Chapter 1 #3
“And what was it like? Not the nickname, but the last campaign. The battle over the northern straits,” Elara asked.
“Cold,” I said.
“Don’t be so vague! Or else I will throw this bread at you,” she said pleasantly.
So I told her. Not the polished version people expected after a ceremony like that.
I told her the honest version, the fog, the cold, the way a pegasus reads a battle before you do, and you learn to trust that instinct over your own eyes.
I told her about the wind coming off the northern ice shelf and what it does to your hands when you’ve been in the air for four hours and you still need to draw and hold.
She listened the way people rarely listen, leaning forward, elbows on the table, completely still.
Aurelia listened too, differently. She already knew what the war had cost. I could see it in the way she held her wine glass, the slight weight behind her eyes when I mentioned casualty numbers. She didn’t flinch from it. She just held it.
When I told them I was going home, Elara looked genuinely sad. “Home,” she repeated, like the word didn’t fit my face.
“Yes,” I said. “Our family farm. It’s been six years.” I paused. “It’s a small village island. Nothing like this.”
“That sounds wonderful,” Aurelia said, and she meant it. She set her glass down and looked at me steadily. “You’ve earned ordinary.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I looked at the candles.
Elara rested her chin on her hand. “Will you take your pegasus?”
“He goes where I go.”
She smiled, slow and warm. “Good,” she said, like that settled something important.
The meal wound down the way good meals do, gradually, no one in any hurry.
Outside the windows, the last light had gone and the floating islands were scattered across the dark like distant lanterns.
Aurelia refilled my glass herself rather than calling for a servant to do it.
When I looked up to thank her, she was already watching me with an expression I couldn’t entirely name.
And I thought about it. I thought about it longer than I should have.
* * *
Elara said goodnight somewhere between the dessert and the door, kissing her mother’s cheek and giving me a look that was both warm and conspiratorial. “I hope we’ll see each other again.”
“We probably will.”
She just smiled, but I caught something bittersweet behind that smile. Then she disappeared down the corridor. Then it was just the two of us, and the queen led me out to the gardens.
The gardens at night were something no dispatch had ever mentioned.
White stone paths wound between flowering terraces and low sculpted hedges, and below the balustrade on the garden’s far edge, you could see the floating islands of Eden.
The moon was up, full and cold, throwing silver across everything.
Aurelia walked beside me without her court posture, or maybe she still had it and it just looked different when there was no one watching.
The gold at her throat caught the light.
Her hair moved with the high-altitude wind.
Neither of us spoke for a while. That in itself was unusual. I’d spent six years in the company of officers who treated silence like an enemy to be killed on contact. She just walked, hands clasped loosely at her waist, and looked out at the dark between the islands.
“It doesn’t feel the way I thought it would,” she said finally.
“Peace?”
“Peace.” She said the word like she was still getting used to the shape of it. “I imagined relief. I imagined putting something down and feeling the weight leave my hands. Instead I keep reaching for it.” She paused. “Some mornings I wake up and spend three full seconds waiting for the bad news.”
I looked out at the islands. “That doesn’t go away quickly,” I said. “If it goes away at all.”
She turned to look at me. In the moonlight, her face was very clear and very still. “Does it not, for you?”
“Six years is a long time to train yourself to expect the worst,” I said. “My body hasn’t gotten the letter yet.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she nodded, slowly, like I’d confirmed something she already suspected but hadn’t wanted to say aloud herself.
We reached the far end of the garden, where the balustrade curved outward over open air and you could see three separate islands below, their own lights glittering against the dark. She rested her forearms on the stone and looked down.
“My father used to bring me out here,” she said. “When I was very young. He’d point to each island and tell me its name, its history, who farmed it, what it produced.” She paused. “He did that with me. Not with my brother.”
She said it without bitterness, but the fact of it sat there anyway.
“My father saw it early,” she continued.
“What the kingdom needed. What I might be able to give it. He started involving me in council meetings when I was sixteen. By the time I was thirty I was managing disputes that should have gone to him, but his health was failing and he trusted me more than he trusted his own ministers.” She looked at her hands on the balustrade.
“Aldren, my brother, watched all of it. He counted every responsibility our father gave me and called it theft.”
I didn’t say anything. She wasn’t asking me to.
“When my father died, I wasn’t surprised that my brother refused the coronation.
I’d been waiting for it the way you wait for weather you can see building on the horizon.
But knowing it’s coming and living through it are different things.
” She straightened and looked out at the dark again.
“He had good men on his side. Men who genuinely believed he was right, who weren’t cruel, who simply had a different idea of how a kingdom should be ordered.
I had to kill some of those men. I had to send boys like you to kill them.
” She turned to look at me directly. “Boys. That’s what I keep thinking about.
How many of them were twenty when the war started.
Twenty-one. How many of them were twenty-six. ”
I was twenty when the war started, but I didn’t say it. She knew.
“The kingdom they’ll rebuild is the one I owe them,” she said. “Every road, every trade agreement, every treaty I spend a week negotiating. That’s the debt.”
“It’s a large debt,” I said.
“It is.” She didn’t make it sound like a complaint. She made it sound like the most important thing she’d ever decided.
We walked back along the path. She talked about the rebuilding, the new trade routes opening between the outer islands, the infrastructure that had crumbled during the war and was only now being repaired.
She talked about Elara’s future, the kind of queen her daughter might become, and there was something naked in her voice when she said it, a pride she didn’t dress up in royal language.
“I’d like something for myself eventually. I’m not sure I’d know what to do with it. But I’d like it.”
She wasn’t looking at me when she said it. She was watching a pair of distant island lights through the dark below us.
I was watching her.
We stopped near a low flowering hedge, close enough to the balustrade that the wind came through steadily, cool and clean at this altitude.
Her hand rested on the stone near mine, close enough that I was aware of it in the way you become aware of things you’re not supposed to notice. I kept my eyes ahead.
“When do you leave?” she asked.
“Sunrise.”
She absorbed this. “Then I’d like you to come to me before you go,” she said. “Privately. Before the morning staff is up.” She turned to look at me then, and her expression was careful, measured, but her eyes were not. “Will you do that?”
“Yes,” I said. It was the easiest word I’d said all night.
She held my gaze for a moment longer than she needed to, then looked away, back toward the palace. “Good,” she said. “Come.”
I followed her back inside. A servant appeared to escort me to my rooms, and Aurelia said goodnight with the same warm steadiness she’d brought to the entire evening.
But when I was alone and the palace had gone quiet around me, I lay on my back in the dark and stared at the ceiling for a long time, thinking about the way she’d looked out at those islands and said she’d like something for herself, wondering what she truly meant.
I didn’t sleep much.
* * *
The palace at sunrise was a different building.
No servants in the corridors, no sound except the stone settling in the pre-dawn cold and the distant wind off the island’s edge.
I’d slept badly and risen early, dressed in traveling clothes rather than the uniform I’d worn through the ceremony, and the difference felt significant in a way I didn’t bother unpacking.
A single attendant met me at the third corridor junction and led me without speaking to a set of doors I hadn’t seen before, knocked twice, and left.