When Reichert — Yegney Zaren, born into the world as the thirteenth prince of Furha in his thirteenth life — had first understood the particulars of the arrangement, he had thought his father, his real father, must have found the whole thing tremendously funny. The old man had always had an unusual sense of humour.
It was not unlike his very first life, as Jarun — a prince then too, though an illegitimate one. Born to the Queen of Heinnas as her youngest son, the King never discovering his true origins, which had allowed him to rise through the succession until he sat on the throne itself. Many half-royal brothers who had viewed him as competition. He had outlasted all of them. He had become the King of Heinnas, and had ultimately destroyed it with his own hands.
This life, the thirteenth, had similar external architecture: prince, royal family, a court full of brothers. But in every way that mattered, it was entirely different.
His soul had retained its memories across all thirteen lives — the weight of everything he had been and done, the accumulated knowledge of a thousand years. Which meant that every time he entered a new body, in a new family, in a new kingdom, he had the persistent sensation of being a visitor. Of not belonging, quite. Of existing slightly to the side of whatever was immediately around him.
He had expected Furha to be the same as the courts he knew from Jarun's life and the others — a race for succession conducted through varying degrees of cruelty, brothers turning on brothers once ambition made itself felt, the careful performance of family unity concealing the machinery of competition underneath. He had prepared himself for it.
He had been entirely wrong.
The Furhan royal family was, genuinely and without apparent artifice, affectionate.
He had been hugged, repeatedly and without warning, by parents and older brothers who seemed to consider physical warmth a natural language of daily interaction. At first this had seemed excessive, almost theatrical. After a while he had understood it was simply how they were. His mother had a schedule — one child per day for evening tea, the day rotating on a fourteen-day cycle, each session an hour of unhurried conversation about how that child was finding their life, what they needed, what was troubling them. His father maintained a parallel tradition at the morning training ground: one child per day for sparring, followed by tea and genuine interest in what they had been occupied with.
Thirteen princes, one princess, and two parents who had apparently decided that the size of the family was not a reason to distribute less of themselves. They had managed it anyway, with the precision of people who understand that love is mostly a matter of showing up consistently.
The succession question had been settled early and stated plainly: the eldest would inherit. The others were free to build their own lives, released from the particular weight of a crown and the compromises it required. His father had made this clear when they were young enough for it to simply become the shape of things, and it had worked — his brothers had grown up without the hunger that a contested succession produces, genuinely glad to see the eldest succeed, the affection between them something that didn't need to conceal anything.
Zaren had seen through the framework while the others had simply lived inside it contentedly. He was an old soul in a young body, and the engineering of it was visible to him even when it was invisible to everyone else. But he had also found, somewhere across the years of morning sparring sessions and evening teas and mandatory family dinners where each person had to account for their day in turn — that he was not untouched by it.
The arrival of the youngest, a daughter, had shifted some of the concentrated family attention in a new direction. He had been quietly relieved. She was the only girl and the absolute favourite, which had seemed inevitable the moment she was born, and which she wore with the unself-conscious ease of someone who has never known a world in which they were not entirely loved. He found her interesting, more interesting than he had expected a small child to be, and he trained her in archery on the days his father designated for her — she had a natural instinct for it, and he enjoyed watching something develop in someone who hadn't been expecting to be good at the thing.
His eldest brother was the exception to everything that made the rest of the family what it was.
This was not a failing that anyone in the family named or acknowledged. His eldest brother was not cruel within the palace walls; he loved his siblings and showed it. But he had been trained differently, shaped differently, the expectations placed on him from the beginning producing a person who was driven in a way that did not pause comfortably at the boundary of what was acceptable. Ambition had been bred into him as a requirement, and what is bred in as a requirement does not always recognise the limits that discretion would suggest.
This had become entirely clear in the matter of the noblewoman.
She was beautiful, and older than the crown prince by a few years, and he had decided she would be his queen with the completeness of a man who had not considered the possibility that this decision required her agreement. He had pursued her with the same relentlessness he brought to everything — and, when she proved resistant, he had done what he did when resistance was an obstacle: he had removed it by whatever means were available, including the ones that left bodies behind.
Zaren had no particular illusions about his eldest brother's nature. He did not oppose it, because opposition would have accomplished nothing; his brother did not listen to opposition. The intervention on behalf of the two shifter children had not been sentimental. He had been building something, even at twelve — assembling the pieces he would need for later, identifying individuals with capabilities worth having, securing loyalties through acts that cost him little and accrued considerable obligation in return. He had seen potential in those two supernatural children, and potential was a resource he collected with the same methodology he applied to everything else.
That was the honest accounting of it.
What he did not examine too closely was what the children themselves had taken from the encounter — the particular quality of their gratitude, the way they had grown alongside him since, the trust they had extended and continued to extend across every year that had passed. They gave him credit that his actual motivations did not, in strict terms, justify.
He had wondered, sometimes, whether they would feel differently if they knew the truth of why he had done it. Whether the knowledge that he had saved their lives as an act of strategic collection rather than genuine compassion would change what had been built between them.
He had decided, across the years, that this was not a question he needed to answer.
They were going to help him reach her. That had been the original rationale, and it remained true. Everything else — the family that had grown around him, the loyalty he had not entirely earned, the specific shape of a life that had turned out to contain more genuine human texture than he had planned for — was simply what happened when you spent enough time in one place with the same people.
He had lived thirteen lives. He understood by now that the things you did not plan for were often the ones that mattered most.