Chapter 25
Chapter
Twenty-Five
Elara
Vale is staring at me again.
I can feel it the way you feel the sun on the side of your face: warm, persistent, entirely too focused for a man who should be watching his eldest daughter walk down the aisle.
But no. He’s gazing at the side of my head with the rapt attention of someone who’s just discovered something extraordinary.
“What?” I whisper, keeping my eyes on the chapel doors where Maren is about to appear.
His fingers find the strand before I can stop him. He lifts it from behind my ear and holds it in the faint chapel light with the reverence of a man examining a relic.
“Another one,” he murmurs, his mouth curving. “White like the bark of a birch.”
“Put it back.”
“I am not done admiring it.”
“You’re being strange.”
“I’m being mesmerized.” He tucks the strand back into place, his fingertips lingering at my temple, tracing the fine lines that fan out from the corner of my eye. “Do you know what these are?”
“Wrinkles, Vale. They’re wrinkles.”
“Evidence,” he corrects softly, his thumb following a crease that deepens when I squint.
“That you laughed too hard at supper last week. That you frown in your sleep.” His touch drifts to the corner of my mouth, where the skin creases more than it once did.
“That you’ve spent twenty years smiling at me when I don’t deserve it. ”
Something warm and familiar turns over in my chest. He does this often, mapping the changes in my face with a tenderness that should feel humbling and instead feels like worship.
Every new line, every shift in the landscape of my body, he discovers and registers as though it’s a gift being unwrapped slowly over decades.
The elongated, pale lines on my hips from three pregnancies?
He traces them in bed like roads on a map, asking which child left which one.
The silver in my hair? He finds each new strand with the delight of a boy finding coins in a fountain.
The softness that settled around my waist after our youngest?
He wraps his arms around it every night as though it’s the only shape he ever wanted to hold.
My husband looks at me as though I’m the most exquisite thing he’s ever seen. “Extraordinary.”
“You’re missing the wedding,” I murmur, nodding toward the altar.
“I’m attending the wedding. I’m simply prioritizing which view deserves my attention right now.”
“How does the queen’s husband still look so young?” murmurs some lady in a pew behind us. “Must be years of good living.”
I press my lips together to smother the laugh that threatens to ruin the ceremony. If only the woman knew what climbs into bed beside me every night. What comes out when the doors are locked and the family is shut away from gossip and minds that couldn’t fathom how the Reign of Rot ended.
Granted, having a perpetually handsome husband during official events has its benefits. Even if the truth behind the glamor would send the entire chapel screaming into the courtyard.
On Vale’s lap, Edmund fusses.
Our youngest is barely two. A late and deeply unexpected addition who arrived with the same furious wail as his sister and has maintained that volume ever since. He squirms against Vale’s chest, one chubby fist tangling in the collar of his father’s forest-green vest.
“Shh.” Vale bounces him with the practiced, absent rhythm of a man who has done this three times now and still hasn’t quite mastered it.
Edmund responds by shoving his fingers into Vale’s mouth. “Papa, leave!”
Vale removes the chubby fingers with the dignity of a god being publicly humiliated by a toddler. “Your son is bored.”
“He’s your son when he’s difficult.”
“He’s always difficult.”
“Wonder where he gets that from…”
Vale rolls his eyes. “Oh, I know the answer to that.”
Beside me, Rowan shifts in his seat. Eighteen, tall, dark-haired like his father but built like my side of the family—broad-shouldered, sturdy, the frame of a young man who spent his childhood helping the groundskeeper dig fence posts and haul stone.
He doesn’t fidget out of boredom. He fidgets because sitting still in formal clothes makes him itch, and I know this because I still feel this way after two decades of being queen.
He’ll be king one day.
Not that Maren couldn't be queen; she certainly could. Brilliantly so, and everyone knows it. But when the question was put to her at sixteen, my eldest daughter looked at the uncursed, perfectly normal crown on my head, looked at me, and said, “No, thank you. I’ve seen what that thing does to a person’s privacy. ”
And so…it falls to Rowan. Kind. Steady. Occasionally too earnest for his own good—qualities that will make him a great king, I’m sure of it.
“Stop fidgeting,” I murmur, nudging his shoulder.
He straightens, tugging at his collar. “The lace is itchy.”
“Rough cotton is worse.” I keep my voice low, my eyes on the altar where the priest is arranging candles.
“Your grandfather shoveled dirt for a living, Rowan. Your grandmother still knits her own stockings. Where we come from, nothing was given. Everything was dug out of the ground with blistered hands. They ache for days, whereas the lace will only itch for another hour.”
Rowan glances at me, the fidgeting pausing. He has Vale’s eyes—that sharp, searching green—but the way he listens is all his father’s, too. Bored after all, perhaps.
“Once you wear that crown,” I continue, “you remember the people who dig. The ones who shovel and haul and bury their dead with shaking hands. Their hardships. The dirt they stand in.”
“Like you did,” he says low.
“Like I still do.” My mouth curves. “I still know my way around a grave. Though my knees have strong opinions about it now.”
Rowan smiles. A small, real thing that softens the serious set of his jaw. “And if I forget?”
I lean closer, bumping my shoulder against his. “Then your father will remind you. Death runs in this family, Rowan. He’ll never let you forget.”
His gaze drifts to Vale, who is currently extracting Edmund’s fingers from his nose with an expression of regal suffering. Something warm and knowing passes through Rowan’s eyes.
He doesn’t flinch at the reference—none of our children do.
They grew up with a father who sometimes forgot to wear his human face at the breakfast table, who occasionally walked through walls when he was distracted, and who once terrified a palace cook so badly she quit on the spot when he materialized in the pantry looking for biscuits.
They know what he is.
They love him dearly.
Perhaps that’s his greatest lesson, even more than mine. That the thing the world fears most can sit in a chapel pew, bouncing a toddler on his knee, crying at his daughter’s wedding, and still be the best father I’ve ever seen.
The doors open.
Maren steps through.
Ivory silk wraps her, simple and clean, her dark hair pinned in the same practical twist I wore the day I married her father. No jewels. No elaborate braids. Just Maren, plain and simple.
Beside me, Vale goes still, wearing an expression so full it could flood the chapel. His hand finds mine on the pew between us. His fingers lace through mine—warm, steady, trembling just slightly—and squeeze.
I squeeze back.
“She’s so beautiful,” he whispers, his voice cracking at the seams. “She looks like you.” He turns to take me in, and the green of his eyes is bright, impossibly bright, swimming with decades of moments exactly like this one. “Thank you.”
“What for?”
His thumb traces across my knuckle, slow and deliberate, the way he’s done a thousand times in a thousand quiet moments across twenty years. “For making me choose this.”
The organ swells. Maren reaches the altar. Edmund shrieks with delight at something only toddlers can see, and Rowan leans forward in his seat, watching his sister with the quiet, steady attention of a boy who’s already learning how to hold the weight of things that matter.
I rest my head against Vale’s shoulder and watch our daughter begin her life. This. All of this. The perfect happy ending.
Worth every grain of sand.