by Dan Wingreen
"You're passably attractive," the Dark Prince said, his eyes slowly mapping every inch of Elias's body. "And it's been many weeks since I've indulged some of my…baser needs. Perhaps I should indulge them with you, while no one is around to hear your screams."
Elias blinked. "Are you threatening to sexually assault me?"
The Prince leaned in until Elias could feel his breath on his face.
"I don't threaten," he said, his voice almost purring. "I promise."
There was a possibility, Elias admitted to himself, that he might have gotten into a situation which was slightly over his head. The Dark Prince was right about one thing. Elias really didn't have any idea who he was. If there were truth to the tales of the impossible magics the wielders of the Mournhelm were supposed to possess, he could be capable of anything.
The Prince was, however, lying about at least one thing. He was so close Elias found it almost impossible to look at anything but his eyes. Eyes that now held no trace of purple, only the deepest, darkest blue that Elias had ever seen. Eyes that were missing something incredibly important.
"No," Elias said calmly. "You won't."
The Dark Prince blinked, and, just like that, whatever atmosphere of dread he had been trying to weave over the empty library popped like a soap bubble.
"Excuse me?"
"You won't," Elias repeated, his tone unchanging. "Sexually assault me, that is. You may very well promise instead of threaten, you're correct in saying I don't know you well enough to judge such things. I have, however, spent enough time around people who have actually performed the acts which you threaten—or promise—to know you won't follow through."
The Prince pulled back and gave Elias an incredulous look.
"What does that mean?"
"What that means," Elias said, "is you've wasted enough of my time with your childish need to intimidate someone who isn't afraid of you. I have work to do, so if you really do wish to read North, the catalog has not changed position. If you'd rather stroke your ego, I'm sure there is a chambermaid nearby that you can probably bring to tears with little effort. Either way, our conversation is over. Goodbye."
And with that, Elias very deliberately turned his back on the open-mouthed Dark Prince and resumed his book.
"Librarian," the Prince said, a full thirty seconds after Elias had expected him to. "Librarian!"
Elias turned a page.
The Dark Prince let out a small, annoyed huff, very reminiscent of a different prince, and immediately after Elias heard the sound of boots stalking away across the wooden platform. That sound was quickly replaced with the similar sound of boots stalking across marble tile until the sound reached the front of the desk, whereupon it stopped.
"Librarian," the Prince said again. "Stop ignoring me."
Elias waited until he heard him take a breath to speak before saying, "I'm not a librarian."
The Prince let out the breath impatiently. "Whatever you are then. Look at me."
Elias finished the paragraph he was on, then marked his place with a finger and looked up.
"I am a scholar."
The Dark Prince crossed his arms. "Fine. Scholar. Now what did you mean when you said you spent time with people who have done what I threatened?"
"So it was a threat and not a promise?" Elias asked, raising an eyebrow.
The Prince glared. "Answer my question."
Elias briefly considered refusing. It was, after all, completely against his nature to give into the petulant demands of entitled nobles. On the other hand, it was very rare that he got to talk about his most fascinating subject of interest. The Head Librarian didn't care and the Crown Prince always looked uncomfortable and fretted over Elias's safety whenever it came up.
Besides, he really did have work to do and answering would make the Dark Prince leave all that much sooner.
"I am a criminologist."
The Prince frowned. "I've never heard that word before."
"That would be because I invented it," Elias said patiently. "It means to study the behavior of criminals."
"You…study criminals?"
Elias nodded. "Yes. Although it would be more accurate, if you ignore the more poetical aspects of the terminology, to say that I study evil. My specific area of interest is in studying what I call 'compulsively repetitive offenders', people who are pathologically driven to commit the same exact crime over and over again until they are caught or killed. The ones who are caught I interview, and then I write a book about them."
The Dark Prince stared at Elias. "You talk to murderers?"
"And rapists. And any combination of the two. They all have the same look in their eye. The same unquenchable desire to commit evil acts. That's how I knew you wouldn't follow through with your threat. Your eyes are clean."
He had surprised the Prince—that much Elias knew without a doubt. What he wasn't sure about was what surprised him more, that Elias studied evil or that he had told the Prince that he wasn't.
"And you're not afraid for your life?" he asked, after a moment.
"They're locked in the dungeon," Elias said slowly. "There is nothing to be afraid of."
"Most people fear evil."
"I only fear evil when it can harm me," Elias said. "And so far, I've never been in a situation where it could."
The Prince stared at Elias again, but this time it was more thoughtful. Elias met his stare for almost a full minute before he started to get uncomfortable, and another thirty seconds before he remembered his book.
"If there's nothing else you want to ask, I'd like to get back to my work."
The Dark Prince shook himself out of his thoughts, and raised an eyebrow. "That was almost polite."
"This won't be. Leave."
The Dark Prince laughed. "You said you wrote books?" he asked, just as Elias opened his mouth to speak.
He did that on purpose…
Well. It wasn't as if Elias hadn't just been doing the exact same thing.
"Yes."
"Hmm." The Prince's lips pulled into a slow smirk. "Care to tell me your name, so I can look them up in that catalog you seem so enamored with?"
"No."
The Prince laughed again. "Very well. I'll leave you to your book and see if I can't find mine. It was very interesting meeting you, scholar."
Elias wasn't sure he had any idea how to respond to that. People very rarely ever gave him more than the most perfunctory of valedictions, and no one had ever called him interesting without some kind of irony attached to the word. Since he was getting what he wanted, he decided that politeness couldn't hurt.
"Thank you."
The Dark Prince gave him a look that Elias couldn't identify, then shook his head and made his way over to the catalog. He spent less time than most figuring out how it worked, and was soon off to find his book. Elias followed the Prince with his eyes until he disappeared into the stacks, then quietly went back to his own tome.
Chapter 4
"I-I know that I should just talk to her, but every time I see her my throat closes and it's all I can do just to breathe. And yet, even though I am ashamed, I can't help but be grateful for even those terrible moments basking in her presence. She is like the most golden of suns, and I am the starving flower on a cold, winter night. Oh, if only I knew how to approach her…"
Elias, once again behind the Librarian's desk, listened patiently to Baron Connolly's peculiarly poetical pining. The plumpish baron was somewhat of an oddity in the castle, being one of the only city nobles to spend copious amounts of his time living in the castle and frequenting the Great Library. His usual areas of interest leaned more towards alchemy and general chemistry, but Elias found that his current romantic angst had a surprisingly organizational effect on the scholar's mind, a much welcome phenomenon after the last several days.
It had been a week since the last time Elias had been forced to fill in for the Librarian, and this time it was somewhat more than a minor annoyance. His new book, which had
been coming along wonderfully in the preparation stages, had completely fallen apart when the subject of the book, a man who gained sexual satisfaction by strangling gnomes, refused to speak with him. That never happened. Even if all they spoke were lies, compulsively repetitive offenders were always incredibly eager to talk with Elias about their crimes and their lives. Even the lies were useful, because he'd found that what a person tried to cover up could be just as important to understanding why they turned out the way they did as what they revealed. This strange silence was frustrating, to say the least, and ever since he'd abandoned his efforts he was somewhat at a loss for what to do next. His thoughts, usually so neat and ordered, had been hard to grab hold of.
Hence why he was thankful for the baron's droning.
"—seems to have an inner light of its own, cascading over her shoulders like…like a waterfall of light! It's…oh, dear, I'm afraid I'm not very good with imagery, at least not enough to do justice to the fair lady who has captured my heart but—"
Elias supposed he'd have to give up on writing any book for now, since the gnome strangler was the only offender currently in the dungeons. He briefly toyed with the idea of writing a fictional epic, as the Librarian often encouraged him to do, before shuddering internally. The world was far too interesting and held too many fascinating subjects of research to waste time making things up. Perhaps he could—
"Excuse me?" A voice that was definitely not the soothing, light tones of Baron Connolly broke into Elias's thoughts.
It also had the unfortunate effect of startling the baron into an embarrassed gasp. Elias glared at the person behind Connolly, only to find the Dark Prince shooting an impatient glare of his own at the baron's back. He was dressed exactly as he had been the last time Elias had seen him, except this time the embroidery on his tunic was a dark midnight blue that almost perfectly matched his eyes.
"I…what? Oh!" Baron Connolly's eyes widened when he turned around and saw who was standing next to him. "Your Highness! I'm terribly sorry, I had no idea—"
"Leave," the Dark Prince said, narrowing his eyes.
"I…yes, of course. I'll—"
"Baron." Elias stopped the man when he would have left.
Baron Connolly looked between Elias and the Dark Prince for a moment, licking his lips nervously. "Yes?"
With one last glare at the Prince, Elias pointedly turned back to the baron. "You should take a look through our romantic aids. I would suggest anything by Horn or Watermund, but you would do well do stay away from anything by Thornhiem, since he is currently in incarcerated in a Ruthousien prison for performing deviant acts, which even the Debauched Kaiser refuses to speak of."
The baron looked confused.
"Perhaps you might find something to help you in wooing your lady," Elias said patiently.
The baron's eyes widened in understanding. "Oh! Oh, yes, that would be most helpful! Thank you so much, scholar. I'll do just what you suggested. Good day. H-Highness." With a nod to Elias and a much more nervous nod to the Dark Prince, Baron Connolly made his way over to the catalog before searching through the drawers with the expertise of repeated use.
Once he was gone, Elias turned back to the Prince only to find him leaning casually on the edge of the desk.
"So, Elias, just how do you know so much about romantic aids?" the Prince asked with a smirk.
Normally such a blatantly goading comment would have barely gotten an internal scoff from Elias. However, since his thoughts—and, consequently, his patience—were scattered to the four winds, Elias found himself responding.
"I never gave you permission to address me by name—"
"And I meant to ask this the other day but why is there a picture of a woman giving birth on the floor over there?"
The sudden question threw Elias, and he answered without meaning to. "It's the Crowning of the first King."
"Ah."
Elias scowled. "And how do you even know my name? I remember specifically not giving it to you."
The Dark Prince raised an eyebrow. "It was much easier than I expected. All I had to do was ask about the rude, snappish scholar with the glasses and the lovely hair and I was treated to a litany of stories about you. You, Elias Sutterby, are apparently quite well-known amongst the castlefolk. I must say your given name fits you remarkably well; you definitely seem like an Elias. Your family name, however, is less fitting. I imagined you as more of a Wordsworth, or a Worthington. Something slightly pretentious and with the word 'worth' in it somewhere, since, so far, you're the only thing in this kingdom interesting enough to be worth my attention."
Elias's jaw clenched, though he had no idea which part of what the Prince said bothered him the most.
"As for calling you by your name…" The Prince smirked again. "I'm a Dark Prince. I don't need permission to do anything."
And I thought our nobles were arrogant.
"I assure you—" Elias started to growl, then stopped himself. He counted to five in his head, then began again, this time in a slightly more neutral tone. "I am not interesting. Nor am I worth anybody's attention. Nor do I wish to be. This is also a library, the express purpose of which is to read and study in silence. If the only reason you are here is to harass me then, guest of the King or not, I will have you forcibly removed."
It was only then Elias noticed the absolute silence that was permeating the library. Unlike when he met the Dark Prince, there were actually people present this time. The air should have been filled with the soft sounds of pages turning or quills scratching. Elias looked away from the Prince, not at all surprised to find every single scholar and scribe in the library staring at him with varying degrees of shock. Even Dunbar looked torn between glee at seeing Elias react so vibrantly and looking like he was about to pass out, most likely in horror at the thought of Elias being on speaking terms with the Dark Prince and what that meant for him.
"Do you really think anyone in this castle could force me to leave if I didn't want to?" the Prince asked, his voice low and dangerous.
"I think your arrogance is astounding, even for a royal." Elias said, unable to stop himself. "But if nobody else wished to remove you, I would."
Elias had no illusions about his capability to follow through on that threat. He hadn't suddenly gained five inches and fifty pounds of muscle in the last week, but he couldn't help making it anyway, no matter how idle it was.
They stared at each other for what seemed to Elias like an eternity. The Dark Prince's deep blue eyes boring intently into Elias's own narrowed hazel orbs. The air between them seemed charged with impending violence.
Then the Dark Prince smiled, and the mood was broken.
"Then it's a good thing I'm not here to harass you," he said lightly.
Elias blinked rapidly, unsure as to what exactly just happened. What he was sure of, was that he was incredibly sick of not being in control of himself.
"What are you here for then?" he asked.
"I wish to ask for your help."
Elias frowned. "I've already explained how the catalog works, surely you haven't already forgotten—"
The Dark Prince cut him off with a laugh that echoed throughout the library. "Oh, Elias, I don't need the catalog," he said with enough condescension to make Elias scowl. Or maybe that was just because he didn't like the way the Prince said his name. "I've already read the most fascinating books I'm going to find in this library."
He leaned in closer.
"And they were, by the way. Utterly fascinating, both the subject matter and the insight of the author. I never would have thought that a man could be driven to skin foreign merchants alive because his mother forced him to watch her whore herself out to them while he was a child."
Both of Elias's eyebrows rose. "You're talking about my books? You read my books?" The Prince nodded. "All of them? In a week?"
"They were incredibly engrossing," the Prince said.
Once again, Elias found himself completely at a loss. He never thought th
at anyone actually read his books, and, if anyone did, they certainly never approached him about them. Elias had never been someone who sought out praise for his work. It was enough for him to publish his essays or other scholarly works for future generations to read and, hopefully, find helpful in their own studies.
His books, however, were slightly different. He didn't write them just because he was interested in the subject or because of his desire to preserve accurate information for the future; he wrote them because he was passionate about the work. And while he still never sought out or expected praise, when he found himself receiving it he was surprisingly affected.
"And how, exactly, does this excuse your harassment?"
Not that he saw any reason to acknowledge it.
For the first time since the conversation began, the Dark Prince looked frustrated. "I just told you I'm not here to harass you."
"And yet you still did. If you think complimenting my writing cancels out your insults then I would suggest you stay at court where vapid emotional manipulation is welcome."
The Dark Prince shook his head. "You are completely impossible."
"And is it our extensive history of social interaction which leads you to that conclusion, or did you hear that in one of the stories people told you about me?" Elias almost crossed his arms, but refrained at the last second when an image of a petulant Crown Prince doing that exact thing floated through his mind. He knew he was being at least somewhat childish, but he couldn't bring himself to care. It almost seemed impossible, but the Dark Prince annoyed him even more than Dunbar. "And why would you even ask—"
"I want you to write a book for me."
"—about me—" Elias paused right before he would have stumbled over his own words. "Excuse me?"
"I want you to write a book for me."