Chapter 60- Sleepless Nights
Sleep had become a myth.
Not the kind men told children to make darkness less frightening, but the kind exhausted soldiers spoke of around dying fires after three nights without rest, when their eyes burned and their hands shook and the world began to blur at the edges.
I remembered sleep as a thing that belonged to other people.
Servants. Stable boys. Ministers useless enough to believe tomorrow would wait politely for them.
Men with wives beside them. Men whose children were not growing inside a woman someone had tried to kill with flowers.
Men who could close their eyes without seeing white blossoms tucked between roses and my wife's thin fingers brushing over them with trust.
I lay in our bed and stared at the ceiling.
The room was dark except for the low fire near the hearth and the thin light spilling beneath the nursery door.
Beyond that door sat the nursery I had spent days preparing like a fool trying to build certainty out of carved wood, soft blankets, and locks.
The cradle waited in darkness. The painted birds slept on the walls.
The ridiculous stuffed rabbit Veronica had placed inside still sat there because I had not decided whether removing it would insult her or improve the room.
Ophelia would have laughed at me.
The thought entered quietly and hurt immediately.
I turned my head toward her side of the bed.
Empty.
Perfectly arranged.
Cold.
The pillows held no scent of her anymore because servants had changed the linens before I removed nearly all access to the room.
I hated them for it, then hated myself because they had only obeyed the standards Ophelia herself would have expected.
Clean sheets. Fresh blankets. Order in a room pretending its mistress still occupied it.
The false shape beneath the covers had been removed for the night.
There was no need to perform for an audience when no one was allowed inside.
Without the lie, the bed looked too large.
Worry lay beside me instead.
It had become my constant companion. More faithful than sleep.
More patient than ministers. More intimate than the crown.
It pressed its weight against my chest until breathing became a task I had to remember how to perform.
It sat with me in councils. Followed me through corridors.
Stood behind my shoulder while I questioned florists, nobles, servants, guards, maids, physicians, gardeners, delivery boys, storage clerks, and every trembling fool whose hands had come anywhere near the flowers that had decorated my wife's sickness like a funeral prepared too early.
Five days.
Five days since Veronica shattered a vase and found death hidden inside sympathy.
Five days since the name conium maculatum became less a plant and more a sentence carved into my skull.
Poison hemlock.
A pretty thing.
Of course it was pretty.
The physicians had explained it in clipped, nervous voices while I stood over them and considered how many men had died throughout history because something lethal had the audacity to resemble something harmless.
Every part of the plant carried poison. Root.
Stem. leaf. flower. seed. It did not require theatrical preparation to become dangerous.
It already was. Its leaves could be mistaken by the careless for common herbs.
Its small white clusters resembled harmless wildflowers used to soften arrangements.
It did not announce itself with black petals or a bitter odor strong enough to warn the innocent away. It entered rooms by looking ordinary.
That was what made it perfect.
Conium attacked the body like a thief cutting ropes one by one.
Dizziness first, perhaps. Sweating. Weakness.
Nausea. Burning in the throat if touched, swallowed, or transferred where the body was already wounded.
Tremors. Confusion. Slowed breath. Failing muscles.
A collapse that could resemble exhaustion if one was already ill enough for everyone to expect deterioration.
With enough exposure, the lungs could simply forget their duty.
A person might remain conscious while the body stopped obeying.
A cruel poison. A quiet one. One that could slip through cracked skin, bleeding gums, small cuts from thorns, the raw places illness had already opened across my wife's body.
My wife had been covered in doors.
Bruises. Needle marks. Cracked lips. A throat burning so badly even water made her flinch.
Hands too thin and fragile, skin splitting where dryness and weakness made even gentle tasks dangerous.
She had arranged those flowers herself because it made her smile.
She had touched the stems. Removed old petals.
Trimmed ends. Brushed leaves aside. Pricked her finger on thorns and laughed when I scowled at the blood.
Then she had apologized because the mess bothered me, when the only thing bothering me had been how relieved I was to see her doing anything that looked like living.
I had watched her poison herself.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her by the window with pale light on her face and death between her fingers.
I sat up before the ceiling could become unbearable and swung my legs over the side of the bed. The stone floor was cold beneath my feet.
I dragged one hand down my face.
The scarred side pulled unpleasantly.
My eye ached.
I ignored it.
On the desk across the chamber, documents waited in stacks too high to be sane.
Flower delivery records. Storage logs. Names of noble houses who sent bouquets.
Lists of maids assigned to carry them from the storage room.
Times of arrival. Times of placement. Notes from Veronica.
Notes from the physicians. Notes from Nathaniel, whose handwriting remained annoyingly calm even while describing possible murder routes.
Every bouquet sent to Ophelia had come through the same florist. That, at least, should have narrowed matters.
It did not narrow them enough.
The florist delivered dozens of arrangements directly to the palace storage area because the noble houses ordered through him to appear coordinated, tasteful, and sufficiently concerned for their queen.
From there, the bouquets were sorted, trimmed, transferred into palace vases, and later carried by maids, servants, or, on better days, taken by Ophelia herself because she liked arranging them.
The conium had not been present in every bouquet.
That would have been too easy. It appeared in some.
Enough to weaken. Enough to relapse. Enough to confuse.
Enough to make improvement look temporary and decline look natural.
Someone tampered with them in storage.
Someone who understood timing.
Someone who understood her habits.
Someone who knew the room well enough to add poison where it would be noticed by no one and touched by the only person who should have been protected from everything.
Now the flower storage room was guarded like a treasury.
Guards verified everyone before entry and again upon exit.
Hands inspected. Sleeves checked. Aprons searched.
Tools counted. Vases examined. Every stem separated.
Every ribbon unwound. Every card read, copied, sealed.
Every arrangement delivered to the palace now passed through more scrutiny than visiting monarchs, which would have been amusing if I had any humor left that did not taste like blood.
Still, the timing had become another blade.
Ophelia's due date approached.
The palace would drown in flowers when word spread that the heir had been born.
Nobles who had sent bouquets in illness would send entire gardens in celebration.
Houses eager for favor would compete in extravagance.
Foreign envoys would send rare blooms. Old allies would send symbolic arrangements.
Courtiers would send roses because imagination was a burden most of them refused to carry.
The storage room would overflow. Servants would multiply.
Deliveries would come at all hours. The castle would become fragrant, crowded, busy, emotional, careless.
A perfect battlefield.
I could not keep my wife hidden forever. That truth had begun stalking me more violently than worry. I had promised to bring her home. I would bring her home.
The problem was that I was out of time.
People had started noticing.
Not the truth. Not yet. If anyone outside the smallest circle knew Ophelia had left the palace, panic would no longer be manageable.
But suspicion had begun moving through the walls like damp.
It started with the servants, as most truths did.
A maid asked whether Her Majesty has finished reviewing the ledger for kitchen winter storage.
Then came a steward with menu approvals.
Then a physician with intake reports. Then the head of lower household accounts.
Then three kitchen officials, two guest-wing coordinators, a gardener, a woman whose title I still did not understand but whose expression suggested she personally held the castle together with thread and righteous anger, and a boy no older than sixteen asking who would do the inspection for the stores because apparently the kitchen head could not sign off on it without the queen's notes from the previous month.
At first, none of it made sense.
Then the castle began falling apart.
Walls did not crumble. Fires did not spread.
People did not riot in the halls. Instead, the palace lost rhythm.
Meals arrived late to the wrong guests. Two noble families were placed too close together despite a feud old enough to have grandchildren.
A shipment of dried fruit was rejected because no one could find the queen's note authorizing the substitute supplier.
Guards argued over rotated posts because Ophelia had apparently adjusted them around staff illness, pregnancy, kitchen deliveries, and one noblewoman's habit of wandering at dawn to spy on people.
The palace became a machine missing a gear no one had realized was central until the teeth began grinding.
I had known Ophelia managed part of the castle.
I had given her space to do it.
That had been my mistake.
Not the space.
Never that.
My mistake was thinking space meant distance from importance.
I had seen her with ledgers. Heard reports delivered to her.
Watched servants relax when she answered questions with gentle certainty.
I knew she worked. I knew she cared. I knew the household adored her with a devotion that should have alarmed me sooner.
But I had not understood the scale of what she carried because she carried it quietly.
Ophelia did not make competence loud. She did not leave rooms smelling of conquest. She simply noticed what everyone else missed and arranged the world so people stopped tripping over it.
Now they were tripping.
Constantly.
And they were beginning to blame me.
The physicians were the boldest, which surprised me until I remembered they had spent months defying death in my wife's room and had perhaps grown suicidal from proximity.
They brought reports she usually reviewed.
I told them she was too tired to look through them.
They accepted that once. Twice. By the third day, one of them nearly lost his head.
He stood before my desk, pale and shaking, clutching the documents so tightly the edges bent beneath his fingers.
He was not brave. That was what saved him.
Brave men irritated me. This man was terrified and spoke anyway because his loyalty to Ophelia had finally outweighed his fear of me.
There was value in that. Inconvenient value, but value nonetheless.
I looked at him.
He swallowed.
"Your Majesty," he said, voice cracking, "forgive me, but she would not refuse reports concerning her own condition for five consecutive days. She would ask questions. She would correct us. She would argue if we reduced her broth without explaining why."
"She is resting," I said.
He lowered his head. Then, foolishly, impossibly, he whispered, "what did you do to her.. is she okay?"
The blade was in my hand before thought fully formed.
He froze.
Levi, standing near the wall, closed his eyes as though exhausted by everyone involved.
I did not kill the physician.
Ophelia would have disliked that.
Instead, I let the silence punish him until sweat gathered at his temple and his knees looked uncertain.
Then I said, "Leave."
He left.
Quickly.
Nobles soon started demanding audiences.
They dressed demands as concern, which made them more irritating.
Lady Merrow insisted she needed the queen's confirmation regarding charitable winter distributions because Her Majesty had personally altered the allotments after last year's shortages.
Lord Tavin claimed the nursery staff selection required final approval because no one trusted anyone else to choose wet nurses without political sabotage.
Three court ladies requested to sit with her because "a queen should not suffer alone," which meant they wanted to see whether she was dying.
The servants were less bold but more dangerous because fear made them curious.
They asked questions with lowered eyes. Is Her Majesty sleeping?
Did Her Majesty eat? Should the east garden flowers still be trimmed?
Would Her Majesty prefer the new fruit preserves stored separately?
Did Her Majesty approve the revised poultry order?
Did Her Majesty want the children's charity fabric sent now or after the frost?
I answered none of it well.
They retreated each time before I lost patience, fleeing like frightened animals from a room full of fire.
Then they returned the next day with different questions because apparently the castle could survive my temper more easily than it could survive without Ophelia's instructions.
I rose from the bed and crossed to the desk.
The documents blurred in the dim firelight.
The issue with being a ruler was simple.
Someone always wanted you dead.
Not sometimes.
Always.
If a ruler forgot that, the world reminded him quickly with steel.
I could not count the number of times someone had tried to stab me, poison me, strangle me, burn me, or arrange my death through intermediaries too cowardly to hold the weapon themselves.
A servant with a knife beneath folded towels.
A noble's bastard son waiting behind a curtain.
A foreign envoy with a ring full of powder.
A soldier who believed killing a tyrant would make him a hero instead of a corpse.
A priest with a sharpened ceremonial pin.
A woman weeping for mercy while reaching beneath her sleeve.
Men came with righteousness. Women came with grief.
Some came for coin. Some for revenge. Some for causes they did not understand well enough to die for.
After a while, the world became a room full of hands.
You learned to watch all of them.
That was why it had always been difficult for me to interact with people the way Ophelia did.
She moved through the world as though conversation itself was not an ambush.
She spoke to servants openly. Asked questions and waited for real answers.
Accepted tea from trembling hands and thanked people as if kindness could be casual.
She could walk through a market and find stories.
She could sit in gardens and make guards forget they were working. She could live among people.
I could not.
Not truly.
No matter how hard I tried.
Elias called me socially awkward, usually with enough delight to make murder feel reasonable.
Unfortunately, he was not wrong. I had never learned the easy way of being around others.
Princes were not raised among people. Not heir princes.
Not princes with enemies before they had adult teeth.
My childhood had been rooms, tutors, maps, guarded courtyards, controlled appearances, meals watched by men who pretended knives were only for cutting meat.
I had my mother for too little time. My father for less than that, though his body remained in the palace longer than his presence did. I had Asher.
Asher made rooms bearable.
Asher made confinement feel like conspiracy instead of prison.
We studied together, trained together, invented games in corridors we were not supposed to run through, whispered beneath blankets when storms shook the windows.
When Elias took us beyond the palace, the world became strange and bright and too large.
Markets. Rivers. Fields. Villages. The ordinary noise of people who did not know every shadow might hide death.
Even then, danger followed us. Guards changed routes. Elias watched rooftops.
Those were adventures to Asher.
To me, they were lessons in exposure.
Then Ophelia told me about her childhood village.
About children she played with. Streams she crossed.
Mud on her skirts. Fruit stolen from trees.
Festivals. Neighbors. Markets where people knew her name not as princess but as a girl who wandered too far and smiled too easily.
For every careful excursion Elias smuggled into my childhood, she had hundreds of memories that belonged to the open air.
She spoke of them with sadness sometimes, but also wonder, as if freedom had once been so ordinary she had not known to hoard it.
I used to sit and listen because I had no matching story to offer.
Only palaces.
Only training.
Only duty.
Only death arriving early and teaching me to keep doors locked inside myself. I understood why she missed walking without fear. I understood why she loved gardens. I understood why being watched constantly had begun to suffocate her but that was the only way i could keep her safe.