The Heir Apparent by Lauren DeStefano Page B

play.
    “What was wrong with the girl he was betrothed to?” Azure asked, keeping his voice steady.
    “Nothing at all,” the king said. “The decision makers are always right. The disease was invisible. It festers in the brain.” He tapped Azure’s temple, and his finger felt like a scalpel. “Once the disease is cut away, healing begins.”
    Azure stared at the boy. His eyes were swollen shut, his lips cracked and bleeding. His skin was as pale as an unearthed root. He didn’t seem cured. He seemed broken beyond repair.
    “Will he go home?” Azure asked.
    “That is up to him,” the king said. “His hair will grow back, and it will be as though he has no scars at all. There are tests he will take to determine whether or not he’s ready to return to his betrothed.”
    The boy didn’t seem as though he would ever be ready. It didn’t look as though there were any life left in him at all.
    Azure wasn’t sure he could stand to know, yet still he asked, “What if he isn’t ready?”
    The king patted his son’s shoulders. “Then he’ll go to the tributary, as all of us will one day.”
    The tributary, where souls went when they left their bodies. Azure didn’t allow himself to wince.
    He began to feel guilty about his own pristinely combed blond hair and his heat-pressed shirt with its gleaming buttons, and his stainless white pants. If he’d been the boy in the bed, he would have been appalled at such a clean thing standing before him while he was made to suffer.
    “There are many diseases of the mind,” the king went on, as though he were discussing the hour of the day. “There are some people who show no emotional capacity of any kind. Those who kill, those who would harm for pleasure.”
    Those well and truly did sound like diseases, Azure thought. But he found himself pitying this boy, whose only crime had been one to which Azure could relate. Perhaps his true crime was not being secretive enough, Azure thought. He would never tell his father that he didn’t like his betrothed. He would beg Celeste not to speak about hers either.
    And he would not tell his father about the boy who had smiled at him a month prior, during a ribbon-cutting ceremony, with the shy brown eyes Azure had so admired, and the lovely doll-like blond curls. He thought about that boy still, like an image printed in his head. He hadn’t even told Celeste about him, and he surely wouldn’t now. Not ever.
    He was grateful when they left the building behind them. The closer they got to the gate, the cleaner the air began to smell, like grass and dry earth.
    “You have the pensive silence of a king,” his father told him, sounding quite proud. For that, Azure smiled. But he was not pensive. He was frightened. He could never be what his father wanted in a prince, but he could pretend, and surely that was enough. One day, when his father was gone and Azure was the king, he would redefine what being a king meant. He would have a son of his own and he would not take him inside that gate. The only people in those little buildings would be the ones who killed, who harmed. Not the ones who merely admired.
    They pressed on in silence, and Azure let the king think it was pensive.
    When they reached the clock tower, the king grabbed his son’s shoulders and gave him a rough but affectionate shake. “I’m proud of you,” he said, and it was such a rarity that Azure wanted to hug him for it, even if he was horrified by what was happening under his command.
    “Thank you, Papa,” was all he said.
    “It is a burden, being king,” his father said. “But it has its rewards. You’ll learn that this is all for the best. I’ll bring you back on another day, when the surgeon is available to explain his process.”
    “Yes, Papa,” Azure said. His stomach was starting to ache, and he was relieved when his father left him, and he fled eagerly to the courtyard to find Celeste.
    She had her skirts gathered to her knees and she was wading