Prologue
Saxon
London, 1995
The king despised me.
He didn’t need to say so out loud. Didn’t need to breathe a single word whenever Pa brought me to the palace for one of their talks. But I knew.
They always argued and I always sat in the corner, my knobby knees clamped together and my fingers digging into my thighs. Beneath my shoes, a plush, red carpet stretched on forever, winding along narrow hallways and cutting down wide, centuries-old stairwells, before rolling all the way out to the front entrance of St. James’s Palace.
Pa and me never entered through the front.
“We’re special, m’boy,” Pa told me time and again, his hand rooted to my shoulder as he steered me down the alley that skirted Marlborough Road and led to our “special entrance.”
But we weren’t special. We were trouble.
“I told you not to bring him again,” the king hissed, no doubt thinking I couldn’t hear him. I heard it all, each word slamming into me like a round from the pistol Pa tucked into his trousers at the base of his spine. He didn’t think I noticed, but we all did.
Me, my older brother, Guy, and my younger brother, Damien.
The only one who noticed nothing was Mum, but she was sick. Always sick. Just as Pa was always trouble.
“He minds his own business, Your Royal Highness. He’s eight, the same age as Princess Margaret.” Pa looked over at me, his green eyes, a shade so eerily similar to my own, darkening with sympathy. “He has no friends. No one but his brothers and me and his mum, and I was thinking, maybe, that when you summoned me, my Saxon could play with your daugh—”
The king’s fist struck the table with a thunderous crack! that detonated like an explosion in my ears. “You forget yourself, Henry,” King John seethed with enough heat to singe my skin to ash, even as far away as I sat from them now. “You forget your place.”
Pa’s shoulders stiffened. “Forgive me, sir, but I’ve forgotten nothing. I took the oath, the same oath as my father and his father before him.”
“An oath which you failed to uphold!”
The king shoved away from the table, launching to his feet as he stalked the room like a caged animal. The doors were locked tight, the walls—Guy once whispered to me—were soundproof. If the king killed us, no one would hear our screams. Guy told me that, too.
So, me and Pa scurried into this secret room like vagrants, always fearful that someone might uncover us, spot us.
We were trouble.
The king said so.
Mum said so, whenever the sickness eased, and her skin wasn’t so very yellow.
My knees knocked together, and I fixated on the subtle sound.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
“Tell me, Henry,” the king snapped, “you’re worried about your blasted son not having any friends? My oldest daughter—my heir—is dead. Shot during a charity event after your family took an oath to protect us.”
Tap.
“Sir—”
Tap.
“Two months, Godwin. You promised me two months ago that you’d uncover who assassinated Evangeline. Two months.”
Tap.
Tap.
It took me a moment to realize that the tapping no longer belonged to my knocking knees but to the sound of King John’s shoes storming over the old wood floors. Toward me. He was coming toward me.
Fear clogged my throat.
Trouble. We Godwins were always trouble.
The king’s hand circled my bicep and hauled me from the chair. My shoes scraped the floor even as my fingers grappled at the king’s shirtsleeve. But he was big whereas I was small, the crown of my head barely hitting his diaphragm when I stood on my tiptoes.
Let me go. Let me go. Let me go!
The words lodged in my throat, threatening to suffocate me.
“John—sir,” Pa said, his cheeks red. He fiddled with the back of his shirt and I knew he was toying with that pistol. Trouble. Trouble. Trouble. “I understand your frustration,” he went on, his jaw locking tight, every word clipped and precise. “You have every right to be upset. But I’ve done everything to find Princess Evangeline’s killer. I’ve hunted down suspects. I’ve employed every possible source to suss out the damned bastard. Paul, the other men and I, we’re all working on this.”
“You’re not working hard enough.”
Before the stone fireplace, the king forcibly thrust me into a chair. The unexpected jolt made me bite down on my tongue, and I felt the pop of a blood vessel bursting in my mouth.
I wanted to cry out. I wanted to beg Pa to pick me up and take me from this place.
The king hated me.
A flash of steel caught my eye as I tried to spring from the chair to safety. An unforgiving hand yanked me back, and then there was no missing the high sheen of the king’s gem-stoned rings that twinkled on his fingers. Yellow topaz like Saturn. Red ruby like Mercury. Blue sapphire like Earth.
My love for outer space felt like a very bad thing when faced with the sovereign king’s wrath.
The tip of the blade pricked the sensitive flesh behind my right ear, and only then did I beg, plead, pray. “Papa,” I whimpered on a sharp, battered exhale, “help. Papa, help!”
He stepped forward. In his hand he brandished a pistol, and it was aimed at the king.
Trouble. Trouble. Trouble.
“Sir,” Pa ground out, his voice quivering with an unfamiliar strain of fear, “you’ve had a long day. A damn long two months. But my boy Saxon? He’s done nothing wrong. We’ll keep searching. I won’t rest until we find who killed the princess. I swear it on my life.”
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see anything, but for the red sea sweeping over my vision and distorting everything.
Red like the carpet under my feet.
Red like the color of the king’s ring.
Red like the whites of my father’s eyes when he met my gaze and I saw his terror.
“Put the pistol down, Henry,” the king snapped. “Put the pistol down or I’ll teach you the taste of true grief.”
The weapon clattered to a chair as Pa surged past it. “John, fuck, listen to me—”
The blade pressed down on my skin, and a howl climbed my throat.
“Your loyalty,” the king said, “swear it on your son’s life. We’ve had your family’s fealty for years. Prove it now, Godwin. Prove it to your son that the Crown must always come first.”
Pa’s red-rimmed eyes locked with mine, and I saw the apology forming in his expression before the words ever entered the space between us. “Saxon, m’boy,” he whispered, “keep looking at me. Don’t look away.”
The king leaned down to utter raggedly in my ear, “Never forget, Saxon, where your loyalty belongs. With the king. With the Crown. An oath that’s spanned generations between our two families. Don’t break like your father and this moment will never be repeated.”
Pain, sharp and insistent, scored the flesh behind my ear. It sank in its claws, twisting and dragging, and the red sea consumed me, swallowing my thrashing feet and flexing fingers and my mouth that parted for a scream that never came.
It didn’t come then, in that secret room of the palace that existed to no one but us. It didn’t come that night, when Pa sat me down in our small, ancient flat in Whitechapel, his arms wrapped around me as he rocked my body back and forth, apologies coating his tongue and sounding so very faraway beyond the roaring in my ears.