Sins & Virtues

Chapter Three: Mourning Dress

Jeremy

The Drey, Kingsdown

Jeremy the Second, new King of Kingsdown, was sitting upon his throne when he received two pieces of parchment. One was sealed with a gold sunburst crest, addressed with looping elegant lettering. The other was a hurried scrawl on a crumpled scrap, written by one of his Generals, stationed at the main gates of the city. He slid the first into the inside pocket of his jacket while he sighed at the second.

Two weeks had passed since the death of Jeremy's father, and the other monarchs who had assembled in Amity's Citadel with their entourages, to discuss the relationships between their seven kingdoms. An annual meeting that was meant as a symbol of peace within the realm. It had been five days since he was crowned. And eight days since he was last permitted to hunt in the King's Woods.

The mourning period in Kingsdown was a full month, and even after that the royals and nobility would continue to wear the mourning black in some fashion or another. The capital city of Arboreas was alive with visiting nobility, gentry and citizens, but it was not excitement for the three-day-long festival that had accompanied the coronation, nor the grief of their lost sovereign. It was the same restlessness that their new sovereign felt as he sat upon his uncomfortable throne.

Kingsdown was an arboreal kingdom. The northernmost kingdom was covered in forest and woodland, meadows and pasturelands, farms and stone cities. Its people were strong and hardy folk. Farmers, shepherds, horsemen, swineherds, cowherds and loggers. The kingdom's main export was its livestock, which grew almost as abundantly as its trees, plantlife and the wild beasts they hunted. Only the nobility; those who were raised in the households of the eight noble Dukedoms who governed the kingdom beneath the royal House of Green, were strangers to the hardiness of life amongst the trees.

Jeremy hadn't realised the nobility was so different to the common folk until he left Arboreas to train as a Hunter. He hadn't known of the class divide of those who were born with everything and those who had to work for any form of livelihood, and since he had returned to the capital, and the royal palace; The Drey, he had struggled to stomach the endless courtiers vying for his attention and approval, the soirees he was forced to attend - though he was grateful his father had always felt the same - and the constant chatter of gossip.

Without Jeremy the first, he was alone and had no one to dismiss him early or share a sympathetic grimace with.

His advisors would come to him every other day, bothering him about a multitude of new affairs of state; a disgruntled lord, preparations for some sort of ball or party, arrangements for visiting merchants, pointless offers of marriage from his more brazen lords. The days between were the days The Duchess would slink about him, whispering about his brothers.

Astoria was determined; he would give her that, resolute in improving her own sons' positions and being informed of every situation at court by the fleet of lesser lords and ladies she assumed Jeremy, junior and senior, didn't know about. Jeremy wasn't certain how further improved their positions in court could get, as his half-brothers, and accompanying titles of Princes.

None of them were present in the throne room, where Jeremy had found sanctuary for the day, accompanied instead by his companions; one an old friend, and the other very new.

Winn looked up from his perch on the dias, as Jeremy scrunched the General's letter in his fingers and stood from the throne.

Winn was his attendant and had remained at his side since the then crown prince had invited him back to the Drey and given him a job. He came from a simple farming family, from a lineage of no nobility or consequence to the kingdom, other than working their smallholding of cattle and crops. A tall and lean but muscular young man, the same age as Jeremy, he had decided to go to Harrier's Reach by his own accord; his elder brother was to inherit the farm and he was bored of working the fields. He had arrived the same year Jeremy's assignment began, their arrivals in the city only days apart, and when it was time for him to continue his royal duties, Jeremy had asked him to take on the position as his attendant.