The chamberlain bowed his head, but his heart ached. He had prayed for Aerion to grow into the Archduke Valemont needed—not into a man who looked at marriage as nothing more than ink and ledgers.
He gathered the papers in silence, stacking them neatly though the portraits blurred before his eyes. Aerion watched with a lazy kind of disdain, but in the set of his jaw there was something else—something brittle.
The chamberlain saw it. He said nothing.
The council chamber emptied of its usual racket, a museum of fluted columns and dull, watching portraits. The great table still smelled of ink and warmed leather where the petitions had been stacked; at the far end, the soot in the grate had cooled to a grey bruise. Servants had smoothed the cushions and shut the doors on the day’s performance, but the hush that followed felt less like peace than a stifling: all those expectant faces gone and with them the only comfortable noise Aerion had ever known.
He sat in his father’s chair until the wood remembered the shape of him and then sat some more—long enough that the leather warmed and the room felt as though it were holding its breath. The portraits on the wall looked down with the same mixture of patience and reproach, Archdukes wearing fictive smiles that had once frightened boys into obedience. Aerion regarded them for a time as if they were props in a play he no longer wanted to perform.
When the last parchment had been cleared, when the chamberlain had folded his hands and the footmen’s footsteps had faded, Aerion rose and let the doors fall behind him with a soft, final click. He wandered the stairways as one might wander the rooms of a house you’ve lived in too long—too many memories, too few comforts. The torchlight bent around him, casting his shadow long and thin like a question.
He returned to his chambers not with ceremony, but with the kind of determined, private steps that felt like trespass. He took a box from his shelf and held the contents to his chest; the paper was creased and smelled faintly of smoke and leather, and the words inside found him like an honest bruise. He read them theway one reads a chant you do not want to admit you remember, slow and then slower, until the meaning settled under his ribs.
For a while he simply held the pages to his face, as if the paper might deliver warmth through its fibres. The room around him thinned—the hearth’s roar, the velvet chaise, Heston’s cautious footfall outside the door—everything reduced to the small, bright ache between his fingers. He thought of how Valemont had looked with Clyde’s shadow at his shoulder: less grand maybe, but steadier, less lonely. How absurd it was that a man who dressed in jewels could be undone by a single line of ink.
He sat, and then he wrote. Not the witty, barbed trifle that charmed the salons, but a raw thing that would have read like a confession if it ever reached a hand that did not know him. The quill trembled a little where his fingers held it; the ink thrummed onto the page like blood onto snow. He tried three drafts—mockery, pleading, a brittle, half-mad dare—and burned each in turn, watching the edges curl and blacken until they blossom into smoke and nothing remained but the memory of the words.
The fourth letter he set down sealed, then kissed with a serious, private devotion that felt indecent. He meant to send it; to send the rawness out into the cold the way one sends a torch ahead of a rider. But when the flame of the single candle licked the red wax at his fingertips, he found himself holding the wax over the flame until it sagged, until the seal softened and the parchment browned. The flame took the name first, the neat, dangerous curl of Clyde’s letters, and the sound of ink and paper burning was the sort of small, private sacrilege that makes a man feel unmoored.
He watched ash fall into the palms of his hands, watched lines he had bled over unmake themselves into nothing. He told himself he was burning what he must—softness, weakness, the part of him that might topple the duchy by existing—but hischest clenched as if whatever he sacrificed were not an idea but a living thing. He lay the last scraps into the hearth and leaned forward until the heat warmed his face.
“Enough,” he told the emptiness, throat thick. “Enough.”
Then, because habit is the only law some men obey, he collected the remaining, unburned pages, tucked the memory of Clyde’s voice under his pillow, and dressed himself in the lavish garments of an Archduke. He walked out into the night with the new title like a foreign weight around his shoulders, and though his face was composed, his hands still smelled faintly of ash.
He told himself, aloud, that he would be what they wanted: prudent, resolute, unyielding. He told himself he could wear the mantle of duty and bury the rest. But when he lay down that night, the emptiness where Clyde should have been yawned large as the sea, and the smell of smoke lingered on his fingers like a promise he had not yet kept.
The great hall smelled of beeswax and roses, polished to a mirror sheen in anticipation of her arrival. Aerion entered last, the weight of his new title stitched into every thread of his black-and-red cloak. He moved like a man to be admired, not approached; chin high, smile sharp, each gesture too deliberate to be careless.
She was already there.
Lady Evelyne of Drelmere. Barely nineteen. Sweet-faced, modestly dressed in pale silk that seemed to shrink from the grandeur of the chamber. Her hands trembled where they clutched her skirts, but her eyes lit like dawn when they found him.
She curtseyed low, nearly to the ground. “Your Grace,” she breathed, her voice soft with reverence. “It is the greatest honour of my life to stand before you.”
Aerion’s lips curved into something that could pass for warmth. He extended his hand, drew her gently to her feet. “And mine to meet the lady who will keep Valemont company.” His tone was gracious, polished, utterly faultless.
She blushed at the compliment, eyes shining as though she’d been handed the sun. Every glance at him was adoration made flesh—her gaze hungry not for power, but for him. She laughed nervously at his smallest quip, and when he offered her his arm, she took it as though afraid he might vanish if she held too lightly.
He smiled as kindly as he could. He asked her about her family, her studies, whether she liked music. She answered every question as though every word he spoke was a gift she might press between the pages of her memory forever.
And even then, even as she glowed with the simple joy of being near him, Aerion knew.
He would never love her.
Not for lack of charm, or sweetness, or devotion. She was all of those things, and she looked at him as though he were a man worth worship. But his heart was already locked. Sealed behind iron and silence. It had been carved by another hand, and he had burned the key.
So, he gave her the only mercy he had left. A smile. A gentle word. Enough to keep her glowing, enough to make the court sigh at his courtesy.
And in the marrow of him, in the place he never let them see, he thought only of Clyde.
His heart was closed forever.
The first letter arrived folded small and neat, the seal damp from a long road. Clyde sat on the limb of a splintered crate outside the mess tent, the canvas sagging with frost, the air sharp with the smell of smoke and boiled barley. Figures of men moved like slow moths around the fire—some sharpening blades, some rolling dice, some staring into nothing at all. He cracked the seal and read,
C,
I’m married. Is this what you wanted? Are you happy?
