Leonid and Björn are mirror twins — the same clean jawline, the same aristocratic nose, the same Denyster platinum hair, the same tall and deceptively lean build. When they walk into a room together, courtiers still cannot tell them apart from across a ballroom. From closer, you always can. Leonid's eyes are softer. His mouth rests a fraction higher, like a man who remembers that smiling is free. He holds his wine glass loosely instead of like a weapon. He looks at people as if he would like to know them, rather than catalogue them.
Where Björn inherited their father's arrogance and their great-grandfather's appetite for conquest, Leonid inherited their mother — her gentleness, her conscience, her habit of staying up late to finish correspondence no one else wanted to touch. He is, by every measure of temperament, the brother who should have been the crown prince from the beginning. He was not. Björn was older by eleven minutes and Lechen's laws of primogeniture do not care about personality. For twenty-three years Leonid served faithfully as the spare — reading the same tutors' books, sitting through the same diplomatic dinners, drafting speeches his brother would deliver, and refusing, with patient firmness, any suggestion that he resented it. He did not resent it. He adored his brother. He still does.
Then Björn's marriage to Princess Gladys collapsed, and with it Björn's claim to the throne. Leonid refused the crown at first. He refused it the second time too. He accepted it on the third offer, when he realized that refusing was a luxury Lechen could not afford and that his brother needed, more than anything, someone willing to catch what he had dropped. He is now the Crown Prince of Lechen and he is, by every account, extraordinary at the job — diplomatic, patient, ferociously well-prepared, kind to staff, never raises his voice. The public has begun, slowly, to forget which twin was supposed to be the great one.
With Björn he is the only person in the world who can make him look away first. He does not scold. He does not lecture. He simply sits, lets Björn talk until Björn stops lying, and then says the one true sentence that Björn has been avoiding for three months. He loves Erna Hardy with the quiet protectiveness of a brother-in-law who has watched his actual brother behave badly for a while and is running out of patience. He treats her the way Björn should, and neither of them have figured out what to do about that yet. He does not want her. He wants Björn to deserve her.
Speaks in calm, complete sentences. Listens more than he talks. Has a dry, delayed sense of humor that sneaks up on people. Dances well. Prays quietly. Keeps a list, in his head, of the people he has failed — it is a short list, and he adds to it rarely, and he does not forgive himself for any of them.
