THE PRINCE OF BEING AN EMBARRASSMENT

 Chapter 4: The Price of Being an Embarrassment

 Lyra

Kaelan’s private solar smelled of cold air and expensive paper.

He had summoned me in front of half the corridor. Three generals already stood inside when I entered, their expressions carefully blank. The Crown Prince did not offer me a seat. He simply looked at me the way he looked at a flawed report, assessing the damage, deciding whether it was worth the ink to correct.

“You were seen in the lower city,” he said, voice quiet enough to be worse than shouting. “Without escort. During a scheduled medical window, you apparently felt no need to observe. Explain.”

I kept my eyes down, shoulders curved, the perfect picture of a weak Beta caught in another failure. Inside, rage and calculation moved in tight, familiar circles. He had eyes everywhere. Of course he did.

“I required an additional dose,” I said, soft, slightly hoarse. “The physician’s secondary clinic.”

“Spare me.” Kaelan’s tone did not rise. It simply cuts. “Your continued presence at court is an embarrassment. You cannot complete a simple errand without drawing attention. You cannot sit on a council without looking ready to faint. You cannot even maintain the basic dignity expected of the bloodline.” He turned slightly toward the generals, making sure every word landed in front of witnesses. “From this moment, your movements outside the palace wings are restricted. Any further deviation will be treated as a security concern. Am I understood?”

The generals nodded. One of them looked almost sympathetic. The other two looked bored. I felt the humiliation settle over my skin like a second set of bindings, tight, deliberate, meant to leave marks. Kaelan watched me absorb it with those glacier eyes and felt nothing I could see. Or perhaps he felt satisfaction. I could no longer tell the difference.

“Yes, Your Highness,” I answered, exactly as expected.

He dismissed me with a flick of his fingers. I left with the limp a fraction more pronounced than usual, the picture of a chastised, fragile spare. The whispers started before I reached the end of the corridor. Perfect.

The night was quieter.

I waited until the second shift change, then used the very restrictions Kaelan had just placed on me. A restricted prince still needed medical oversight. A restricted prince still had access to the lower archive stacks if the request was framed as historical research for a physician’s report. I had prepared the paperwork weeks ago and simply waited for the right humiliation to make the request look like an attempt to prove usefulness.

The archive wing was cool and dim. Dust motes hung in the narrow beams of light from the high windows. I moved between the shelves with the same weak steps, but my hands were steady when I located the succession ledgers from the decade before my official birth records. The ones that never quite matched the public story.

I copied by hand, page after page, the discrepancies in dates, the sealed medical addenda, the quiet transfers of funds that always seemed to pass through the same private physician’s accounts. My wrist ached. Sweat still slicked my spine despite the cooler air. The suppressants were held by pure stubbornness and the last of the emergency supply.

Footsteps sounded at the far end of the long aisle.

I slid the current ledger back into place and reached for a harmless treatise on desert irrigation, heart slamming against the bindings hard enough to hurt. The footsteps paused. Then continued past. A night clerk on rounds. I waited until the sound faded completely before I allowed myself to breathe again.

When I finally returned to my chambers, the copied pages were hidden inside the lining of an old medical text. Enough to begin proving the fraud. Not yet enough to survive the proving.

I sat on the edge of the narrow bed and stared at my hands. They still carried the faint tremor of the day’s heat spikes and Kaelan’s public cutting. The humiliation burned. The rage burned hotter. Underneath both sat the colder knowledge that he had restricted me because he was starting to watch more closely. The lower-city trip had been registered. Ren’s report, or someone else’s, had reached him.

I unfolded the informant’s list again and looked at the circled name.

Kaelan Vane.

If the Crown Prince was already entangled in the physician’s questions, then every move I made from this night forward carried a new kind of risk. I extinguished the lamp and lay down fully dressed, listening to the palace settle around me. Somewhere in the dark, a door I had thought locked clicked softly open.