That night, the hawk came.
Its wings beat against the dusk air as it landed on the sill, feathers ragged from long flight. Heston took the letter and brought it to Aerion’s desk without a word.
The seal was crude, dark wax pressed by a soldier’s hand. Aerion’s pulse quickened.
He broke it.
A,
It is done. The banners burn. The field is ours.
The men are tired, but alive. The dead will be honored.
We begin the journey home at first thaw. Two months, if the roads hold.
I will see Valemont again. I will see you.
—C
Aerion read it three times before he could breathe again. He pressed the page to his lips, eyes closing.
Two months.
Two months was nothing. Two months was forever.
He set the letter down with trembling hands and laughed once, softly, the sound cracking into something too sharp. Then he rose, pacing the room like a caged thing, words already spilling from his mouth as though Clyde stood before him.
“You had better come back whole, you bastard,” he whispered. “Or I’ll drag you from the grave myself.”
The fire in the hearth roared high, and for the first time in years, Aerion allowed himself to imagine it: Clyde, not in letters, not in dreams, but standing in the hall again—breathing, scarred, alive.
Two months.
The number circled Aerion’s mind like a hawk over prey. It would not leave him.
So he turned it into work.
By the next council session, the plans had doubled. Not just a banquet, but a feast for every soul in Valemont; tables stretching the length of the square, casks of wine rolled up from the southern cellars, musicians enough to drown out memoryitself. He demanded not only the building of a cemetery, but a monument of stone, carved with names and ringed with roses.
“Every fallen knight will be named,” he ordered. “Every squire, every bannerman, every boy who carried a sword too heavy for his arm. If they bled for Valemont, their names will outlive us all.”
The chamberlain bowed, though his hands twitched around his quill. The vassals shifted uneasily, murmuring of costs, of supply lines, of timetables. Aerion silenced them with one raised hand, jewelled rings glinting in the firelight.
“Do it,” he said simply. “If I must spend every last coin in the treasury, it will be done.”
And when he was alone, he spread maps across his desk, but not maps of war. Maps of kitchens, of storerooms, of the cemetery plots he marked with precise strokes. He sat up late into the night with Heston at his side, dictating menus, arguing over stonecutters, insisting on roses and rosemary sprigs for remembrance, insisting that every widow and child be seated at the head tables, not hidden in the shadows.
It became an obsession.
When Isolde tugged on his sleeve one morning, asking why he hadn’t walked in the garden with her in a week, Aerion blinked as though waking from a dream. He bent, kissed her pale hair, and promised they’d walk tomorrow. He kept the promise. But even then, as she pointed at new green shoots pushing up from the thawed soil, his mind was elsewhere—seeing Clyde’s boots on that path, hearing Clyde’s voice cutting through the still air.
He began measuring days not in sunrises, but in distance. Two months. Eight weeks. Sixty days.
In the evenings, when the keep fell quiet, he returned to Clyde’s cloak—still folded at the foot of his bed, still carrying the faint scent of smoke and leather. Sometimes he wore it. Sometimes he pressed the new letter—the one with Clyde’sblunt, soldier’s script—against his lips before tucking it into his robe.
Heston saw the change, though he never spoke of it. The butler only made sure the Archduke’s goblet was never empty, his cloak never missing, his quills always sharp. Once, Aerion caught him watching from the doorway as he stared too long at Clyde’s letter. Their eyes met. Heston bowed and left without a word.
The days bled forward. The banquet was planned, replanned, perfected. The cemetery was marked, stonemasons summoned from three counties. Musicians were hired. Carpenters set to work on long trestle tables.
