Instead, they talked.
They whispered in corners, behind jeweled hands and feathered fans, in voices meant to be low but pitched just loud enough to carry.
“Too thin for an Archduke,” muttered Lord Halford, chewing bread as though each bite soured in his mouth. “A crown would look ridiculous on those shoulders.”
“He didn’t even kiss the body,” Lady Marrisol said into her goblet, the rim brushing painted lips. “Not once. Not a tear shed before the bier. Heartless.”
“Still no duchess,” Baron Faele added, his rings clinking against the stem of his cup. “What use is a man without heirs? The line dies with him.”
From another cluster:
“I heard he sleeps with his knight’s cloak wrapped around him like a lover.
“Obscene.”
“Writes to him still, even now.”
“Lonely.”
Each word was meant to vanish into the smoke and clatter of the hall. But Aerion heard them.
He sat alone at the high table, a goblet balanced between two fingers, the black velvet cloak heavy on his shoulders. He leaned back in his chair, his posture indolent, his face a mask of mild disdain. To anyone looking, he was untouchable—lounging, bored, playing the part of the sneering peacock who cared for nothing.
But inside, each whisper struck.
Too thin.
No duchess.
Obscene.
Lonely.
The words curled in his chest like coals left to smoulder. He thought of Clyde—Clyde’s hand steady on his wrist, Clyde’s silence heavier than any vow, Clyde’s absence ringing through the keep like a bell struck too often. They called it obscene. They called it loneliness. They didn’t know it was survival.
Aerion sipped his wine slowly, letting the bitterness coat his tongue. He did not flinch. He did not let the mask crack. But beneath the stillness, his heart beat sharp and furious, the words lodging in him like daggers.
Obscene.
Lonely.
They thought him brittle. They thought him strange. They thought him already broken.
Aerion let the goblet fall back to the table with a soft clink, his smile curving faint and cruel. If they wanted obscene, he would give them something far worse.
He raised the cup again in mock salute toward the hall, eyes glittering cold as sapphire. And though he said nothing, the silence that followed was louder than any retort.
Because Archduke Aerion Valemont had heard every word.
And he would not forget.
Aerion did not linger at the feast. He felt the circle of gazes like teeth around his throat and the sound of their whispering like a hive about to swarm. He spared them the spectacle of his grief by choosing absence over performance—no speech, no forced toast, no practised grief to soothe their consciences. Instead he went somewhere quieter: to the one small room that still smelled of another man.
Clyde’s chamber in the barracks had remained untouched since he left—no furs reshuffled, no trunks rifled for tokens. The cot sagged in the middle where Aerion had slept once like a thief; the trunk creaked with its own small memory. The leather of a scabbard gave off that clean, stubborn scent of iron and oil, and beneath it all, threaded through the stone chill, a ghost of warmth. He closed the door and let the sound of the keep fall away.
He sat at the scarred desk, the wood still nicked where a whetstone had been dragged in impatience. The candlelight made halos in the dust, and Aerion watched the motes turn like small, indifferent planets. For a long time he did nothing but breathe, letting the rhythm of the room—Clyde’s room—set the tempo of a heart he had not wished to attend to.
He would be the Archduke they wanted. He had said it aloud once before, sharp as a blade; now he let the words settle into the hollow where grief had been lodged. The thought was simple and terrible: authority without apology. Expectation worn not as a chain but as armour. He would learn to move through the halls and the councils with the same lethal calm he had shown in thechapel that morning—unmoved, unbending, more dangerous for the fact he never let them see how the steel had been forged.
