquesses. After the Counts. After the Earls and the Barons.”

He looked at the footman.

Then back at the Queen.

”I do not raise this to create difficulty,” he said. ”I raise it because to save the highest-ranking nobleman in this assembly for last — behind those who, with all due respect, hold considerably lesser titles — is not a matter of scheduling. It is a statement.”

His pale green eyes moved briefly to the King.

”A statement directed not merely at myself,” he continued, ”but at my family. And at Blackmere.”

The King cleared his throat rather uncomfortably at that.

”Perhaps,” he said, with the carefully constructed ease of a man building a bridge over uncertain ground, ”the footman misread the order. These things happen in the course of large proceedings.” He glanced toward the footman in question, who had gone quite still near the edge of the dais. ”We shall address the matter with him appropriately.”

The Duke regarded the King for a moment.

”Your Majesty is quite efficient at that,” he said. ”But I must confess I find it unlikely that the fault lies with him. A footman reads the order he is given.” He tilted his head slightly. ”But as Your Majesty says — these things happen.”

He let that sit for exactly one breath.

”In any case,” he said, moving on with the seamless ease of someone who had made his point and had no need to keep on circling around it, ”that is not why we are gathered today. And I have a painting to explain.”

He turned toward the canvas.

The stick figure regarded the court with its W crown and its two circles and its additional circles on each outstretched hand.

”What I have drawn,” the Duke said, ”is precisely how I see the Princess.”

He pointed toward the figure with a straightforward, unhurried gesture.

”The form, as I have acknowledged, reflects the boundaries of my technical ability rather than any artistic intention. I ask the court to look past the execution and toward the meaning.”

He indicated the circles on the figure’s face.

”These represent both the moon and the sun,” he said. ”The Princess is, as all the kingdom knows, the Moon. She carries that within her. It is who she is.”

He gestured downward toward the stick figure’s outstretched hands and the circles drawn upon them.

”But these,” he said, ”are what I find most significant. The Princess holds both the moon and the sun in the palms of her hands. She is not merely one celestial body among many. She is the absolute authority. The one who determines what shines and what does not. What rises and what remains below the horizon.”

His voice was measured and pleasant throughout.

Not a single word was delivered with anything other than the composed, courteous tone of a man sharing an honest observation.

”I see the Princess,” he continued, ”as someone in whose hands everything rests. The stars orbit her — this, as my fellow candidates have observed today, is not a new insight. But I will add this: they orbit her without any effort on her part. She need not move toward them. She need not reach for them or seek them or work to draw them near.”

”She simply exists,” he said, ”and things come to her. Whatever she wishes is placed in her hands. The sun, the moon, the stars — all of it arranged for her comfort and her pleasure, because that is how the world around her has been constructed.”

He looked at Jacinta.

”That is exactly how I see Her Highness.”

The courtyard fell into silence after his words.

This was a more complicated silence. The silence of people who had heard something and were not entirely certain what they had heard.

I stood at the gatehouse window and felt the words arrange themselves in my mind with the slow, careful precision of pieces finding their places.

I turned them over.

Examined them from different angles, and no matter how much I did it, I arrived at one conclusion: the Duke had not complimented Jacinta at all.

He had described a woman who had never earned a single thing in her life. A woman who existed at the centre of a system built specifically to ensure she never had to. A woman whose authority was not the authority of wisdom or effort or genuine power, but the authority of someone who had been placed on a platform by other people’s hands and told she was elevated.

The sun did not shine because of her. The sun was handed to her.

The stars did not come because she was worthy of them. They came because the world had been arranged to send them.

She simply existed.

And things came to her.

Every word of it had been delivered with a pleasant, composed courtesy that made it impossible to point to a single phrase and call it an insult. And yet the whole of it — the complete picture it painted — was the most precise and cutting assessment of Jacinta that had been spoken aloud in this courtyard today.

The Queen’s eye twitched. I was certain she had gotten the hidden message behind the Duke’s pleasant words.

Jacinta, however, was smiling.

She was looking at the Duke with the warm, satisfied expression of a woman who had received a compliment and intended to accept it graciously, and I understood, watching her, that she had not heard what I had heard.

And sometimes, I wondered if I really was the one who was uneducated, or if it was her.

The Duke inclined his head toward her with a slight smile.

Around the courtyard, whispers had begun.

”The Duke is quite right,” someone murmured. ”She is the absolute authority. Everything bends toward her.”

”A most perceptive interpretation,” another voice agreed.

I listened to them and felt something that was not quite disbelief, but was close to it.

They had not heard it either.

And perhaps Jacinta wasn’t the only one who had me questioning my intelligence.

The King cleared his throat.

He raised his hand with the decisive authority of a man drawing a line under something he wished to move past.

”You may return to your place, Your Grace,” he said.

The Duke bowed.

”I shall do so most obligingly, Your Majesty,” he said.

He turned and walked back toward his position in the arc with the same unhurried ease with which he had approached the dais.

The King rose.

”The judges shall now convene,” he announced, his voice resuming its natural authority, ”to deliberate upon the works presented today. In the meantime, we invite all present to take refreshment and converse at their leisure.”

He gestured toward the far end of the courtyard, where attendants had arranged tables with the quiet efficiency of people who had been waiting for this signal.

”We shall reconvene in thirty minutes,” he said, ”at which time the result of the first competition shall be declared.”