The Prince in Question Is Not Stable

Cymbal was constructing a rebellion.

For years, it had been him carefully selecting the pieces to run on his board; a board which he thought was his.

He wanted to cease control over the Kingdom, and destroy his brothers while their Mother, the Queen, still unaware, lived in isolation.

It had been years since she went in isolation, leaving Cassian as her Proxy.

The absence had created an illusion that brothers ruled the kingdom, not the Queen.

And Cymbal had long accepted that illusion. It had become his reality.

And all he wants is power, and the one woman he cannot have.

For Winifred, the study was a place where no servant bothered to keep a fire lit for a man they rarely saw. A place for his mind to dwell in the serene sense of his work. A cold place far into the castle.

Winifred crossed the room without lighting any lamps.

Rain struck the tall windows in long, uneven sheets, and somewhere above the roofline...

*Ghrumble*

Thunder rolled low.

This night wasn’t a peaceful one.

The old man set his wand down on the desk, and it produced a low thudded sound of wood meeting wood in an oddly quiet room.

*Scruff*

*Scruff*

He began pulling drawers one by one.

He placed ledgers bound in plain leather on the desk.

Three of them...He laid them open across the desk, side by side, and began turning pages he’d memorized.

’Third Quarter, grain surplus, the list of counts, debts, assets, No...not these...’ he thought.

’Correspondence, household accounts, donations, routine, where...where did I slip...’

Nothing was wrong.

Not a single thing was out of place.

He turned the pages anyway, one after another, until the sound of pages scuffling against each other was the only sound remaining in the room besides his exhausting breath.

*Ghrumble*

Thunder growled again. The flame on candle whipped violently as air pressured the closed windows of his study.

Winifred mapped Cymbal’s movements, his correspondences, the slow architecture of rebellion built to look like ambition rather than desperation; he checked every entry, every code in his accounting, with no single point of failure.

Something unsettled him.

He couldn’t point it.

He knew he made a mistake, but what is that mistake? He did not know.

Because there wasn’t one.

He closed the last ledger slowly, and sat on the sofa in front of his desk, with both hands flat on the leather cover.

He listened to the rain instead of his own thoughts for the first time.

’How?’ he thought.

’How did he look at me like he already knew?’

Winifred watched rain streak sideways across the dark glass, and let the older failures surface.

The Duke of Krells first.

He’d built that campaign with more care than almost everything else in his life.

A rebellion carefully funded, positioned to bleed the royals dry while Duk’s own counts turned against each other from the inside without Winifred’s knowledge.

It should’ve worked, not in thirty years of quieter versions of the same play.

Instead the Duke had gone mad in the field, waged war on his Dukedom, destroyed half of his army, left nothing behind for Winifred to salvage, and weakened the position of Kingdom that towers themselves had to step in political presence to display their powers.

An aberration? Could be.

Then the assassins, the mercenaries, men he’d trusted with worse work than his, couldn’t find anything on a scholar, a teacher, with no title, no army, no reason for Kingdom to protect him.

Every single one of them had come back empty, or hadn’t come back at all.

A dead end.

’Why had Marcus Rile, a man who by whispered reputation alone made even clearance six mages reconsider their standing, chosen to dismantle the rebellion quietly instead of simply taking Ymir’s head, someone who butchered his family?’

’Any other power broker in the kingdom would have used a threat like that to seize control of a prince who owed him everything, if not the throne itself.’

Marcus had never showed interest in any debt, leverage, ill intent, not even fucking once, in all the years Winifred watched for it.

He’d told himself it was principle of some scholar’s code that made professor’s detachment from politics, maybe he considered it beneath him.

That’s how scholars are.

*Ghrumble*

And then there was this Violet.

A marriage he’d been told, by every account that reached him, Ymir despised.

A commoner’s blood married into royal, an engagement the fifth was rumored to have accepted only because refusing would have cost him more than accepting ever could.

Instead Ymir had defended her name in open court, more than once. He’d shut down whispers and somehow controlled every factor around her, till the point that even his greatest asset Ferrey that controlled her was now out of the picture.

A man protecting something he claimed not to want.

Princes performed marriages the way people perform grief.

They’re correct, public, regardless of what sat underneath. Not everyone is Marcellus married to Eisi.

And even unknows to them, they have Cymbal who has been building a structure to chain the love of Marcellus.

’Everything about him only makes sense, if none of It was ever contradiction at all. If I was reading two threads and calling them one man’s confusion, when they were never tangled to begin with.’

*Ghrumble*

Thunder rolled down again.

The grumble was felt deep within his old chest, it was closer this time, and was more violent.

The moment blind light of the growling thunder disappeared, a man sat in front of him.

Winifred...became aware that he was no longer alone in the room.

He hadn’t heard the door.

Red gleam of eyes, shirt folded to the forearm, no blazer which was unlikely of a Prince.

Top buttons undone, and hair black as jet that disappeared into the darkness of the room.

Winifred did not reach for his wand, nor did he try to run.

He understood that this was his ruin. It wouldn’t matter if he did try to run.

"You’ve been sitting with your ledgers for a long while," Ymir said.

"I was beginning to think you’d found something."

Winifred let out a breath. He scoffed dryly.

"I found...everything except what mattered." He said.

"Your Highness!"