A Royal Affair by John Wiltshire

universally loved, or whether he was a genuinely good judge of character, I couldn’t tell. I suspected the former. His son had inherited much of his arrogance and self-belief. In Aleksey, given his relative youth, it was amusing or occasionally annoying. In this man, it was a more dangerous trait.
    Aleksey, of course, was much featured in our conversations. I have to confess that I encouraged the old man to talk about his youngest son. I learned a great many interesting things about Aleksey that I was sure he would not appreciate me knowing. I learned, for example, that he had been taken and held as hostage by a rival state when he was eight. Saxefalia, lying to the east of Hesse-Davia, was a rich and powerful country, owing to very favorable trading agreements with its other neighbor—Russia. The Saxefalians had kept Aleksey for two years, until his father had paid his ransom. When he returned, he had forgotten his own language—apparently. Everyone suspected he pretended not to remember to emphasize the point that it had taken two years for him to be considered worth redeeming. I learned that he did not attend mass, but whether this was from lack of conviction or pure laziness, his father was not sure and had not inquired.
    I got the distinct impression that His Almighty Princeliness Christian Aleksey had been allowed to do very much what he liked when he liked with no one telling him different. When he was fourteen, he had nearly died in the Cretian Wars when he had taken a glancing sword blade to the stomach. So much for his tale of alehouse brawls. He had found his dog in the woods, an orphaned wolf cub, and had brought it home with him. When his brother had put the cub in a sack and thrown it off the battlements into the sea, Aleksey had jumped in after it. It was a drop of over forty feet, enough to knock a grown man to unconsciousness, but Aleksey had survived it and emerged from the water with his bedraggled cub. The next day, the cub had miraculously been discovered to be a rare breed from somewhere unpronounceable in the north and thus spared death. He had rejected seven eligible princesses until he had met Anastasia, and then within a day had agreed that they would marry when she was old enough. He had, until recently, had long hair that fell well below his shoulders, but then in a drunken game with his soldiers one night he had shaved it all off for a bet. Apparently it was still growing out from this unfortunate escapade.
    I was mulling over some of the things the king told me as I split some kindling for the fire. I studied the hatchet. On impulse, I grabbed a hank of my inconvenient hair and sliced it off, then tossed it in the fire. It felt incredibly satisfying, like lancing a boil. I did it again. Then I shrugged and hacked it all off to within about an inch of my scalp. Without a mirror, I’m sure the result was a little uneven, but it felt incredibly good. No more lank hair; no more worry over lice. It was liberating. It felt great to rub my hands over. The king was less impressed than I and said I looked like a heathen. The heathens I had known had possessed the most beautiful hair, of raven black without curl or kink, but I did not contradict him. I had gathered by now that by heathen he tended to mean anyone who did not agree with him. The king’s world held a great many heathens.
    I wanted to know much more about his intriguing youngest son, but the old man was unable to tell me the sorts of things I longed to discover. He knew his son on the periphery of his life. I wanted to know the real Aleksey, and I envied his friends.
    By the end of the month, I think we were both sick of each other’s company, as very old friends can be. I grumbled at him, and he grumbled at me. He had more cause to be grumpy than I; I was not easy to live with by now. It was a side effect of my cleansing treatments that, at the end, I always became very… healthy. Sharing this hut with the king, I was now very lean and