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Tomorrow will be kinder.

"The tricky thing," Trajan was saying somewhere behind him, picking his way through the shattered chunks of concrete and fragments of broken glass that littered the ground. "Is that yesterday, you were just a child playing soldiers, dreaming dreams with happy endings."

Hadrian didn't respond for a long moment. He didn't think he could. It rather felt as though his tongue had turned to lead in his mouth, and his bones to concrete. He could tell without looking that black clouds had begun to gather behind him, visible in the still disrepaired hole left by dynamite in the eighth floor wall. "And now what am I?"

Often he wondered why each thread of thought within his mind ran towards the conclusion, hoping for an end, like he was wearing an armour of sorrow, weighing his shoulders down, trouble haunting his mind like a vulture perched precariously on one shoulder.

"Now?" His uncle was amused, a smile in his voice. The sound of metal, as he kicked a gun away from a corpse. Hadrien was glad that their soldiers had left them behind to speak in the ruins of the palace, that there were no witnesses to this moment. "Now you are restored to your rightful position." And Hadrian noticed that his uncle avoided saying exactly what that position was, but bit his lead tongue and allowed no such venomous words slip past his lips. This was a homecoming. This ought to have been joyful. So he stayed silent. "But now we've stepped into the world, and it's full of wolves and rats. Everybody is watching. Everybody is keeping score, Hadrian."

Another of Trajan's mantras. Even when they had hidden from the entire world, hidden from every last prying eye, somewhere anonymous and silent and secret, act as though everyone is watching. Hadrian heeded Trajan's words - they were less painful than making those mistakes for himself.

Every lesson formed a new scar. The last had left a knotted cicatrix over his heart where a pretty girl had tried to cut his heart out. The lesson: don't trust a beautiful girl, and don't trust your heart. One will always betray the other. What was love but a disease of the blood?

But he didn't think about that anymore.

"They never thought I'd make it this far," Hadrian said softly.

"They were foolish to doubt you," Trajan replied, setting a fatherly hand on his nephew's shoulder. "And they paid for their mistake with their lives."

"Most of them," Hadrian replied bitterly. A small cabal of rebels had escaped their onslaught in the midst of the royalist attack on their palace, fleeing even as their guards and ground soldiers ran towards their deaths.

"The country is ours again," Trajan said calmingly. "Let them run. They will not get far."

Hadrian hesitated. Turning on his heel and looking over the destruction that the rebels and royalists had wrought on the once glorious castle, the wreck and ruins that now lay across the ground as though discarded by some careless deity, he could not help but feel... lost. Wasn't this meant to be home? Wasn't this meant to be a homecoming?

And yet he had never known this palace. Not since he had been stolen from this world, a mere six months old, spirited away and enclosed within a more mundane reality, his identity - the one he assumed now, name and all - stripped from him and another put in its place, like a snake might shed its skin in spring. This was not - could not - be home.

Home was very far away from here.

"Ours," he repeated, rather distantly, and then there were footsteps behind them and Trajan turned to accept the salute of an approaching royalist rifleman, his uniform torn, one arm hanging useless at his side.

"Lord Regent, sir," the soldier gasped out. "Your Highness. We've found them. We've found them."

Trajan shot Hadrian a significant look. The teenager took a deep breath. He could be a teenager no longer.

He was a prince now. He might be a king soon. This country, this throne, was his. His birthright. Time for him to claim it.

"Show me," Prince Hadrian said.

Tomorrow would be kinder.


ONE YEAR LATER

"Come away, little lamb. Come away to the water, to the arms that are waiting only for you."

The new facade of the palace gleamed bronze and gold and amber in the late morning sunshine, the light leaking slowly like thick honey through a dense cloud cover of charcoal and slate. The long emerald lawns now laced with wildflowers led to the high walls and the permanently locked iron gates that hid the castle and its inhabitants from the rest of Angeles, from the rest of Illéa, from the rest of the world. After only a year, reconstruction of the once beautiful palace was nearly complete - and yet, would it ever be the same?

"Come away, little lamb, come away to the slaughter, to the one appointed to see this through."

No king now, no queen either. Their headstones shone, white and black marble, tucked away in the small alcove beside the castle chapel that had belonged to their forefathers for as long as they had forefathers. Hadrien's younger sisters lay there now too.

"We are calling for you. We are coming for you."

Well, all but one.

"Do you know any songs that aren't dreadfully morbid?" Hadrian asked rhetorically as he approached the delicate ivory girl, who was standing on the end of the cobblestone path just as it began its gentle curve back towards the driveway.

Drosida was swishing her fencing foil through the air with a ferocity that was entirely unsuited to her delicate facial features, her bird-like frame and scorpion grass eyes. Her flaxen hair had been braided back in an arrangement that looked entirely too complex to be practical - nonetheless, Hadrian had to concede that despite her small size, his favourite and only cousin cut as imposing a figure in her padded jacket and plastron as she had in her fatigues a year ago.

Had it only been a year? A year since they had retaken the castle, the throne and the nation? Hadrian's hair was beginning to grow too long again, curling where it touched his collar. The wound on Drosida's upper lip had healed to a thin silver scar, barely visible against her porcelain skin.

She showed very white and very sharp teeth when she smiled. "Who exactly taught me those songs?" She raised her foil and arched an eyebrow. "I don't suppose you're here to indulge me."

Of all of them, Drosida had taken most aptly to existence as an idle aristocrat, spending her days watching her shadow and arranging her skirts and basking in the sun, and Hadrian often found himself envying her. She made it look easy - she always had. Trajan had said when they were young that Drosida was closer to a chameleon than the flower for which she was named; certainly, their Drosida never tried to put down roots.

"I'm going," Hadrian said, putting his hands in his pockets. "To take that as a yes to my next question."

Drosida pursed her lips. "Seems like cheating."

"You heard."

She shrugged, testing the sharp tip of her sword with the edge of her fingernail, watching her cousin with a jackal's gaze. "Difficult not to. You know that my father is utterly insane, yes? You are too, for agreeing to it..."

"It was my idea."

She shrugged. "Doesn't change a thing. You're both lunatics. Although I should probably have guessed as much before now."

The foil slashed through the air again, a silver blur, and Hadrian felt suddenly very glad that Drosida was not being placed in charge of her own Selection. This palace had seen enough bloodshed.

"We need to unite the nation," he said. It sounded a little weak, even to his own ears. "Show them who we are..."

"It legitimises you," Drosida said, nodding. "Following in your father's footsteps. Showing you are truly a Schreave. I get it. I think you're a fool, and so is Father for even contemplating the prospect, but I get it."

"It'll be risky," Hadrian said. To open their gates to the world while they were still unsteady... Despite Trajan's words twelve months earlier, many of the rogues who had escaped their destiny at the palace on that fateful night had never resurfaced - among them the False King. They were still out there, somewhere. And they would not go quietly into the night. Hadrian had wanted to move against them instantly, but Trajan had counselled him first cool his blood and consider his next move with caution.

"Thirty five girls," Drosida mused. "My, but you are a fool, cousin. Would you prefer I put you out of your misery now?" Her foil wavered in the golden afternoon air, and she mimed the slitting of a throat with considerable drama.

Hadrian almost laughed. He had almost laughed many times in the days and weeks and months that had followed his homecoming, but he had never quite managed to complete the sounds.

Could you call it that, a homecoming? Even if this was not a home? Trajan thought him intransigent. There was no need for his uncle to tell him so - it was more than evident.

Perhaps that was why Trajan had agreed so readily to this idea of the Selection. Perhaps he hoped that it would give Hadrian a reason to stay, a reason to make his home here, and a motive to put his mind towards matters of kingship and diplomacy and politics.

He shouldn't waste that finite hope of his. The scar over Hadrien's heart reminded him of that lesson he had learned, many years ago. What was love but a disease of the blood?

"The Report airs tonight," he told his cousin in no uncertain terms, his tone firm, and then he turned on his heel and walked back with a straight back towards the half-ruin of the ancient castle, leaving the gold-haired girl to fence her shadow behind him, and black clouds gathering in the crystalline sky above.

Let tomorrow be kinder.