Like all of the children of the noble houses, Aliver Akaran had been raised in opulence. He always woke to find his slippers resting in place on the floor beside him and flower petals in the basin of scented water he washed his face in. From the moment he took solid food, each meal he had eaten had been prepared to the highest standards, with the best ingredients, with the effect on the palate considered down to the last detail. He had never walked into a cold room on a winter’s day, never drawn his own bath or wet his hands washing clothes. He never even witnessed the washing of plates soiled by a meal. If asked, he would have had to create from fancy the process by which items were cleaned, mended, replaced. He had lived at the center of a massive delusion. It was a most pleasant one in which the world functioned largely for his gratification. At sixteen years of age, however, none of this stopped him from viewing the world through disgruntled eyes.

Leaving his private quarters a week after the seashore ride with his father and siblings, the prince grabbed up his leather training slippers and flung his fencing vest over his shoulder. In the corridor outside his room he strode between guards that stood like statues at either side of his door, and then he passed down a row of actual mannequins that lined one wall. These life-sized figures were carved of pinewood down to the minutest human detail, sanded to textures as smooth as skin and evocative of flesh over bone. They had been positioned in differing stances and wore military garb from the various nations: a Talayan runner, the wood stained to near-black to mimic his skin color, an iron spear poised in the fingers of his right hand; a Senivalian infantryman in scale armor, curving long sword at his belt; a horseman of the Mein with his characteristic thick breastplate, draped in hides that hung around him in tattered bands; a Vumu warrior adorned in eagle feathers; and Acacians in their various tidy uniforms, bare armed, with loose, flowing trousers under fine chain mail.

Aliver’s rooms had more objects of warfare than the king cared for. He had once pointed out that Acacia had overseen a largely peaceful empire for generations. But on this matter the prince did not mind his father’s disapproval. His daily interactions with his peers were a more challenging jostle than his relationship with his father. Leodan no longer elbowed through life among a throng of young men. Aliver, on the other hand, had yet to come through his manhood trials. As he saw it, all of the higher pursuits his father enjoyed had been made possible by the bravery of men and women willing to bear arms. It had been their earlier military prowess that allowed their ancestors to take the feuding, disparate elements of the Known World and unify them into a partnership of nations that benefited them all. How but through force could this have been achieved? How but through the threat of force could it be maintained?

In angry moments Aliver imagined his father trying to hold forth to that earlier rabble, to explain to them the virtues of peace and friendship. They would have laughed him away from the campfire. They would have kicked him into the cold, spat, and called him a coward. And then they would have commenced the snarling battle that decided things in this world. Sometimes during these imaginings Aliver came to his father’s rescue, sword in hand; other times he simply watched. It was not that he failed to love his father. He cared for him dearly. He hated that he thought such things. They came to him unbidden, no easier to submerge than the unexplained pangs of carnal desire that had plagued him the last couple of years. But this was also beside the point. What mattered was that the Akarans were the benevolent masters of a magnificent realm. They had been for twenty-two generations, and would be for much longer if Aliver had any say in the future. That was why he took martial matters so seriously.

The walk to the Marah training hall took only a few minutes, most of it downhill. The bulk of the palace, the town below it, the island, and the sea around it stretched out before Aliver. The receding scale of it was difficult to reckon with. The near buildings were hulking structures of clean Acacian architecture. Roads wound down in the switchback fashion the hillside’s natural steepness required. Beyond the gates, figures on the visible bend of the main road were slow-moving pinpricks, like deer ticks crawling across a man’s arm. The spires of the lower town were little more than sewing needles pointing upward, so tiny they could be squished between the thumb and forefinger. It was hard to imagine that all of it had begun with a simple fortress built by Edifus, a defensive structure perched high so that the nervous monarch could scan the seas around him in fear that his newly conquered subjects might yet unite against him.

Flushed from the brisk walk, Aliver entered the large pillar-supported space. It was lit by oil lamps hung on the wall or from three-legged stands and by skylights cut in the ceiling that cast slanting beams down on the gray-white stone of the place. The scent of the burning oil was almost sweet, stronger than the smoky flavor given off by the stoves used to keep the chill at bay. He greeted his instructors, nodded at other youths entering with him, boys mostly, although a handful of girls attended also. They received military training on an even footing with their male counterparts. Indeed, women made up almost a quarter of the Acacian armed forces. For this Marah training, however, they were all children of aristocrats bound for high posts as officers and government officials. Many of them were from the Agnate, the privileged group that could verify an ancestral link to Edifus’s family tree.

The prince knew that previous Akaran rulers had formed tight bonds with their young peers. His grandfather Gridulan was said to have been constantly in the company of thirteen male companions, dining and sleeping, ruling and wedding in a close tangle. Though his peers were deferential to him, Aliver found no such feeling of group connection. He tried to spurn the absence of it and value his independence of mind and position, but he feared something was lacking in his character, something he seemed powerless to correct.

Aliver smiled when he saw Melio Sharratt, a young man his own age, enter. Melio was the nearest thing the prince had to a friend. They had been born only a few weeks apart, and from their first classes together, the kind intelligence in the boy’s eyes drew Aliver to him. For a while, when they were both ten, they spent days at a time hiding out in the palace labyrinth, playing a game wherein one of them became a storyteller and the other the main character in what invariably became a tale of warfare and adventure, of mythic beasts slain and evil vanquished. Aliver felt comfortable with Melio in a way he did not with others. Still, despite his fondness for the lad, the prince never fully dropped his aloofness with him, or anyone else. If anything, it had grown as adolescence shifted and altered their bodies and emotions. So the smile that once would have been friendly changed into an expression harder to define.

“Hello, Prince,” Melio said. “I hope the day finds you well.”

“It does,” Aliver said, looking past him as if something at the far end of the training grounds interested him.

Melio combed the longish bangs of black hair back from his forehead with his fingers and good-naturedly copied Aliver’s examination of the other students as they arrived. “Have you been practicing your Fifth Form? I saw that Biteran was coaching you on it last week. If you passed it, you could start spear training.”

“I’ll pass it,” Aliver said. “You should worry about yourself. I’ll help you with the Fourth Form if you need it.”