The King Who Had a Difficult Heart… But Fell For His Servant
They said King Dio had everything.
Gold that could buy a thousand kingdoms.
Men who would die at every single web.
Every night he danced.
He drown.
He laughed the loudest in every room.
He beat his chest and dared the word to name a greater man.
Nobody could.
Nobody did.
But if you looked closely past the crown, past the noise, past the wine on his lips and the row of his men, you would see it just for a second.
In his eyes, an emptiness so deep, not even gold could feel it.
Listen to the rest of the story to find out what really happened.
King Deo had a name that meant joy, but there was very little joy in him.
He was tall and strong with a deep voice that filled any room he entered.
He had ruled the kingdom of Amara for 20 years.
His armies had never lost a battle.
His palace was made of stone and gold, and its walls were so thick that the sound of thunder could not get through them.
People all across the land spoke his name with a kind of fear that passed itself off as respect.
Dot.
By every measure the world used to count success, King Deo was winning.
And yet at night, when the oil lamps burned low, and the palace fell quiet, he would sit on the edge of his bed and stare at nothing, and feel an emptiness so wide he could not find the edges of it.
He had tried to fill it.
He had filled it with gold first, then with war and conquest, then with food and wine that came from every corner of the continent, and then in the way that powerful men sometimes do when they run out of other things to collect.
He had filled it with people dot over the years.
King Deo had taken 180 men into his royal household as companions.
Not because he loved them, not even because he truly wanted them in any real sense, but because having them made him feel for a little while like a man who lacked nothing.
Their laughter echoed in his halls.
Their music played until midnight.
Their beauty decorated his evenings the way gold decorated his walls.
He called this happiness.
Deep down he knew it was not.
The men lived in the east wing of the palace which the servants called the garden of silk because of the colored fabrics that hung from every doorway.
They ate well.
They wore fine clothes.
They were comfortable in the way that a bird inside a beautiful cage is comfortable.
Warm, fed, and not free.
Most of them competed for the king’s attention in small, careful ways.
They dressed carefully.
They laughed at the right moments.
They said what they believe the king wanted to hear.
Deo listened.
He smiled.
And then he went to bed feeling exactly as empty as before.
He told no one about this.
Kings did not speak of emptiness.
It was not something the royal court had a ceremony for.
Then came the morning of the festival of first harvest when people from every corner of Amara came to the palace to sing, drum, and give thanks.
Among them in a group of servants and their children gathered near the palace fountain was a young man playing a small wooden harp dot.
His name was Cosy.
And when King Deo’s eyes found him, not because he was the most handsome or the most skilled, but because he was the only one in the entire courtyard, who was not performing for anyone, something shifted in the king’s chest, something he had not felt in a very long time.
Dot curiosity, dot not hunger, not desire, just a quiet, clean feeling of wanting to know something.
He watched the young man play until the music stopped.
Then he looked away.
Then he looked back.
He did not sleep well that night.
Kosi was 24 years old and had learned early in life that the world did not owe him anything.
His mother, Amma, had come to Amara from a village far to the north when she was still a teenager.
She had arrived not by choice, but by the kind of arrangement that poor families with no option sometimes made to survive.
She had worked in the palace kitchens for most of her adult life, waking before the sun and going to bed long after it.
She was a quiet woman who smiled slowly and loved her son in a way that was practical and constant and asked for nothing back.
She died when Cosy was 23.
A short illness that came quickly and did not leave.
He was with her at the end, holding her hand in the small room they had shared since his birth.
And after it was over, he sat there for a long time in the silence of the room, and understood for the first time what it meant to be completely alone in the world.
He had been left the small wooden harp she had bought him when he was 11.
He played it the way some people pray, not for anyone watching, but because certain feelings need to become sound before you can live alongside them comfortably.
He was not ambitious.
He did not dream of power or money or the kind of life that happened on the other side of the palace’s grand doors.
He had grown up close enough to that world to understand that it was not what it looked like from the outside, and far enough from it to have no personal attachment to its rewards.
He wanted simple things, enough food, enough quiet, the occasional hour with his instrument, and no one making demands of him.
He knew who King Deo was.
Everyone in the palace knew.
He knew about the East Wing and the men who lived there, had heard the music that drifted from its windows on festival nights, and had always found the whole arrangement slightly sad in a way he could not exactly explain.
Not cruel, just sad, like watching someone eat and eat without ever being full.
He was not prepared 3 days after the festival of first harvest to be brought to the king, not to the throne room, to a small covered garden at the back of the palace, where Buggan Villia grew over the stone walls, and the air smelled like rain.
King Deo was already there, sitting on a low bench with no crown and no attendants nearby, wearing a plain robe, looking exactly like a man who had too many thoughts and nowhere to put them.
Coy stood at the edge of the garden.
Come and sit, said the king, he sat.
You were playing at the festival, the king said.
The wooden harp.
Yes.
Who were you playing for?
The question surprised Kosy with its directness.
Most people with power did not ask questions.
They made statements and waited to be agreed with “My mother,” Coy said, “She died 4 months ago.”
The festival was the first time I played since.
The king was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, “I am sorry for your loss.”
Not, “I am sorry for your loss, servant.”
Not, “I am sorry.
Now tell me something more interesting.
Just the words, plain and honest.
Coy looked at him and saw a man who meant what he had just said.
That was more than he had expected.
They began to meet in the small covered garden on most afternoons.
Dot.
No one gave it a name.
There were no official meetings, no record in the palace books, no ceremony.
Kosi would finish his work, wash his face, and find his way to the garden where the king would already be waiting, sometimes with food set out, sometimes just with himself, sitting quietly, looking like he had been thinking for hours.
Kosi did not change how he spoke around the king.
This, it turned out, was extraordinary.
Dot everyone else in King Deo’s life adjusted their words before they let them out.
His advisers softened bad news and hardened good news.
His companions in the east wing said what they believe would make him look at them warmly.
Even Cosy, his oldest and most trusted elder, had a habit of pointing the truth in the king’s direction, only after carefully wrapping it in several layers of respectful language.
First, Kosi just talked.
He said what he thought.
When the king described a decision he had made, and Cosy believed it had been the wrong one, he said so not rudely, not with drama, but plainly, the way a person talks when they are not afraid.
When the king spoke about the years of conquest, and collecting as if they were achievements, Kosi was quiet in a way that asked a question without asking it.
“You don’t think it matters,” the king said one afternoon, watching him.
I think it mattered to you at the time, Coy said.
I’m not sure it still does.
Deo was quiet for a long moment.
No, he admitted it doesn’t.
He had not said that to anyone.
He had barely allowed himself to think it.
Dot.
It was like setting down something heavy that he had been carrying for so long.
He had forgotten he was carrying it.
They talked about his childhood.
A boyhood full of instruction and not much room for doubt or tenderness about what he had expected his life would feel like from the inside and what it actually felt like.
Kosi talked about growing up in the margins of the palace, watching the world of the powerful from a distance, noticing the gap between the way things looked and the way they were.
You see everything, the king said once.
I’ve had a lot of time to watch.
Coy said, “People who have nothing are very good at watching people who have everything.
We have more practice.”
King Dale laughed.
It was a real laugh startled out of him before he could shape it into the kind of controlled, dignified sound a king produced in public.
He put his hand over his mouth after it, then took it away.
I don’t remember the last time I laughed like that, he said.
Kosi looked at him carefully.
You should do it more.
There was a moment just after that where the king looked at the young man across from him and felt something he had no word for, not the wanting that he was used to, the grasping, consuming kind that he had learned to call desire.
This was quieter, more like standing in a doorway between two rooms and understanding for the first time that the second room exists.
Dot.
He did not say anything, but he went home that evening and sat by his window and thought about the feeling for a long time.
The garden was dark.
The palace around him was full of voices and music.
He barely heard any of it.
The east wing noticed dot.
Of course it did.
A palace is a small world dressed up as a large one.
And in small worlds, shifts in attention are felt before they can be seen.
Dot.
It was Bode who said it first out loud.
In the voice of a man who had been patient long enough, and had decided patience was no longer useful.
Bode had been in the East Wing for nearly 2 years.
He was handsome in a sharp, deliberate way, and very aware of it, and he had spent those two years building what he believed was a secure place in the king’s regard.
He had done everything correctly.
He had been entertaining and agreeable and physically present in all the ways expected of him, and he had watched over the past several weeks as the king’s attention drifted away from the east wing entirely and settled somewhere else on a servant sung a nobody, a thin young man with a wooden instrument who had not been trained in any of the arts of court living, and who clearly had no idea how these things worked.
He hasn’t called for any of us in 3 weeks, Mode said.
Sitting in the large shared room where several of the companions gathered most evenings.
His voice was controlled, but underneath it was something jagged.
“Four weeks for me,” said Fola, who was quiet but never missed anything.
“It’s the boy from the kitchens,” B continued.
The one who plays that harp.
They sit in the back garden every afternoon like two old men with nothing better to do.
No silk, no music.
No wine, just talking.
Talking?
Someone repeated as if the word itself was ridiculous.
About what?
Fa asked.
Bode shook his head.
Nothing that matters.
Nothing that should matter.
The bitterness in the room grew the way bitterness always grows, slowly at first and then faster than anyone intended.
Within a week, five of the companions had formed a private agreement among themselves.
They were not cruel people, for they had not been once, but they were frightened people, and frightened people in small worlds sometimes do things they would not do in larger, say for ones that they began with whispers.
Small targeted words placed carefully with certain palace staff.
Questions raised about where Kosi had come from.
Suggestions never stated directly always implied that a young man with no background or history was perhaps not who he appeared to be.
That the king who was a good and strong king might be under some influence he wasn’t aware of.
Kosy heard about this the way he heard about most things from a kitchen worker who told him quietly while they were both washing vegetables.
The way people warned someone they like about a storm that is coming.
He thought about it that night for a long time.
He decided not to hide, not to change what he was doing, not to pretend the threat wasn’t there, but also not to let it push him into being someone other than himself.
And he decided not to tell King Dale.
Not yet.
Because if the king was going to choose, and Cosy could see clearly that a choice was coming, it needed to be a choice Deo made himself for his own reasons, not out of protection, not out of guilt, because he wanted to.
