News travels like gossip with good shoes — faster than a cart, louder than a horn, and always with a flourish at the end. The caravan smelled it before the rider arrived: the scent of perfumed banners and the faint metallic tang of something gilded coming to taste the mud.
They found him where the road widened and the grass kept its dignity: a young man on a gray stallion, riding too clean for the countryside. His cloak was the color of a newly minted coin; his boots were the sort that made women glance and guards pretend to ignore. He wore a paper crown at his hip — an affectation, deliberately ridiculous, the sort that said: I am a prince who practices being human and wants to see how the experiment fares.
"Prince?" Lina asked, because sometimes the world gives you a title and you have to accept it like a weird gift.
"Prince Coren," the rider said with a tilt of his chin that balanced arrogance and something like curiosity. He smiled in a way that made three of the caravan's girls blush and one of the twins mutter a curse under her breath. "I travel to see what the folk do when the gods miscount. I hear stories."
Aras stepped forward as if the world were a stage and he had been given a front-row seat. "We tell stories," he said, "and sometimes we steal back the endings people think they wrote."
Coren laughed like someone who'd been taught to appreciate theater. "I like thieves with a conscience," he said. "Far more romantic than ordinary thieves."
Serane's hand rested on her sword hilt as a habit of habit; princes, she had learned, are often politeness wrapped around obligation and sometimes blade. "Why come now?" she asked. "The roads are dangerous. The priests are busy counting their missing beads."
Coren's expression shifted, a quickness beneath the polished armor of his face. "Because I am curious," he replied. "And because my father—King Alric—has decided that whoever unsettles the ledger in the capital ought to be brought in for… conversation."
Aras raised an eyebrow. "Conversation or invitation to tea with chains?"
"Both," Coren admitted with an easy honesty. "My father loves a dramatic entrance. He prefers his justice served with an audience."
Miren watched the exchange with a slow, careful appraisal. "You come with royal permission?" she asked bluntly.
Coren shrugged. "I come with a letter that says I may visit. I do not claim to have the whole of my father's wisdom in my pocket." There was a flare of something raw at that admission; it softened his arrogance into an oddly likable flaw. "I wanted to see how those who oppose the counting live. I have seen servants' tales and martyrdoms played for the court's amusement. I thought perhaps—if I saw it myself—then I could argue for different policies."
Aras let that land like a coin in his palm and then, because he could not resist, flipped it into the air. "You want reform," he said. "Or at least a spectacle about it."
"I want to understand," Coren corrected. "And if I can charm my father into tempering his priests' enthusiasm for ledgers—well, I will do so. But I am not naïve. I did not come here to be fooled. I came because sometimes princes like to see the unvarnished truth before they varnish it themselves."
Until the prince spoke, the caravan had treated him like a curiosity; afterward they treated him like an argument that needed testing. Princes could be dangerous: they wore public mercy the way some men wore swords. Coren, though, had about him the impatient idealism of someone who had read too many pamphlets and not enough mud.
Lina, whose heart operated on the currency of warm bread and blunt truth, stepped forward. "If you want to understand, stay a night in the barn. Eat, sleep, and see what caring looks like without a theater."
Coren blinked in a way that meant he liked the challenge. "I'll take the night of mud, then," he said. "But if the beds are bad I will write a sonnet about it."
He dismounted with the awkward grace of a man who had been instructed how to be charming and had then decided to improvise. The caravan watched him as if he were a new play's protagonist. He was handsome — undeniably so — but his hands trembled when he took the first slice of bread as if he had never done something so ordinary without an audience.
That evening the prince sat at the long table between Lina and Matri, asking questions not of the sort that sharpened axes but of the kind that open doors: How had they woken the sleepers? What did the awakened want first? Who decided they were more than a ledger line? He listened with a seriousness that discomfited even the twins, who had been busy plotting how to steal his hat for sport.
Aras, watching from his corner with Keen balanced across his knees, noticed something else: Coren's laugh came late to the party. It was not a practiced thing; it was a reaction that followed understanding as if honesty was the only joke worth telling. That, more than any charm, made Aras think the prince might be dangerous in a good way.
Later, when the fires had burned low and the children slept, Coren asked to speak with Aras in private. They walked down a lane lined by haybales like a pair of men on a stage going backstage.
"You're the one who steals," Coren said, blunt. "Why?"
Aras considered, then grinned in that irritatingly honest way. "Because someone had to," he replied. "Because the wheel turns and people fall off. Because I dislike polite deaths."
Coren's face flickered with something complicated. "My father fears what you do because it points out his failures," he said. "If I bring you to the court, what will you say when they ask you to return what you stole?"
Aras looked at him then, properly. "I will say that the world owes people chance more than it owes priests' ledgers," he said. "I will say that counting without asking is a kind of violence. I will say that eleven thousand missing beads were not just numbers; they were people."
Coren was quiet. "And if my father refuses to listen?"
"Then your father becomes an enemy with a crown," Aras said. "And crowns look sharp from the wrong side."
Miren, who had followed at a distance and arrived like a shadow with tea, added, "You will need allies who can get you out of the palace if your father decides you're a better sacrifice than a son."
Coren smiled, small and wary. "I have a cartographer who owes me a favor," he said. "And a stableboy who can swap horses in a way that would make any nobleman furious." He looked at Aras. "I am not saying I want to be reckless. I am saying I want to be useful."
Serane's voice, when it came, was a practical blade. "We don't trust princes on principle. You can sit with us, you can learn, but you will be watched. If you betray us—if you bring the ledger to our door—then there will be blood."
Coren nodded like a man who accepted the terms that came with being honest. "I would expect nothing less," he said. "And if I bring you to the palace, I will not do it for theatrics. I will do it for change."
Aras spat a laugh that was half-skepticism, half-hope. "You sound like you might make a good ally or a terrible son," he said. "Either way, we'll enjoy the story."
Over the next week Coren did the work of staying: he learned to split wood without bruising the hands he'd been taught to use for ribbon, he sat through Matri's lectures on keeping people warm without a price, and he listened to Lina teach a man how to read his own name without trembling. He proved, by the small things, that he wanted more than a trophy in the moral wars.
But being a prince is not a small thing. Word of Coren's curiosity arrived at the capital like a rumor with banners. King Alric, who loved the sound of his own dispatches, sent a diplomat: a man with a neat face and the patience of a ledger. He brought a summons that was soft as silk and sharp as a threat.
Coren read it in the kitchen while the caravan prepared for movement. His smile thinned. "My father asks politely that I return home," he said, voice even. "He will offer me favors if I do."
Aras hefted Keen and considered the world. "Do you go willingly? Or do you make your father chase you?"
Coren folded the paper with a soldier's slow attention. "I go," he said. "But I won't be led like a lamb. I want to bring you with me. Not as criminals—yet. As witnesses."
Serane's eyes were steel. "Witnesses are the sort of people who need good exits."
"We will prepare one," Miren said. "We will map the palace routes, the kitchens, the servants who whisper. We will teach you to move with people who do not notice."
Coren looked around at the caravan that had adopted him for reasons he didn't yet understand. "If I succeed," he said quietly, "I will ask for a counting that is fair. If I fail—" he swallowed—"I ask you to ensure my father cannot make the ledger swallow more people to fix pride."
Aras put a hand on Coren's shoulder, not the theatrical pat he'd give Lira but an honest grip. "We'll go with you," he said. "Because you're prince enough to risk your neck, and also because your hat is ridiculous and I like ridiculousness in unexpected places."
Coren laughed, real and surprised. The caravan warmed like bread in an oven. They packed not only supplies but plans: Miren drew secret lanes and safe rooms; Serane found the names of palace officers who might be bribed or charmed; Lina wrote notes that could be smuggled into kitchens. Verene stitched soft pockets into cloaks to hide letters. Aras considered his suit of charm and thought it the most useful armor they had.
The road back to the capital would be the hardest path they'd take yet. Princes wore crowns that could both shield and sharpen; King Alric's court had teeth. Yet for the first time in many reckless mornings, Aras felt something steadier than hunger or thrill bloom in his chest: an odd, reluctant hope.
"Bring your grin," Lina told Coren as they left the barn. "But leave any illusions about crowns behind."
Coren adjusted his paper crown like a man putting on his armor. "I have always found illusions inconvenient," he said. "I will bring my teeth instead."
Aras laughed, kissed Lina's forehead with the promise of a man who'd learned to make small vows, and stepped into the road with a prince by his side. The caravan followed, a noisy, ridiculous, dangerous family bound for a palace that liked tidy numbers.
Abov
e them, the sky was iron-bright, and the road ahead smelled faintly of rain and revolution.