He took up a sheet of parchment and a fresh quill. There was no flourish in his hand tonight. No glittering wit to mask the fact he was bruised. Only plain sentences, honest as a wound.
He wrote:
C,
He’s gone.
The keep feels larger, somehow. As though everything I hated has stretched into the open now that he’s no longer here to crush it.
They call me Archduke. I sign it now. Aerion Valemont, Keeper of the Red Coast. It tastes like ash.
You should’ve seen them stare when I refused a crown. One lord nearly choked on his own spit.
I wore your colours today. Black and red. No one noticed the stitching was shaped like thorns.
I say less now. It makes them more afraid.
But I write more.
Gods, I write more.
Come back soon.
I want you to see me wear this name with my own hands, not just your letters.
Yours,
A
He read it once, then again, feeling each line like a step taken toward something both necessary and ruinous. The letter felt like an offering and a lie at once—an offering because he sent his truth out to the man who had taught him how to be guarded; a lie because the truth he needed to look at most was not the duchy’s ledger or the council’s petitions but the small room’s scent, the shape of a hand that would not be in his palm that night.
He broke the seal with deliberate slowness. The wax crumbled, dark as old blood. He pressed the parchment to his lips—the brief, ridiculous intimacy of it—and the paper tasted faintly of smoke and ink and the last of a hawk’s journey. He might have been kissing a vow; he might have been kissing his own confession. Either way the gesture steadied something raw in his chest.
Then he crossed the room to the hearth. The embers were dull, a few grey hills of ash and a coal that fought to keep life. He set the letter in his palm above the small flame and watched the edges catch, curl, and blacken. Ink ran in dark tears down the page like blood through snow. The paper shrieked in that thin, animal way that things do when they die. Aerion held the burning thing as though he were offering up the pain raw and entire.
“I will burn it away,” he told the smoke out loud, his voice low and used to malice. “If I burn the words, I burn the hold he has on me. I burn this—” he broke off, and the candlelight made his jawline a cliff. “—I burn this foolishness and become what I am meant to be.”
Flames licked up his fingers; he let them. Not to maim himself—he knew the theatrics of self-harm—but enough to feel a heat that was not grief. A physical burn to answer an invisible one. The paper flared, the script disintegrated into ash, and Aerion watched the letters of his confession vanish into smoke.
When the last of the page had gone the way words go when they are no longer allowed to live—grey and small and drifting—he closed his hand and let the ashes fall between his fingers. For a heartbeat he considered scattering them in the wind, letting the north take anything that might track back to him. He thought of the petals Clyde had once pressed into a page, of the way the knight’s handwriting bent like trimmed iron. He told himself he was doing the right, hard thing.
He told himself a great many things.
The truth was simpler and sharper: burning a paper did not burn a memory. It only made the shape of what remained clearer, the need more precise. He set the scraps in the hearth and stamped them down with his boot as if crushing a child’s toy, and then—because he was both man and creature of habit—he picked up a fresh sheet.
Before the candle guttered fully, he paused. The words he had just destroyed lay warm in his mouth like a promise. He folded a corner of the blackened ash into nothing more than a whisper between his palms, and with a motion that was almost religious, tucked it beneath the inlay of the desk where no one would think to look. He would tell himself later that he was preserving nothing but a scrap of parchment, absurd and cruel. He would tell himself he had not failed his resolve.
He pressed his forehead to the wood of the desk, closed his eyes, and let a single breath out that tasted of smoke and steel and impossible things. Then, because hope was something he had always allowed himself in private even when refusing it aloud, he spoke into the quiet of the small room:
“Come back. I’m ready to be worth the promise.”
The words were not a bargain. They were a vow and a command and a plea braided into one. He listened for an answer only the empty room could not give, and when none came he folded himself into the ritual armor he had chosen—the cold calm, the blade of restraint.
Outside, the keep moved on: curtains closed, the council ruffled, the kitchens put to work. Inside, Aerion rose from the desk with the cloak of the duchy heavy on his shoulders in more than needlework. He was resolved; he would be the Archduke they wanted, the man to steady storms. But as he turned out the candle and the last bit of ash sniffed his fingertips like memory,something private and human stayed unburned under his boot—an ember he refused to show, even to himself.
Chapter sixteen
Marriage
