Instead, he stared at the blank parchment on his knee.
For three nights he had told himself he wouldn’t write. That silence was mercy. That Aerion, peacock prince of Valemont, was safer not knowing what the warfront had become—the dead couriers, the beasts that should never have appeared this far west, the slow, grinding losses.
And yet.
Every night his hand reached for ink. Every night he hesitated, the words clawing at him and refusing to form. He could fight a man in steel, stand unflinching before a beast’s maw, but a page… a page undid him.
Finally, his jaw tightened, and he dipped the quill.
The words came slowly. Each one scratched into parchment as if carved into bark.
Aerion,
The snow is constant now. It covers everything—tents, armour, graves. It makes the world look clean when it isn’t. I keep thinking of you when I see it. Pale, cold, impossible to hold for long. It melts in my hands.
They say the war will stall here through the winter. The army won’t be moving much further forward until spring. That means letters will take longer. A month each way, if they reach you at all. Two months before I can read your words.
Are you willing to wait that long, for every reply?
—Clyde
When he finished, Clyde read it once, then again. His throat tightened. There was so much he hadn’t said—so much he couldn’t.
He reached into his satchel, fingers brushing something small, brittle. A wildflower, purple and gold, crushed flat against the leather from when he had pulled off his boot. It must have caught there days ago, clinging to him as stubbornly as memory. He stared at it a long time.
Then he pressed it between the pages. A fragile thing, half-dead, but still carrying the ghost of its colour.
He folded the letter, sealed it with black wax, the mark plain and utilitarian.
No crest. No flourish. Just his hand.
Instead of calling for a courier, he lifted his arm to the sky. A hawk sat waiting on the tether. Their couriers had begun turning up dead on the roads—slit throats, stolen dispatches. The rebels were clever, vicious. If Aerion’s letters were intercepted… Clyde didn’t let himself finish the thought.
He tied the message to the hawk’s leg with steady fingers. The bird’s yellow eyes gleamed in the firelight as if it knew the weight it carried.
“Fly,” Clyde murmured. His voice cracked in the frozen air.
The hawk launched into the night, wings cutting through the snow. Clyde watched until it vanished into grey sky and white flurries, carrying his heart two months away.
Then he sat back down on the log, gloves heavy with blood, chest hollow with silence.
And for the first time since he was a boy, Clyde bent forward, braced his elbows on his knees, and let his head hang in his hands.
The warfront stank of smoke and damp wool. Tents sagged under the weight of snow, cookfires sputtered, and the stew was thin enough to see the bottom of the pot. Men huddled in twos and threes, sharpening blades that would dull again by morning, trading stories with voices so low they barely carried above the wind.
Despair had crept into the camp like frost. Quiet at first, then heavier, settling into shoulders, into eyes, into the slump of backs. Clyde saw it everywhere he looked.
And as commander of the western flank, it was his burden to break it.
He rose before dawn, shaking snow from his cloak, and roused the younger knights with his boot. “On your feet,” he barked, his tone flat, unyielding. “If the enemy doesn’t kill you, the cold will. Swing your swords before your arms forget how.”
Groans met him, but the boys obeyed. They always obeyed.
By midmorning, the clash of steel rang through the frost. Clyde stalked between sparring pairs, calling corrections. “Footwork, not flailing, Renn.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy wheezed, sweat steaming off him in the cold.
“And you,” Clyde snapped at another, knocking the lad’s shield aside with his own gauntlet. “That arm drops again; you’ll be gutted before you see the blade.”
