—A
The words landed like a blow, a slap and a stone in the same instant—simple, sharp, impossibly intimate, and impossible to answer. His chest tightened, a heat rising behind his sternum that felt dangerously close to grief but burned sharper, angrier. Married. The words tasted like ashes.
He closed his fist around the parchment until the edges cut his palm. The sting grounded him, though not enough. He tasted iron on his tongue though he hadn’t touched wine in weeks, and wondered—bitterly, helplessly—whether the question was meant to wound him or whether Aerion had managed to wound himself in writing it. The script was unmistakable: precise, elegant, too pretty to be casual, too barbed to be innocent.
The laughter around the fire rose, ragged and brittle, one man shouting as dice tumbled, another coughing up smoke. The world went on as though his chest hadn’t been struck clean through. Clyde folded the paper once, carefully now, reverently almost, and slid it beneath his chestplate, resting it where the ribbon already lived. As if keeping it close, keeping it pressed to his heart, might make an answer unnecessary.
He sat there until the fire burned low, staring at the frost gathering along the crate’s splintered edges, and told himself—like a prayer or a curse—that an oath is heavier than a ring.
The second letter found him hunched beneath a leaning tent roof while snow begins to bruise the morning sky. The canvas sagged with frost, stitched seams dripping meltwater into a shallow tin bowl by his boot. His fingers, stiff from the cold, broke the seal with care as though the parchment might shatter like glass.
C,
I have a daughter. Her name is Isolde. She has her mother’s hair, not mine. That’s mercy. When I held her, she gripped my finger with her whole hand, as though she could anchor me. I almost believed it. I thought you should know. Though why I should tell you anything, I can’t say.
—A
Aerion’s words were clumsy with a tenderness Clyde has never known from him. No barbs, no sharpened wit—only the faltering cadence of a man undone by something small and new. Clyde read how the child gripped her father’s finger with her whole hand, how tiny, how utterly ordinary, and his throat tightens until it aches. He had seen men die clinging to nothing, begging for gods who would not come. Yet here is Aerion, describing a girl’s fragile fist as though it could anchor an entire world.
For the first time since the banners rose and the march east began, Clyde let himself picture Aerion not as the jewelled lord of Valemont, nor the voice spilling venom from ink, but as a man—shoulders bowed, hair mussed, a sleeping infant pressed to his chest. The image made something twist painfully inside him, sharp with longing and soft with shame.
The camp noise dulled, as if the letter itself had muffled the world. Outside, hooves clattered; men curse as they draggedfrozen water buckets across rutted ground. A boy in the next cot snored with his mouth open like a wounded animal, each wheeze pulling Clyde back to the present. He smoothed the page flat on his knee with a reverence he had not shown a living thing in too long, fingers tracing the words as though memorizing them into bone.
Then, slowly, he folded the letter and pinned it inside his tunic, near the ribbon he still carried. The ribbon’s faded red had gone almost brown, fraying at the edges, but when the weak dawn filtered through the tent seam it glowed faintly, stubborn as a wound that refuses to close. Against it, Aerion’s letter felt warm, as though ink and paper alone could keep him breathing.
The third letter comes ragged, the parchment thin as old cloth, its edges soft and smeared where damp and handling had worried it raw. Clyde broke the seal with his thumb, already bracing himself, already tasting bitterness before the words rose up at him.
C,
Do you still breathe? I hear whispers that the war drags on. That knights fall nameless in fields of mud. That hawks never return. You’d laugh at me, wouldn’t you? Sitting here, waiting like a lovesick maid. I hate it. If you mean to be dead, say so. If you mean to be silent, say so. Just stop leaving me in between.
—A
It was not plea. Not question. It was demand carved in ink, raw and restless, as if Aerion might beat the world into giving him what he wanted simply by asking it sharper. Clyde could almost hear his voice in the words: mocking, furious, lonely. The ache beneath the barbs so bare that it made Clyde’s chesttighten. He folded the letter once, then twice, knuckles white around the creases, and a low laugh escaped him—bitter as bad wine. Of course Aerion would call silence cruelty. Of course he would dress grief in iron and make it someone else’s fault.
Clyde sat back against the tent pole, staring at the open flap where snow hissed into mud. He thought of the hawks shot from the sky, of couriers cut down in the mountain pass, of the way time stretched here—slow as rot, endless as night. Did Aerion not know the cost of a single word? The lives risked for ink to cross leagues?
That night, he worked with the men, sharpening blades by the fire. Sparks hissed against his knuckles, and the whetstone sang with every pull. But his hands remembered the curve of letters more than the heft of steel. The letter lay open beside the grindstone, curling at the corners, catching firelight like a lantern he couldn’t quite bring himself to snuff. Each time his gaze strayed, the words burned brighter than the steel.Do you still breathe?
He didn’t answer. But he breathed. And he hated that Aerion would never know how much that cost.
The fourth letter arrived in the middle of a storm that would not end. Rain pounded the earth until the camp became a mire of sucking mud, tents slumping and sagging as though the very canvas was exhausted by war. Clyde sat on an upturned crate beneath a dripping awning when the hawk came, bedraggled and furious, its feathers plastered tight. The seal was smudged, the ink inside blurred where damp had worried it, but the words were still clear enough to drive like nails into him.
C,
You haunt me worse than ghosts. I sit at council and hear your voice in my head, mocking their cowardice. I walk the halls and feel your shadow at my back. And when I lie beside her, I imagine it’s you. I think I’ve gone mad. Perhaps that would please you.
—A
Clyde read the confession twice, the rain roaring so loud it felt as though the whole world leaned in to listen. His men nearby cursed as they bailed water from trenches, their voices frayed with weariness, but all he heard were those lines—I walk the halls and feel your shadow at my back.
It struck him like a blow, not of longing but of weight. Responsibility pressed down, heavy as iron, as if Aerion had reached across the leagues and settled armor onto his shoulders he had not asked to wear. Clyde had been keeping his men alive with ration counts and steady orders, sewing up frayed morale like a patch on a torn cloak. But this—this private accounting, this lord turned confessor—stripped him bare. It was not a command he could issue, nor a problem he could cut down with steel.
He folded the letter slowly, carefully, as if the parchment contained not words but bones, fragile and sacred. His thumb lingered at the crease, the paper damp beneath his calloused skin. Around him, men muttered, rain poured, the world dragged on. But for the first time, the steadiness he had worn like a shield for years felt perilously thin.
Dangerously close to cracking.
And in the hollow of his chest, where he had kept silence like a fortress, something shuddered—as if even the walls he built could not keep Aerion out.
