Chapter 4: Herbs and Heartbeats
The sunlight after breakfast was a different creature than the harsh midday glare. It was honeyed, generous, pooling in the courtyard’s herb garden like liquid gold. Vil walked a half-step behind Leona, not out of deference, but because the prince’s stride was a meandering, loose-limbed exploration of the space, and Vil needed a moment to adjust.
The garden was a wild, fragrant contrast to Vil’s sterile chambers. Lavender bushes buzzed with drowsy bees, their purple spikes bending under the weight of scent. Rosemary clawed its way up a sun-bleached trellis, silvery-green fingers reaching for the sky. The path was paved with worn, warm stones, and the air itself tasted of crushed mint and damp earth.
Leona had changed after breakfast. His earlier tunic was gone, replaced by a simpler linen one, loosely laced at the throat. It was well-made but lived-in, the fabric soft from countless washings. His trousers were loose, tailored for movement, not show. His hair, usually a chaotic mane, was partially restrained by a leather cord at the nape of his neck, but rebellious strands had escaped, framing his face and catching the light like spun gold.
Vil found his gaze caught, again and again, on the line of Leona’s jaw where the sun traced it, sharp and clean. On the way the loose fabric of his tunnel shifted across his shoulders with each lazy, confident step, hinting at the muscle beneath. On his hands, currently tucked into his pockets, which Vil remembered were capable of both destroying a pastry and rebuilding a fire with the same unthinking efficiency.
He was… disconcertingly attractive. Not in the polished, statuesque way of the courtiers back home. This was a lived-in attractiveness, a physicality that was as much a part of him as his cynicism. It was entirely unfair.
Vil forced his attention to the plants. He identified feverfew, its cheerful white flowers belying its potent purpose. He spotted a patch of silvery wormwood, and his mind automatically catalogued its properties: antiseptic, vermifuge, bitter.
His fingers drifted over a cluster of delicate, purple-flowered stems he hadn’t seen in cultivation before. “Vervain,” he murmured aloud, his professional interest piqued. “I’m surprised. It’s temperamental. Needs specific drainage.”
“My mother’s patch,” Leona said, stopping beside him. He wasn’t looking at the plant. He was looking at Vil’s hand hovering over the leaves. “She was big on the old remedies. Said the palace healers relied too much on magic and not enough on dirt.”
Vil sneaked a glance at him. With the sun behind him, Leona’s features were thrown into sharper relief—the strong bridge of his nose, the curve of his lower lip, the surprisingly long lashes that softened the habitual glare of his eyes. He looked less like a prince playing at being a layabout and more like… a person. A complete, complicated, infuriating person.
Leona’s head turned, and his green eyes caught Vil’s mid-stare. A slow, knowing smirk spread across his face. “See something you like, Schoenheit?”
Heat rushed to Vil’s cheeks, a traitorous, humiliating blush. He straightened up, withdrawing his hand from the vervain. “I was assessing the viability of the cultivar. It’s struggling. The soil here is too dense.”
“Is that what you were doing?” Leona’s voice was a low rumble of amusement. He reached past Vil, his arm brushing lightly against Vil’s sleeve. The scent of sun-warmed linen and something uniquely, essentially Leona—a mix of clean sweat, herbs, and open air—washed over him. Leona’s fingers, deft and calloused, plucked a single, perfect sprig of the purple vervain.
Before Vil could protest, Leona raised his hand. Vil flinched, a minute movement he instantly despised himself for. But Leona didn’t strike. His movements were deliberate, almost gentle. He tucked the stem of the vervain carefully behind Vil’s ear, his knuckles brushing the sensitive skin of Vil’s temple.
The touch was electric. Vil froze.
“There,” Leona said, his smirk softening into something else, something more intimate and challenging. “Even the plants need to look perfect for you, Princess.”
The old nickname, which usually sparked immediate ire, landed differently this time. It was wrapped in the scent of the herb, in the ghost of his touch, in the dappled sunlight. It felt less like an insult and more like a secret.
Vil reached up, his fingers touching the delicate petals nestled in his hair. He should remove it. It was absurd, undignified. Instead, he left it there. “It’s vervain,” he said, his voice oddly quiet. “Historically used to ward off vampires and ensure fidelity.”
Leona’s eyebrows shot up. Then he laughed, a real, surprised bark of sound that startled a small bird from a nearby bush. “Fidelity, huh? Guess they thought of everything.” He shook his head, still grinning, and started walking again down the path. “Come on. There’s something else.”
Vil followed, the herb a strange, tangible weight against his skin. He felt hyper-aware of it, of the place where Leona’s fingers had been. They walked in a silence that was no longer charged with antagonism, but with something quieter, more fragile.
The path led to a crumbling stone fountain at the garden’s heart. Water trickled from a lion’s mouth carved into the center, but the basin was cracked, and most of the water seeped away into the ground before it could pool. It gave the space a melancholic, waiting feeling.
Leona hoisted himself up to sit on the fountain’s wide, sun-warmed edge. He patted the spot beside him.
Vil hesitated. Sitting felt dangerously casual. It was a concession to this… whatever this was. He sat, maintaining a careful inch of space between them. The stone was warm through the fabric of his trousers.
For a while, they just listened to the drip-drip of the faulty fountain and the hum of the garden. The world beyond the palace walls felt very far away.
“My brother,” Leona began, his gaze fixed on the trickling water, “the golden heir. He used to try and fix this thing when we were kids. Every summer. Would get the stonewrights in, patch the cracks. It’d hold for a week, then start leaking again.” He picked up a loose pebble and tossed it into the dry part of the basin. It skittered across the stone with a hollow click. “I told him it was a waste of time. The foundation’s wrong. The whole base is shifted. You can patch it forever, but it’ll never hold water.”
Vil watched his profile. This wasn’t just about a fountain. “So you let it leak.”
“Yeah.” Leona looked at him. “Sometimes things are broken at the core. Patching the surface is just… performance.”
The unspoken words hung between them. Vil’s perfect schedule, the Luminary Fellowship, the alliance itself. Were they just patches on a cracked foundation?
“What do you do,” Vil asked slowly, “if you can’t fix the foundation?”
Leona shrugged, a lazy roll of his shoulders. “You get a new fountain. Or you learn to like the sound of the leak.” He leaned back on his hands, tilting his face to the sun. “Or you sit by it with someone who doesn’t mind getting a little wet.”
The simplicity of it was staggering. And terrifying. Vil’s entire life was a monument to patching cracks, to maintaining a flawless surface. The idea of letting something be fundamentally broken, of finding value in the flaw itself… it was heresy.
Yet, here he was, sitting by a broken fountain with a crown prince who embraced his own role as the flawed, leaking secondary part of the system. With a flower behind his ear.
His pocket communicator buzzed, a sharp, insistent vibration against his thigh. The spell shattered. Vil flinched, the sound an intrusion from another world.
He pulled the device out. The screen glowed with a name: Envoy Selene. The icon of his queen’s crest shone beside it.
All the softness of the moment drained from his body. His posture straightened, his face settling into its familiar, practiced neutrality. He looked at Leona, who was watching him with a flat, unreadable expression.
“I have to take this,” Vil said, his voice formal and distant even to his own ears.
Leona just nodded once, looking back at the fountain. “Sure.”
Vil stood and walked a few paces away, turning his back to Leona and the sun-dappled garden. He answered the call. “Envoy.”
“Vil.” Selene’s voice was crisp, efficient. “I trust you’ve had time to consider our discussion. The Queen’s Council requires your preliminary response to the Luminary Fellowship terms. They are preparing the official edict of postponement for the signing ceremony.”
Vil closed his eyes. The vervain behind his ear felt stupid now. A childish ornament. “Postponement?”
“A brief one, of course. To facilitate your transition and initial research period in the Shifting Sands. The Council feels it’s the most prudent course. I’ve taken the liberty of drafting a statement for your review.”
He could feel Leona’s gaze on his back. He imagined him sitting there on the broken fountain, listening to the half of the conversation he could hear. Listening to Vil say nothing.
“Send the drafts,” Vil heard himself say, his voice smooth and hollow. “I will review them immediately.”
“Excellent. I’ll have them transmitted within the hour. The Queen is so pleased with your… dedication.” The line clicked off.
Vil stood for a long moment, the silent communicator in his hand. The scents of lavender and rosemary now smelled cloying. The dripping of the fountain sounded like a countdown.
He turned. Leona hadn’t moved. He was still sitting on the fountain’s edge, now idly shredding a leaf of lavender between his fingers.
“Well?” Leona’s voice was neutral.
“They’re drafting a postponement,” Vil said, the words ash in his mouth. “For the signing. To accommodate the fellowship.”
Leona nodded slowly, as if he’d expected nothing else. He flicked the shredded lavender away. “So. The performance continues.”
“It’s not a performance,” Vil snapped, the anger sudden and hot, directed at the wrong person. “It’s my life. My work.”
“Yeah.” Leona stood up in one fluid motion. He walked over to Vil until they were close again, but the earlier warmth was gone. He reached out, and for a second Vil thought he might touch him again. Instead, Leona’s fingers plucked the sprig of vervain from behind Vil’s ear.
He held it up between them, the little purple flowers looking pathetic and wilted now. “Funny thing about wards,” Leona said, his voice dangerously soft. “They only work if you believe in the thing you’re afraid of.”
He dropped the herb. It landed soundlessly on the stone path.
Then he turned and walked back toward the palace, leaving Vil alone in the fragrant, sunlit garden with the sound of the leaking fountain and the ghost of a touch on his skin.