I stand at the front, drowning in black velvet that feels simultaneously like a shroud and like armor made of cobwebs. Too heavy. Too insubstantial. The fabric drags across my shoulders, whispering against my skin, yet it does very little to quell the chill in the air.
Before me: two coffins.
One is gilt-edged and grotesque, rococo flourishes screaming wealth and status even in death—my mother’s. The other is stark, severe, unforgiving planes of polished ebony that swallow the candlelight rather than reflect it—my father’s.
Just like them. As different as night and day but indelibly connected, even in death.
“Your Highness?” The priest's voice is a distant drone, bees in another garden. “The eulogy?”
I blink.
When did I walk to the lectern?
My hands find the cold marble, and I realize I'm gripping it hard enough to turn my knuckles white. I open my mouth, and words spill out—something about legacy, about sacrifice, about the price of peace. I don't recognize my own voice. It sounds like Mother's, all clipped consonants and regal distance, as if I'm narrating a documentary about someone else's tragedy.
The crowd blurs. Faces swim in and out of focus like fish behind aquarium glass. There's Ambassador Voss from Temanburg, dabbing at dry eyes with a silk handkerchief. Senator Kael, who voted to cut my mother's infrastructure funding three years ago, now weeping openly for the cameras. A sea of black wool and crocodile tears, each person calculating how this death benefits their portfolio, their poll numbers, their petty ambitions.
How many of you,I think, my gaze scraping across the pews,actually spoke to her? How many saw past the steel? How many knew that she hummed when she thought no one was listening, off-key and tuneless, some half-remembered lullaby from her own childhood?
How many of you saw my father tremble? How many noticed the way his hands shook when thunder came, how he'd hide in the library with the curtains drawn, reading poetry to the shadows?
None. They saw the masks. The benevolent, powerful alpha and her devoted omega. That's what the history books will say.
Would they still think that if they knew what she had done?
Would they mourn a monster?
I hate myself for having these thoughts, especially now, at my parents’ own funeral. But they persist regardless, residing in the dark corners of my heart where resentment festers like mold.
But I also remember?—
The fishing trip when I was six. The way Father's laughter cracked across the lake like a whip, startling the birds from the trees, when I finally hooked my first trout. How he'd pressed a chocolate into my palm before dinner, his eyes crinkling with conspiratorial delight, and said,Don't tell your mother.
He was soft in a world that devoured softness. I loved him for it. I hated him for it. Now, standing over his coffin, I don't know which feeling wins. Maybe neither. Maybe both, tearing me apart like wolves with a shared kill.
And Mother.
God, Mother.
She never held me like a daughter. I was the princess first, the weapon second, her legacy third. I remember the etiquette classes that chipped away pieces of myself until I was polished smooth as marble, the political lessons delivered with the same detachment others used to order lunch. I remember watching her sign execution orders, her face unreadable as granite, while I stood in the corner, wondering if she'd ever looked at me and seen something other than a project nearing completion.
But I also remember?—
The fever. I was twelve, burning up with some infection that had the doctors murmuring in hushed, worried tones. She'd sat on my bed, her spine rigid even on the soft mattress, and brushed my hair. Her hands had been surprisingly gentle, the way I'd always imagined a mother's hands should be. She'd sung something under her breath, a lullaby in a language I didn't recognize, her voice so soft I thought for years I'd invented it. A hallucination of affection.
Maybe I did. Maybe grief is just another kind of fever, and I'm hallucinating now.
My chest constricts, but this time, it's not grief—not entirely. It's fear, sharp and electric, shooting through my veins like poison.
Because three miles away from us, in a private hospital that smells of antiseptic and impending doom, Teddie is fighting for every breath.
The cure isn't working.
I gave him everything the Noths fucking had, and still his fever climbs. Still his body rejects the so-called cure like a foreign invader.
If I lose him too?—
I can't finish the thought. My knees threaten to buckle, the cathedral tilting dangerously, but then?—
