Thabiso stroked his beard. “Rumor? I guess that’s the closest translation.”

“Oh,” Johan said. “That makes sense.”

He’d been a bit giddy when Nya had bequeathed him with a nickname, but this felt worse than other insults, though it made sense. That’s what came to mind when people thought of him: rumors of his wild and wicked deeds. It was the bed he’d constructed for himself, purposefully and with great dedication, and Nya had simply laid him in it.

“Perhaps you misheard?” Thabiso asked, as if sensing that hadn’t been the answer Johan wanted. “There’s also phokojoe. It means fox. We have children’s tales of Phokojoe, a trickster god. He would turn himself into what people desired most in the world to lure them into his mystical lair.”

Johan grinned and nodded appreciatively. “I see.”

That made sense, too.

“It sounds bad, but it’s a fairy tale.” Thabiso clapped him on the shoulder. “It has a happy ending.”

Johan had been obsessed with fairy tales as a child; his mother had given him a big book of them, and he’d read them under her desk in the royal secretary’s office, back when she’d been single and her dealings with royalty had been in an official capacity, as an employee. When her time at work had been regulated by workers’ rights protections. Queens had no such protections, it turned out.

The stories in that book were why Johan had been terrified when the king had fallen in love with his mother. They were why he’d tried to sabotage their love up to the day of the wedding. Not because King Linus was evil, but because everyone had started to say their love was a fairy tale, and it had seemed to Johan that a curse was being laid down, by tabloids instead of an evil witch.

He’d known how the fairy tales he’d memorized played out—there was unnecessary pain and suffering caused by the human need for love and shelter. And he’d known how they ended—with sadness and longing, and mothers dead and gone.

Thabiso was fond of Disney, though—Johan had been dragged into many a rewatch of childhood classics in Thabiso’s dorm room—so Johan didn’t give him his TED talk on why fairy tales didn’t mean happy endings. He just nodded.

When he glanced at Thabiso, he realized his friend hadn’t seen his agreement because he was staring down the long, columned walkway that stretched along the front of the palace. Johan tracked Thabiso’s gaze to Naledi. If he looked at his friend very closely, he was sure he could make out little hearts fluttering about Thabiso’s head like an InstaPhoto filter. If he looked at himself closely, he could make out the pool of dark-green churning envy that had opened up at his feet.

What would it be like to be able to love like that? Openly, without fear that it would be snatched away? Thabiso had never lost anyone he cared for. Johan didn’t wish that for his friend, ever, but he couldn’t help but be jealous of it.

“Hey, Biso.” Ledi stepped joyfully into Thabiso’s arms. Naledi had lost people she loved, but it’d happened so long ago that she couldn’t remember. She could only think about what she’d gained: family, friends, and a people she would help lead.

Johan was happy for them. He didn’t want to feel envy. He didn’t want to feel anything and that’s how he went about his life because, as with everything, if Johan did something he did it excessively.

“Why is the boy crying under your desk again, Laetitia?” King Linus asked with concern.

“My Jo-Jo is very sensitive, Your Highness. Some of the boys at school don’t understand that–”

“Mamm, don’t tell him!” Johan glanced up apprehensively, waiting for Linus to explain that Johan was eight and too old for such behavior, like Johan’s teachers did.

His mother’s cool fingers brushed against his cheeks, wiping away his tears, and she looked down at him with understanding in her eyes because she always understood these things.

“It is a gift to feel so much, Jo-Jo. It is what makes you special. Don’t forget that.”

“Mmoro, Phoko.” When Johan looked down, pulled from his memory, Nya stood before him. She wore a pink head wrap tied into a bow, her bun of braids poking through, and her lips had been swiped with a sparkly nude gloss. Her outfit was the same pink T-shirt he wore, but in a scoop-neck style, paired with curve-hugging blue jeans and pink trainers.

Her clothing accentuated her curves, but it was her wide brown eyes that stopped him. There was a bit of the shyness he’d thought was her most noticeable feature, but there was also playfulness and a kind of probing concern that skewered him. “Are you doing better?”

She’d asked him the same at dinner the evening before, but her grandmother had come and pulled her away, telling her that there were people she had to greet so as not to seem rude.

“Ouay,” he answered carefully. There were few people who inquired about his well-being and meant it. Most of them were in his peripheral vision—Thabiso, Tavish, Ledi, and Portia. For some reason, their inquiries didn’t make him feel like this. There was something about Nya that pulled at him—a pull he had been fighting successfully for a year and a half but, in the wake of their recent run-ins, was starting to feel like a losing battle.

His control was slipping again.

If he’d only wanted to sleep with Nya, it would have been manageable. Lust was basic and could be ignored. But his attraction swelled each time he saw her, ballooned each time he heard her voice, and because he most definitely would not indulge it, had been all he’d thought of since the plane had landed in Thesolo.