The Price of Peace
Snow fell against the high windows of the northern palace in silence, as it always did, gathering in soft drifts along the stone sills like a language only winter understood. Prince Karim sat cross-legged on the cushioned bench beneath the largest of these windows, a brush poised above a half-finished canvas, watching frost spread its lacework across the glass. He had been trying, for the better part of an hour, to capture the particular blue of the ice that crept along the eastern wall of the garden each morning—a shade that shifted from the color of a robin's egg to something nearer to bruised twilight, depending on how the light fell.
It was, he thought, the only honest thing in this palace. The ice did not pretend to be anything other than what it was.
His chambers occupied the northernmost tower, a fact he had once resented and now cherished, for it meant fewer visitors, fewer summons, fewer reminders of the court below that moved like a single creature of silk and whispers. Shelves lined the curved walls, crowded with books on botany and the old poetry of the mountain clans, their spines cracked from handling. A pair of finches trilled in a cage near the hearth, and the…
