Chapter 10 #2
The air changed around him, just slightly, like the mountain recognized his grief and made room for it.
I stared at him, and for a moment I didn’t have anything smart to say. Which was rare. A personal failing, really.
Because I understood that kind of stubbornness. The kind that didn’t fix the loss but at least gave you something to hold. Something solid when the rest of your life had turned liquid and impossible.
I took a slow step toward the table, eyes locked on the comb lying there like it might bite me if I breathed wrong.
“Where is she?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. I wanted to hear him say it.
“They took her,” he said. “Icespire.”
My chest tightened. “They captured her?”
Valen’s eyes lifted to mine.
That was my mistake.
Because there was something in his gaze that did not belong to a villain.
It belonged to a son.
A boy.
A person who had once begged.
“They stole her. She was… unwell. Her mind slipped in and out like a candle fighting wind.” He went very still, like the memory had hands. “My father wanted her here. Not in the queen’s quarters. Not where anyone could see.” His voice dropped with old disgust. “Hidden away. Like a shameful secret.”
Valen’s gaze fixed on nothing at all. “In the end, she chose her own exit.” The words were flat, controlled, but something in them splintered anyway. “That was the only choice he couldn’t rip from her hands.”
He inhaled once, slow and punishing. “We prepared her for the pyre. We washed the blood away. We wrapped her in an ashcloth. We did what Ashenveil does when grief is all you have left.”
His eyes burned when they met mine.
“And then she was gone.”
His mouth curved, humorless. “Stolen from her bed like she was nothing more than a relic someone wanted to claim.”
A beat.
“My mother was powerful,” he said, quieter. “An Auracrafter.”
The word didn’t come out clean. It sounded like reverence dragged through rage, like it hurt him to name it and he did it anyway.
“She could bend emotion like smoke,” Valen continued, eyes fixed somewhere past me, past the room, like he was seeing her instead of the walls. “Project it. Drown a room in calm or panic with a thought. Make soldiers drop their blades. Make kings doubt themselves.”
He paused.
“My father saw that power and decided it belonged to him,” he said, voice low and flat, like he’d said the sentence too many times in his own head. “Not her.”
A cold prickle ran under my skin, despite the heat pressing in from every side. Because I knew that kind of story. Different kingdom. Same language. The way men talked about magic like it was currency. Like it was a weapon to be stored and spent.
“Resource,” I murmured before I could stop myself.
Valen’s gaze snapped to mine.
“Exactly,” he said.
The firelight caught the edges of his eyes, making them look almost feral. Not anger. Not quite. Something controlled and ugly underneath.
“She wasn’t a person to him. She was leverage,” Valen continued. “A tool he could use to keep his court obedient. His enemies uncertain. His allies loyal.”
My stomach tightened. “So he made her do it.”
Valen exhaled through his nose, a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “He made her perform.”
The word was bitter.
Like he hated that it was the closest thing to what it really had been.
“Auracrafting comes at a cost,” he said, and the room felt like it leaned closer to listen. “It isn’t harmless. It isn’t just influence.” His gaze dropped to the floor, then lifted again, steady and bleak. “It feeds on the one wielding it.”
I swallowed. “How?”
Valen’s mouth tightened, and for a second he looked older than he should have. Like grief had been sitting on his shoulders for years and he’d simply learned to carry it without complaint.
“It takes pieces,” he said. “Bit by bit. Every time she flooded a room with calm, she had to swallow her own panic. Every time she forced courage into someone else’s chest, she had to bury her fear until it had nowhere to go.”
My throat went tight, my ribs aching with something I didn’t want to name.
“And if she pushed too far,” he added quietly, “it took more than pieces.”
I held his gaze. “What did it take?”
Valen’s voice dropped, rough at the edges. “Her.”
Silence settled between us.
Not the comfortable kind. The kind that pressed at your lungs until you either spoke or broke.
I stared at the pristine room again. The bed was made too neatly. The comb left out like she might come back.
Untouched.
Not because it was sacred.
Because it was all he had.
“So your father…” I started.
The heat in the room felt suddenly more dangerous. “He used her until there was nothing left that was her.”
My stomach turned.
I forced a breath through my nose, steadying myself, because my voice was trying to go soft, and I refused to give him that. “And you expect me to believe you’re any different?”
Valen looked at me, calm and cutting. “I didn’t say I was different.”
That answer hit harder than a denial would have.
Then he stepped closer, not enough to trap me, but enough that his presence filled my senses again. Enough that I could hear the quiet control in every breath he took.
“I learned from him,” Valen said. “I learned what power does to people when you treat them like tools.”
His gaze dropped briefly to my mouth, then back to my eyes, deliberate and unhurried.
“And I learned what it costs,” he finished, “when the tool breaks.”
I thought about what he said for a moment, turning it over in my head like a blade I didn’t want to touch. “So in life, your father… used her. And in death…”
My throat tightened. Because I already knew the rest. I’d lived in a kingdom built on it. A land that didn’t just bury its powerful, it kept them.
Valen’s expression didn’t change, but something in his eyes went colder.
“In death,” he said, “she served Icespire.”
The words landed like a verdict.
Not grief. Not remembrance.
Duty. Theft. A final extraction.
I understood with a sick twist in my stomach that he didn’t just hate what his father did to her.
He hated that even death hadn’t freed her.
My stomach turned violently.
“My father was a king. An abuser,” he said.
The sentence landed without ceremony. No performance. No warning.
My mind didn’t jump to glittering courts and jeweled queens, because I didn’t have a lifetime of ballrooms to pull from.
I had ice. Stone. Silence. Aeliana’s hands covered in frost as she laid wreaths on the dead.
I had spent most of my life in a crypt where the only “royalty” I ever served were corpses sealed into blocks of ice.
The few months I’d had in Emberfall had been enough to teach me what court really was. Not romance. Not music. Not elegance.
A hungry room full of people smiling while they measured you.
But even that had been brief. A strange, sunlit nightmare I’d been thrown into like a joke the universe told at my expense.
My real education had been colder.
It was what happened when you took a girl who had survived by being invisible and you shoved her into a role meant to be watched.
Me, who had spent years speaking to dead men’s tombs like they were friends, suddenly expected to sit still and act grateful while royals and councils decided where my body belonged.
And then there was the part I didn’t like to think about. The part that still felt like bile in my throat.
The marriage.
The word was too clean for what it was.
I wasn’t a bride. I wasn’t chosen. I wasn’t loved.
I was assigned.
A concubine. A pretty title for a woman you could use without calling it violence.
My hands went numb.
I stood there staring at the comb on the table, the neatness of it, the quiet devotion of it, and for the first time since entering Ashenveil, I understood something about Valen that made my skin feel wrong.
Not because it softened him.
Because it explained him.
Because I knew what it was to have your life treated like a resource. To be placed somewhere you didn’t belong and told it was destiny. To be trapped under a role you never asked for, then punished when you choked on it.
In Icespire, they buried you alive in duty and called it honor.
In Emberfall, they dressed the cage in sunlight and called it alliance.
In Ashenveil, they didn’t bother pretending. They just locked the door and dared you to survive it.
Valen had been raised by a man who could call himself king and still be rotten to the core.
I had been raised by a kingdom that didn’t even remember my name unless it needed something.
Different worlds. Same cruelty.
My voice came out rougher than I meant it to. “She must have hated him.”
Valen’s gaze lifted to mine. Steady. Unflinching.
“Yes,” he said.
I swallowed once, hard. “But she stayed anyway.”
His jaw flexed. “She endured.”
That word hit like cold water.
Endured.
The same word they’d used about the crypt. About exile. About the dead. As if enduring was a virtue instead of a slow kind of dying.
He was not cruel because it entertained him.
He was cruel because tenderness had cost him everything.
I stared back at the comb. “Why are you showing me this?”