The Missing Prince

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Cold winter wind swept through the thicket, rustling the bare branches. A shivering crow leapt from its perch searching a crook better hidden from the freezing gusts. The sky was a dull endless grey, and had been for weeks.
Neither young man in the frozen clearing shivered, though they dressed in light summer coats, wearing no more than a tradesman might wear on the hottest day of summer. Gentleman’s blood protected them from such mundane difficulties. Their horses stamped impatiently in the thick snow, and let out vast clouds with each breath. It was the coldest day of winter.
Though his body stayed warm, Darcy’s spirit and soul were cold. When he’d first learned that George Wickham had used magic to bend the will of a servant girl so he could seduce her at an inn, he had cried. The second time he ever cried; the other was when his father had died. Wickham had comforted him then.
Only one support remained to Darcy: The connection, that mysterious, impossible bond. An attachment that could only be called magical with the soul of a girl he had never laid eyes upon, who he did not even know for certain existed.
“Wickham, you shall no longer be my steward.” It had been Wickham’s idea for them to ride over the hills and dales of Pemberley to this small meadow surrounded by the managed forest of Pemberley. A spot they had played so many times as youths. Darcy knew that he must not delay this conversation.
Darcy stood tall with his shoulders squared and his chest out. He adopted the posture his father always displayed and that his tutors had drilled into him. What he must say to George Wickham hurt. It was hard to say.
Wickham paced, angry and uncontrolled, slapping his riding crop against his gloved hand again and again. “Damn it. Fitz, damn it all! We always talked of what would be done once you were master and I the steward!”
“I no longer am an idle boy playing the future with his companion.”
Wickham looked about the clearing, his eyes falling on an old fire pit in the center, with the rocks visible in the low snow that covered the ash marks. “Remember? You have not forgotten. I do not know what has poisoned you ‘gainst me. But remember. Like brothers we were.”
Darcy looked at the trees about them. He looked at the fire pit. He looked into himself for the memories.
He owed his once friend so much.
They had played in this place. Darcy broke his arm falling from that tree. They stood upon that ridge which let a man look over the entirety of Pemberley’s lands. Many evenings they had sat here and talked. The stream that flowed through the dense thicket beneath them had been fished and splashed in by them. His Fitzwilliam cousins had joined them often. They’d sat around the fire ring and pretended to be highwaymen.
The memories came to him in a thick tangled clump, full of emotion, each as vibrant as the day he had experienced them. The potentia in a gentleman’s body made it impossible for him to forget.
Darcy looked and Darcy remembered. “It shall not be. It seems a dream.” He paused, gripping the bridle of his horse tightly. The wind shrilled through the air. Darcy added sadly, “But, being awakened, I do despise my dream.”
“Damn you, quoting Shakespeare. Close — we were close as my father and yours. The tradition. The duty of my blood to your blood — what other place can I serve?”
“I trust you not.”
“Your dear friend — remember crying, like as if you were a lady, when your father died? The time I helped you meet that girl, when you had no sense what to do with a woman? And how you—”
“I remember.”
“What have you against me? I never would damage you. Never!”
Darcy stood tall, his face impassive despite the pain in his stomach. The thick flow of potentia flooded from the portae in his body to keep the air warm around him. That warmth was eaten away quickly by the harsh winter winds that gusted and sprayed handfuls of frozen snow against everything.
“That girl? That bothers you?” Wickham’s mouth fell open, and he spoke furiously, poking his fingers to emphasize every sentence. “A simple servant. Not our servant. Outsider. No birth, no breeding, no power. Not gentlewoman, not Darcy retainer.”
That other girl. The one he was connected with. Her image had always been present in Darcy’s mind, as long as he could remember. There was some connection between them that could not be explained by mystical theory. She was years younger than Darcy, but she slowly grew older with him. He knew she was of less status and not a member of any great clan. She would be very beautiful… She was almost as old as the maid Wickham had used for his pleasure.
A terrible anger fell on Darcy. Red danced in front of his eyes as he imagined her being hurt. His chest tightened with desired violence. Not even friendship from childhood could stand against that feeling. But to throw his friendship away, that hurt. Darcy could not do it entirely. He remembered too clearly the way Wickham had been his companion since childhood.
Wickham raised his hands defensively. He spoke placatingly. “Fitz, she wanted me. My spell let her do what she really wished. You questioned her yourself! She wished me to have her, but the consequences frightened her. With such a pretty creature, a creature who wanted me — anyone would act the same. I did nothing wrong.”
“Wickham. Were we not so close I would…I would expel you from the clan. I would…damn you. I hurt as well. Why could you not have been a better man? I so wish you had been a better man.”
“Not one of ours. Our obligation ends—”
“You understand nothing! My obligation is to my honour. To take the virginity of a maid — even had she chosen to give it…that is beneath us.”
“I would never have believed you could scorn me so. I would never have believed my dearest friend would treat me this way.”
Darcy squeezed his fingers into his palms. He didn’t say anything. His very bowels ached with his heart.
Wickham sneered. “You need a man like me to be our steward. The house will bleed! We will lose our resources if you treat outsiders like members of the family. The grandeur of the Darcys, the third great family of this little England; you shall destroy and humble this glory and greatness. My father, my father with yours worked to build us. What our grandparents created together. Generations behind us constructed this grandeur. All to be destroyed by a boy-man. A servant girl, who is not ours, is not worth throwing away the family steward.”
“My place is to decide. I am the head of the family.”
The young men glared across the snowy field. Behind Wickham the trees of the well-maintained woods were decked with white and in the distance, columns of smoke rose from the many chimneys of Pemberley. The massive building displayed hundreds of windows facing every direction, and in the courtyard the green of the garden was kept ever warm by the potentia of the house.
Wickham’s forehead turned pale and his veins pulsed. He clenched his teeth; he snarled, his handsome features become distended as he pulled the potentia into his hands so that he might shape it into a spell. The swirling motes of power about his hands were visible to a man trained as Darcy had been.
This once.
Wickham could strike him, and he would not punish him for it. Such laxity was a mistake; the prince of a great house could never allow his retainer to act so. But Wickham had neither the power nor skill needed to harm Darcy. Especially not so close to Pemberley. The strength of the house flowed through Darcy.
There were no witnesses. This one time Darcy could allow such an attack to pass.
Wickham glared.
Darcy paid attention at once to everything; the potentia allowed his mind to run more powerfully than that of a simple human. It was a flood of adrenaline that need not end. He felt Pemberley. He felt the air around him. He felt Wickham’s attachment to him as a sworn retainer of Pemberley, and he felt the motions in Wickham as he manipulated his own power.
And at moments like this, Darcy knew it was not his imagination. He felt that soft connection which should not exist.
Always present, never understood, never spoken of, pointing towards someone distant, that connection comfortingly lodged deep in him, beneath his magical core. It was that girl who he dreamt of. That girl who he had imagined as the one Wickham had hurt.
She was far beneath him, but one day he would seek her out, to see if she was a real creature, or a figment of his imagination. He would take her to his side as his dearest companion if she were real. There were stories of such things, from distant pasts, but it ought not exist. The scientific study of potentia gave reason to believe that one soul could not reach across space and touch another.
But Darcy felt her.
In this intense state the footsteps approaching from behind crunched loudly upon the snow.
Wickham relaxed, and Darcy was glad. Even if he would not have him executed, as would be his right, Darcy did not wish to seriously fight his childhood friend.
The person approaching from behind was deeply familiar to them both. Wickham turned his eyes towards the person. “Fitz shall not give me the stewardship. He is angry over the girl.”
Wickham held up his hand in a gesture to ask the person approaching from behind to stay where he was. Wickham looked at Darcy again, his eyes burned with need. “Why? Tell me true.”
Darcy studied the man in front of him. Wickham’s hair was long and curly, and he had wide sensual lips and green eyes that sparkled with motes of power.
“I told you true.” Darcy had tears in his eyes. Tears that would not flow again. “You understand me not. Had you been worthy; you would have known I would care. But now I have seen through you. I have seen what you truly are.”
“Ha!” There was something lunatic, something hurt in Wickham’s laugh. “You think you have seen through me? You think you have controlled me. You think you can send me away? I shall miss you. We did grow together, and you were always the stupid puppy following in my wake, desperate for my approval and your father’s.”
Focused on Wickham, Darcy did not hear the person behind them move until an instant before he felt the crack on the back of his head.
Darkness.
In a distant county a young girl screamed in fear and echoed pain.