A cruel reality when you've had too much to dream

[hondoyota]

On most days, Adam thought he knew all there was to know about himself. He had studied his skin and the capabilities of his muscles. He had interrogated every thought inside his own mind. He knew the depth of his capacity for exhaustion, and how much he could do on how little sleep.

He did not know, on the afternoon of the prince's eighteenth birthday, that over the course of the day things had been learned about him, through spell and revelation, that he did not know about himself.

Adam knew that there were celebrations throughout the kingdom for the prince, but Adam had no time for them. He had the day off of work at the shipyards, but that only meant that he had time to catch up on his chores at home, which would allow him some time to catch up on his studies. He knew that the royal family was magic. A fairy king and his family, and the middle son, the magic son, who would inherit everything. He knew, esoterically, that the fairy-dreamer kings of their realm took magic consorts who aided and increased their power.

Adam had no interest in any of it. This was mostly due to self-preservation for his pride and his heart. He knew he was not magic and did not belong in that world. Nothing he could do would ever produce an aptitude for that kind of magic. So he forbade himself from wanting it.

And if, in the months since his own birthday, he'd found lost things easier and broken things were more swiftly fixed by his hands, he attributed it only to his own intelligence and aptitude. If the weather suited itself to his mood and the flowers grew around his parents' house in a riotous profusion that he'd never seen before, Adam thought little of any of it. All these things had logical explanations, or they were mere coincidences.

He did not know that the king had cast a spell for his son, and his face had appeared in a basin of water, and a map had glowed to mark his home and the back field where Adam was hard at work repairing a broken fence.