Page 44 of The Sun King's Noon

“No?”

“No.” Heat rushed to Richard’s face. “He is the Deputy Captain of my Crownsguard. The sworn brother of my brother. Why would I—he and I are not—I do not think of him in that?—”

Seola’s eyebrows climbed higher with each stuttered denial. Richard bit his lip.

“I would just...” He dropped his voice to a mutter. “I have come to know him better in these few months. And—” He coughed. “And I should merely prefer that he be…closer.”

“Closer.” Seola waggled her brows.

“No.” Richard recoiled. “Not—not like that. In any form.”

Seola looked confused. “Then as a friend?”

Richard gave his head an irritated shake. As a friend? But Seola was a friend, and he did not feel such ugliness welling in him at the thought of her abed with her wife. And Orric was a friend, who stirred none of the same…possessiveness? Richard stared down at where his hand curled against his heart.

A lover?

But no. He did not want Kaelen in his bed. He wanted none of what Seola’s waggling eyebrows hinted at.

“I do not know,” Richard said quietly. “I know only that I should like him to smile at me more. And perhaps—” He hesitated, baffled by the words that came to his tongue. “To smile at others less.”

Seola gawked, almost cross-eyed, and Richard groaned, moving to grab his shirt from the fence.

“Forget it.”

“No!” Seola exclaimed. “All these years, and I have never seen you so flustered!”

“I am not flustered!” Richard hissed back. He was relieved when Seola’s reply was cut by Dain’s bellow across the bailey.

“YOUR MAJESTY!”

The man strode towards Richard, one hand dragging a sobbing Briony—her curls tangled with straw, her right eye swelling shut—and the other yanking along a similarly aged squire. Isolde, Richard recognised. Her braid was loose, her collar torn, and her left cheek puffed red. Behind them came a straggle of sheepish squires and a few knights.

The soldiers around stopped their training to watch, and servants peered over the balcony railings. It wasn’t every day, Richard supposed, that they saw a princess bested in a fight.

Dain deposited both girls before Richard and stepped back with a harrumph.

“Caught these two, Your Majesty, rolling in the dirt in the inner courtyard like a pair of feral cats.”

Richard pulled on his shirt. “Tell me, Briony.”

The girl’s face crumpled, and words poured from her in a teary torrent. “She p-punched me! Right in the eye! I wasn’t even—I didn’t do anything horrible, and she just—just hit me, Brother! She is a treasonous snake, she is, and I am blinded?—”

“That is a lie!” Isolde stood tall and jabbed a finger in Briony’s direction. “She slapped me first!”

“Because you were laughing at me!” Briony shrieked and stomped her foot. “You and your silly friends were giggling and whispering, and I told you to stop, and you said I was more revolting than the backside of a wicked troll?—”

Seola, who leaned against the fence with her arms folded, guffawed. “Oho, this is magnificent. Better than any duel.”

Richard glowered at Isolde. “Is it right, Squire, for you to hit a girl you outmatch in every bodily regard?”

Isolde’s face coloured. “Your Majesty, I was defending?—”

“And is it right,” Richard continued, “for a squire, who aspires to knighthood and is taught in the virtues of honour, to mock others behind their backs? To giggle and whisper where the subject can hear and use demeaning insults?”

Isolde flinched and stubbed her boot against the ground. “She—She shouldn’t have tried asking Squire Godwyn to the ball. Godwyn is my—he’s courting me, and she knew, and she went and asked him anyway?—”

“He smiled at me, and I only asked if he had thought of changing his mind!” Briony yelled.