The Prince Who Envies His Own Brother

I used to watch you from the shadowed doorway of the great hall, you know. The light would greet you with its warm embrace first, as though it knew the correct order of things and kept strictly to it. You wore it so easily — that light, and you never once looked up to check if it was still there. For years I told myself that what I felt was only callow impatience. That what I wanted, what I was waiting for, would come to me by right of being able, by right of simply wanting it more. I dressed the feeling in smart clothing and called it ambition, nursing it all the while.

I want you to know that the crown doesn’t feel the way I thought it would. It sits heavy, not like it sat on you, loose and half-forgotten as though you never thought you’d lose it. There are some mornings I wake with the weight of it on my brow yet no crown there at all.

Your chamber, though, is the same as you left it. I cannot say what I am keeping it for. I go there when the court is still asleep and I sit in the chair by the window, that wobbly one that you never troubled to have mended. I see your face in the candle’s flicker sometimes, there in the dark reflection of the glass, pressing against it as though you reach for me. You are there, and then you are gone, and I sit on until the wick drowns itself and the room lets me proceed to the next place: the garden.

There stands a fig tree we used to climb as ruddy-faced boys. Or rather, you climbed and I stood under it and watched and wanted. You would disappear into the leaves and drop the ripest ones down to me, the figs grown too high for my reach, and call it fair shares when it was truly nothing of the kind. You gave me the best of everything and never seemed to feel the giving. That was the cruellest thing in you, and you never meant a moment of it as cruelty. You could afford to be kind. The light was yours; you had enough of it to spare me some, and I took what you let fall and hated how eager I was to have it.

I stand under that tree still. I am too old now and too freighted with the demands of office to haul myself up into it, or perhaps even now I am still imagining excuses to wave away the staunch burden of bravery. You knew that about me even then, I think, that I was a coward. You always knew things about me I had not yet earned the right to know myself. I wonder at what you would know of me now. In court, there are whispers that the dead can be called to. That on certain nights the veil between their land and ours wears thin and something imperceptible crosses over. I have stood at the foot of your tomb long enough to have my own view of the matter. The alabaster marble there carries your face turned up to a sky it cannot see, empty eyes bared open. The carver flattered you, embellished upon the hard lines of your jaw and the set of your brows. Even flattered, you are better to look on than I have ever been. I have stood at enough still water to know this much. You are in the water too, there beside me. You are in the flame. You are in every surface I can think to gaze upon, forever watching. I have stopped flinching from it. Your face where mine should be is the toll, I think, a sensible cost of the road I set along.

What I have told no one, what I dared not utter with my mouth until now, until here, is that I have come to envy you a second time.

The first envy you knew very well. You must have felt it, the same way Mother could always feel the turn of the weather before it showed in the skies. I wanted all that the firstborn life had promised you. All that you gouged upon readily. I wanted our Mother's face to do the thing it did when you came into a room, the thing it never quite did for me. I wanted the whole room to turn when I entered it. I wanted to be the one the light went looking for.

So I did the thing I did. I will not give such evil the courtesy of a name. But we know the ground our kingdom is built on, you and I, and you know how it came to be that one of us stands on it and one of us lies beneath, and I think that is as much as I can bear to say.

I took the crown. I took the hall, the acclaim, the light, all of it. Every last piece, and I need you to understand that it was exactly as I had pictured it but was worth nothing at all. The love of a court is loud, but it weighs nothing in the hand.