The place was far away from the Leroy Kingdom, and the room was small and secluded, and Royal waited in it alone.
A cloaked figure came in from the dark. When the cloak came off, it was Lenhard.
"I'm sorry," he said, before anything else.
"Why are you apologizing?" Royal asked calmly. "This is simply a transaction between us."
"I should never have made such a deal." Lenhard's hands were not quite steady. "I know that. I knew it while I was saying the words. But I can't control myself anymore. I felt as though I would go insane." He looked up. "I want this night to become a precious memory. For both of us."
Royal reached out and touched his face, and admitted, honestly, that he did not know how he was supposed to react to any of this.
Even so, he moved closer, and let the man be comforted.
They spent the night together.
When Lenhard kissed him, Royal was surprised at himself. He had never once imagined kissing another man, and he found that he did not hate it nearly as much as he had expected to. He looked up at that handsome face in the low light and wondered why a man like this — a man who could have absolutely anyone he wanted — had become so deeply attached to him instead. Lenhard's eyes, he decided, were dangerously captivating. Perhaps that was how he pulled in everyone around him without appearing to try.
Lenhard was growing impatient, and emotional with it.
"Slow down," Royal told him softly. "I'm not going anywhere."
Lenhard's heart began beating so hard it frightened him, because he understood in that moment that he had fallen even deeper than before.
The night went on, and it was full of small sweet things neither of them would be able to put down afterward.
"I am in pain," Royal announced later, from a horizontal position, with feeling. "Enormous pain."
Lenhard apologized. Then apologized again.
"You broke the agreement," Royal said, opening one eye to glare. "One night. It was supposed to be one night. It has been three days and three nights."
"I know."
"You aren't a human being. You're a beast."
Lenhard received this almost as though it were a compliment, and gazed at him with unmistakable affection. Even in that state — exhausted, furious, half-buried in the bedding — he found Royal beautiful.
Royal caught the look and felt a small cold thread of fear go through him. How, he wondered, does a man keep someone here for three entire days over what was supposed to be a simple contract?
"Perhaps," he said awkwardly, "Your Majesty should return now."
"I can't leave you alone in this condition," Lenhard replied, smiling warmly.
You are the reason I am in this condition, Royal thought.
Soon afterward Lenhard's attendants arrived to call him back. He rose and made himself ready to go, and then, before leaving, he crossed the room and kissed Royal's forehead gently and thanked him for spending this time with him.
Royal stared at him. Slowly, he lifted his fingers and touched the place. "You're welcome," he said quietly.
Lenhard looked back at him one last time from the doorway, with the expression of a man holding something important behind his teeth. For a moment it seemed he would say it.
Then he shook his head. "It's nothing," he said, and bid him farewell, and was gone.
Royal sat alone in the emptied room for a long time afterward, thinking about all of it. He remembered telling the emperor that he should visit their kingdom again, whenever he came back from his own continent.
Lenhard never came back.
Because of that, Royal believed that whatever had briefly existed between them had ended there, in a rented room, for good.
Exactly one year later, something happened that nobody could have expected.
Royal was asleep, and so tired that sleep had weight to it. Half-conscious, he registered someone entering his room again, and decided not to open his eyes and not to give whoever it was the satisfaction.
It was Daniel.
Daniel touched his forehead gently, the way you touch someone you think is unconscious, and said, very quietly, that he was sorry. He had dragged Royal into all of this out of his own cowardice. He had forced a man to live inside his name.
"You're stronger than I have ever been," Daniel told him.
As for Lenhard, he kept every promise he had made. He honored the trade agreement to the letter, and then went further and sent additional compensation to the kingdom on top of it.
But he never returned to the Leroy Kingdom again.
Another year passed peacefully.
"Everything is unbelievably busy lately," Daniel complained one afternoon, face down in the paperwork.
Royal sighed. "That is our own fault for accepting the enormous trade agreement. The workload of the entire kingdom went up the moment we signed it."
Soon after, the king formally handed his royal seal to Daniel, which was as near to handing over the kingdom as made no difference.
Daniel was furious about it. "I am still young," he protested. "I wanted to have some freedom before I was tied down completely."
"So once you officially become king," Royal asked, amused, "do I still have to go on being your shadow king?"
Daniel considered it for a moment, then smiled. "Of course you do. And if you ever try to run away from me, I'll chase you to the ends of the world."
Royal was immediately annoyed.
Time went on passing peacefully, and everyone settled into the shapes of their ordinary lives, and nobody realized how little of that peace was left.
One day the king announced that he wanted to go hunting.
Daniel refused outright, and accused his father of arranging the whole thing purely to make him jealous while he was buried under state papers.
The king laughed at him. "I am still technically the king," he said. "I am allowed to do whatever I want. Including going hunting."