The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1657: The Frozen Streets of Gaalen

"Lord Eagle," the gray-haired and immaculately dressed retainer said, bowing modestly when Prince Henri made his way over to him. "I apologize for interrupting your evening," he said smoothly as he straightened. "But your father requests your presence at your earliest convenience."

Of course, when the king requested his son’s presence at Henri’s ’earliest convenience,’ it was a polite way of saying that nothing but the most sensitive or critical of matters should delay his son in returning to his side, but a tenured retainer like Pierron would never be so crass as to express himself that way.

"Just me?" Henri asked as he glanced out at the dance floor, where a first-year student of the academy in an elaborately decorated hawk mask found himself the center of attention for several giggling young ladies demanding that the young lord favor them with the next dance.

"Just you, Lord Eagle," Pierron said, shaking his head as he followed the prince’s gaze. "This is Lord Hawk’s first masquerade, and your father saw no reason to pull him away from it for this evening’s matters."

"I see," Henri said as his lips pursed into a frown beneath the sharp beak of his gilded mask. "We should leave quietly then. My brother can make the midnight toast this year. He’ll enjoy that," Henri said as he imagined his bookish brother being thrust to the center of attention even more than he already had been.

"Lead the way, Pierron," Henri said. "We can go without announcing ourselves."

Henri left his mask in place until they were well away from the Great Hall, removing it only when they emerged into the wintry night air of the Royal Capital, where an impressive carriage bearing the royal crest awaited the crown prince.

"Your Highness," Pierron said, dropping to one knee in the wet slush of snow that had been churned by countless horses and carriages this evening. "Your carriage awaits," he said before rising to open the door and setting out a series of step-stools that would prevent the crown prince from having to step into the icy slush.

"Do you know what this is about, Pierron?" Henri asked as he stepped into the heated interior of the plush carriage. "Anything that might help to prepare me for an audience with Father?"

"Only that he summoned you mere minutes after receiving a visit from Lord Florien Vaussay," Pierron said. "But whatever message brought the Master of Messengers to His Majesty’s side on a night like tonight, or provoked such an immediate response, I couldn’t say."

"I see, thank you, Pierron..." Henri said as he settled back into the comfortable cushions of the carriage.

The ride from the Royal Academy to the Royal Palace was longer than the word ’royal’ in both place names would imply. By a tradition that dated to the academy’s founding, the Royal Academy was outside the walls of the Palace District, befitting its status as an institution that was open to all. On a night like tonight, when the steepest hills were to be avoided for fear of carriages careening out of control on hidden patches of ice and the most direct routes to the palace were unavailable, a journey that could have been completed in a quarter of an hour would take twice as long, giving Henri plenty of time to speculate about his father’s intentions before he reached the palace.

Outside the carriage windows, Henri watched the people of Gaalen struggling through the snow. The Carter’s Guild carried the royal mandate to keep the streets clear enough to travel and to ensure that lamps were lit at every home along the major roads, and even now, the crown prince spotted men with bent backs and heavy shovels hard at work clearing away the snow that, left to pile up overnight, would shut down certain parts of the city.

"This winter is the worst it’s been since... since I don’t know when," he said as he realized that he hadn’t seen things looking this dire at any point since he was old enough to understand snow as something other than a toy to play with that even his father couldn’t summon on command.

From the road, Henri caught occasional glimpses of the River Chorale where it flowed into Cobalt Bay. Already, large sheets of ice drifted from the river into the bay, and along the riverbank where both merchantmen and fishing vessels found their berth, several piers were encased entirely in ice, trapping vessels there until the river thawed or someone spent days of dangerous labor trying to break them free.

"We’ll be able to walk across the Chorale within a week," Henri realized. "Two at most."

The winter ice flows were one of the only things that kept the port of Gaalen from rivaling the great southern port of Blackwell Bay, and this year the ice hadn’t just come in early, it had come in suddenly and more fiercely than Henri had ever seen. According to his teachers, the Chorale froze over once every seven to twelve years, and only rarely twice within the same decade. The last time he’d seen it happen, he’d only been seven years old.

But even if it didn’t freeze solid, the ice flows still made the river dangerous enough that few ships arrived from the farmlands upriver, and the city of Gaalen depended on trade coming in via Cobalt Bay to make up for the demands of the bustling city. This year, however, even the bay had grown icy enough that he wondered how they would fill the gap.

"The day the river freezes, the price of Blackwell whale oil and Keating coal will double in the city. The day the bay freezes over, it will double again," Henri sighed. There were men who stood to make a fortune off those commodities this year. Men who built up vast stockpiles in better years only to wring every possible silver penny and golden sovereign from desperate hands when times grew hard.

Henri and his father had argued about this very thing just two nights ago when Henri suggested that the Crown should outlaw that kind of hoarding and profiteering, but his father had resolutely opposed him.

"You’ll understand one day when the crown sits on your head, Henri," his father insisted. "If I outlaw hoarding, then there will be no stockpiles within the city walls when we come to need it most. Merchants will always find a way to maximize their profits, and if they cannot do something as simple as buying low and selling high, we’ll soon find ourselves with too few of them to make any commerce flow."

"There should be limits, Father," Henri had argued. "There’s a difference between a man’s right to earn a living and a profit and allowing him to fleece the common folk of the city when their only alternative is to freeze or starve," he insisted.

"I agree," the king replied. "But what mechanism will you build to know what is profit and what is gouging? How will you judge it fairly from year to year, and how will you convince the guilds to agree with you?"

"The remedies you propose may be worse than the illness you’re trying to treat, son," the king said sagely. "Until you understand the damage you may do when you have the best of intentions, you aren’t ready for the responsibilities of making the most important decisions."

The rebuke had stung enough that Henri had refused to join his father for breakfast the following morning, choosing to return to the academy and his teachers in the hopes of formulating a counterargument. In the end, however, he’d only come away with more questions than answers and a growing sense that the kingdom of Gaal was held together by bits of string and glue, ready to fall to pieces if the king’s actions tipped the scales more than a hairsbreadth at a time.

"The Church will have its say in things too," he said as the carriage rolled past the massive temple complex that only lost in splendor to the great temples in the Holy City. "And their own chains to fit us with for every favor we ask of them or accept from them..."

When he was a younger boy, Henri couldn’t wait to be king so that he could make all of his own rules and do as he pleased. Now, as he approached his final years of schooling, he was coming to realize how fragile the king’s power truly was.

"Is it the Church that forced Father to summon me tonight?" Henri wondered as the temple began to fade from sight behind them. "Or something even worse? Demons from beyond the frontier?" he speculated before dismissing the notion as nonsense. There hadn’t been a demon spotted within a hundred leagues of Gaalen in more than two hundred years... the notion that once had forced his father to act on Midwinter’s Night was preposterous...

Wasn’t it?