Broken Glass
COLSAR
As the Ship Departs
By the time Rathmor’s towers rose against the horizon, exhaustion had ground him down to something stripped and elemental, a creature moving on will alone.
He passed through the gates without slowing, and though guards bowed and courtiers drew back along the streets, no one dared step into his path or risk the weight of his attention.
“Where is my wife?” he asked the first servant he encountered, his voice low but carrying easily in the hush that followed him.
The girl’s lips parted as though an answer might form, yet whatever courage she possessed dissolved under him, and silence held.
Her chambers were the first door he forced open. The bed was made too carefully, the curtains drawn back in a way that tried too hard to suggest routine. The air carried no warmth, no trace of her presence. The room felt prepared rather than lived in, as if absence itself had been arranged.
He crossed into his own chambers next, already knowing what he would find and refusing to believe it until he saw it. Empty. The realization came as cold, spreading slowly from spine to chest until even the wound in his side felt distant and irrelevant.
He turned and walked toward Sevrin’s rooms without increasing his pace. Servants pressed themselves into the walls as he passed. No one tried to stop him, no one offered words, and the quiet grew thicker with every step. He did not knock. The door gave beneath his boot and crashed inward.
Sevrin sat behind his desk with a half-emptied glass at his elbow, cloak discarded, the weight of drink still softening his posture.
His shirt lay discarded across the floor near the hearth, sleeves twisted where it had been pulled off without patience.
His chest was bare, flushed from drink. Several decanters stood open around him, one overturned, wine seeping slowly across the wood.
He lifted his head slowly. “Brother,” he said.
Colsar remained near the threshold. “Where,” he asked, voice low and contained, “is my wife?”
Sevrin frowned faintly, as though the question were misplaced. “In her chambers,” he said. “She does not leave before dinner.” He lifted his head slowly, blinking as if the moment might rearrange itself into something less dangerous.
Before Colsar could move, the door behind him opened again and a figure stumbled across the threshold.
Maridale collapsed to her knees, tears already soaking the front of her gown, her hands shaking as though her body could not decide whether to plead or flee.
“Thank everything you’ve returned!” she cried, voice breaking with relief.
Colsar did not look at her at first. His focus remained on Sevrin, as if he refused to let him breathe around the truth.
“Where is she?” he asked, each word pulled through restraint.
Maridale swallowed hard. “After the King locked the princess in his chambers, Lady Yvara took her away under false pretenses.”
Sevrin’s head turned toward her in a sudden, jerking motion.
“She led her away,” Maridale continued, voice breaking, “and when her Highness returned she could barely walk. One eye swollen. Burns along her arms. Bruises beneath her sleeves.”
Maridale’s voice trembled. “And her leg.” She burst into tears.
Colsar did not move, but something in the room tightened, the air pulling thin around him.
Sevrin shifted in his chair, the movement small but unsteady, his hand tightening around the stem of his glass.
“What about her leg?” Colsar asked, eyes closed.
“I changed her dressings this morning,” Maridale sniffled. “By the look of it, she was stabbed several times. I stopped counting at nine because she was screaming.”
Sevrin’s grip tightened further, the glass creaking faintly in his hand.
She swallowed hard. “She would not say what was done, only that she had endured what she had to in order to leave alive.”
The room felt smaller, as if the walls had drawn nearer to contain what could not be undone.
“She came to you, King Rathmor,” Maridale said, turning fully toward the King now, grief hardening into accusation. “She begged for your help. We heard it from the corridor. She asked for protection.”
“That was—” He stopped. Swallowed. “That was this morning.”
“No, Majesty,” Maridale said, voice trembling but cold. “That was yesterday.”
Sevrin blinked once. Then again.
“You told her to get out.”
Silence filled the space where explanation should have been, heavy enough to press against lungs.
“We packed her belongings ourselves,” Maridale said more quietly. “She did not wish to go, but she could not remain. She was no longer safe here. So this morning she went to the docks, said she was waiting for a Vaelor ship.”
Colsar closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again, as if he could force the palace to re-form around a different reality and found it stubbornly unchanged.
“And that was not the worst of it,” Maridale whispered.
His chest tightened. He did not want to ask, but he could not refuse the truth. “What,” he said carefully, “was worse?”
Maridale lifted her head, and whatever composure she had managed to hold fractured completely. “Your Highness,” she whispered. “She is with child.”
The words entered him slowly, like air drawn into lungs that had forgotten how to breathe, and then all at once they were everywhere, filling him until he could not tell where grief ended and fury began.
With child. He saw her as she had been the morning he left, her fingers tangled in his collar as if she could anchor him by touch alone.
He saw her stealing bites of strawberry cake and pretending she did not want more.
He saw her arguing with him in doorways, fierce and luminous and alive, and then the image twisted into something deeper, something unbearable, because now there was a life inside her that belonged to them both.
“It is the main reason she left, Highness. The pregnancy is already at risk. The child would not survive another attack like this.” She glared at Sevrin. “Or starvation.”
Maridale extended a folded letter toward him with trembling hands.
“She asked me to give you this,” she said. “And to say one word.”
He took it.
“Wings.”
The air in the chamber tightened as something older than anger rose without restraint. The torches guttered low, and the windowpanes began to tremble within their frames as if the palace itself recognized a predator waking.
Sevrin’s breathing shortened.
Colsar moved forward until there was almost nothing between them, close enough that Sevrin could feel consequence gathering.
“I should kill you,” Colsar said quietly. “I should tear this palace apart around you and let the court decide what remains.”
Sevrin attempted to speak, but the pressure in the room crushed the words before they could form, forcing them back into his throat with humiliating ease.
“But death,” Colsar continued, voice calm and absolute, “would be mercy.”
He remained there, unmoving, letting the King understand the shape of what he had invited.
“When I find my wife,” he said, and the words sounded less like promise than law, “and when I end every man and woman who laid a hand on her, including your precious Yvara, the Threns will not frighten you.”
His tone lowered further, controlled and merciless.
“The undead will feel like an inconvenience.”
He drew closer, making the truth unavoidable.
“I am coming for your throne.”
Then he shifted.
Glass burst outward as he drove through the window and into the night, the palace shuddering in his wake as he ran for the docks.