The sky over Elderwyck was a brooding canvas of bruised greys and twilight blues, as though Heaven itself had fallen into introspection. The lawns of the West Terrace, manicured to an almost monastic perfection, swept down in emerald gradients towards the forest’s edge. Above us, the great turrets of Halberstone Palace stood like sentinels of stone, gazing out over a realm that shimmered somewhere between myth and responsibility.
We had escaped, he and I, from the suffocating velvet of the great drawing rooms, where lords twiddled rings and duchesses whispered like wind through lace. The air outside tasted of damp earth and impending spring—a contradiction as complex as the young man beside me.
“How does it feel to be a—” I paused, mid-sentence, as one does before crossing a philosophical Rubicon.
He was slinging the loop of his leather satchel across his shoulder with the sort of studied ease one associates with an Oxford don who lectures in Latin but moonlights as a mountaineer. He looked up at me with that maddening twinkle that was forever on the tip of teasing.
“To be a what?” he enquired, arching one eyebrow with such aristocratic precision that I momentarily lost my grammatical footing.
I faltered. “You know.”
“I would know only if you spell it out now, wouldn’t I,” he said, with the weary patience of a tutor coaxing a reluctant prodigy.
I cleared my throat like a guilty vicar. “A sovereign, my brother.”
He smiled—not the sort of grin that emerges from mischief, but something gentler, weightier, as though he were quietly admiring a relic few still understood.
“Hah, that,” he said, and with poetic softness added, “the sovereign, my brother, is just a man, after all.”
I grinned, in spite of myself.
“I reckon you envision me in an armour... wielding a weapon even, right?” he asked, stepping over a puddle like he’d been born doing it.
My eyes gleamed. “Exactly!”
He stopped walking and turned towards me, his coat catching the wind like a flag on a cusp of battle.
“A sovereign serves his people,” he said with a clarity that made the air still, “and the day the people serve the sovereign is the day the empire falls. Remember that, if nothing else.”
I rounded my mouth, as though trying to form a thought large enough to match the sentence I’d just swallowed.
“And yes,” he added with an offhand thumbs-up, one that belonged more to the cricket field than the court, “my armour and my weapon is my imagination.”
“That,” I said, pointing with mock solemnity, “is a disappointingly bloodless choice of weaponry.”
“Oh, is it?” he quipped, strolling on. “Wait till you see what it does to ignorance. A good metaphor slices cleaner than any blade forged by man. And it never rusts.”
We descended onto the gravel path like pilgrims of banter, our footfalls quieted by the soggy hush of evening.
“So,” I said, adopting my best professorial tone, “if you are armed with imagination, does that make me your royal jester? Am I to juggle abstractions and tickle the soul of the court with existential humour?”
He turned, walking backward now, hands in his pockets. “You are far too tragic for a jester and far too witty for a priest. I’d say you are the whisper in the corridor of the king’s conscience.”
“Marvellous,” I said, “a metaphysical earworm.”
“Indeed,” he nodded gravely. “And if I ever start naming ships after myself or speaking of the populace as ‘my children,’ do me the favour of pushing me into the ornamental lake.”
“With pleasure,” I said. “Though it may take some explaining to His Highness.”
We passed the old sundial, now barely readable beneath moss and time, and stood at the edge of the garden where the palace fell away into shadow. The evening deepened into that peculiar English melancholy—a dusk that sighs rather than falls.
“You know,” I said quietly, “I sometimes forget you didn’t ask for any of this.”
“No one ever does,” he murmured, “not truly. Thrones are like shadows—one doesn’t notice they are following until the sun begins to set.”
A crow took off from a nearby branch, and we both turned to watch it, its wings carving calligraphy into the air.
“I suppose,” I said at last, “you’ll make a fine king.”
“I’d rather be a just man,” he said, “kingship is only ever noble when it’s forgotten in favour of duty.”
There was a pause then—profound, unscripted, and gently aching. The kind that comes when boys realise they are becoming men, and that the world is waiting, always waiting, with a crown in one hand and a lariat in the other.
We turned back, walking slowly towards the golden-lit palace, where titles waited like masks at a masquerade.
“Just out of curiosity,” I said, breaking the mood like a boy throwing a pebble into a sacred lake, “do you ever try the crown on when no one’s looking?”
He smirked. “Only when brushing my teeth. It helps with posture.”
And we both laughed—loud, irreverent, deeply human laughter—echoing down the walkway of dusk, where the prince was only ever a brother, and the kingdom, for a moment, was just a garden at the end of the day.