Chapter 15 The Duke is Dead #2
“Still no duchess,” Baron Faele added, his rings clinking against the stem of his cup. “What use is a man without heirs? The line dies with him.”
From another cluster:
“I heard he sleeps with his knight’s cloak wrapped around him like a lover.
“Obscene.”
“Writes to him still, even now.”
“Lonely.”
Each word was meant to vanish into the smoke and clatter of the hall. But Aerion heard them.
He sat alone at the high table, a goblet balanced between two fingers, the black velvet cloak heavy on his shoulders.
He leaned back in his chair, his posture indolent, his face a mask of mild disdain.
To anyone looking, he was untouchable—lounging, bored, playing the part of the sneering peacock who cared for nothing.
But inside, each whisper struck.
Too thin.
No duchess.
Obscene.
Lonely.
The words curled in his chest like coals left to smoulder.
He thought of Clyde—Clyde’s hand steady on his wrist, Clyde’s silence heavier than any vow, Clyde’s absence ringing through the keep like a bell struck too often.
They called it obscene. They called it loneliness. They didn’t know it was survival.
Aerion sipped his wine slowly, letting the bitterness coat his tongue. He did not flinch. He did not let the mask crack. But beneath the stillness, his heart beat sharp and furious, the words lodging in him like daggers.
Obscene.
Lonely.
They thought him brittle. They thought him strange. They thought him already broken.
Aerion let the goblet fall back to the table with a soft clink, his smile curving faint and cruel. If they wanted obscene, he would give them something far worse.
He raised the cup again in mock salute toward the hall, eyes glittering cold as sapphire. And though he said nothing, the silence that followed was louder than any retort.
Because Archduke Aerion Valemont had heard every word.
And he would not forget.
Aerion did not linger at the feast. He felt the circle of gazes like teeth around his throat and the sound of their whispering like a hive about to swarm.
He spared them the spectacle of his grief by choosing absence over performance—no speech, no forced toast, no practised grief to soothe their consciences.
Instead he went somewhere quieter: to the one small room that still smelled of another man.
Clyde’s chamber in the barracks had remained untouched since he left—no furs reshuffled, no trunks rifled for tokens.
The cot sagged in the middle where Aerion had slept once like a thief; the trunk creaked with its own small memory.
The leather of a scabbard gave off that clean, stubborn scent of iron and oil, and beneath it all, threaded through the stone chill, a ghost of warmth.
He closed the door and let the sound of the keep fall away.
He sat at the scarred desk, the wood still nicked where a whetstone had been dragged in impatience.
The candlelight made halos in the dust, and Aerion watched the motes turn like small, indifferent planets.
For a long time he did nothing but breathe, letting the rhythm of the room—Clyde’s room—set the tempo of a heart he had not wished to attend to.
He would be the Archduke they wanted. He had said it aloud once before, sharp as a blade; now he let the words settle into the hollow where grief had been lodged.
The thought was simple and terrible: authority without apology.
Expectation worn not as a chain but as armour.
He would learn to move through the halls and the councils with the same lethal calm he had shown in the chapel that morning—unmoved, unbending, more dangerous for the fact he never let them see how the steel had been forged.
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.