Chapter 4: A Father's Warning
The gallery’s music had shifted from lively reels to something slower, more languorous. The sweet, mournful pull of a cello seemed to coil around the base of Gareth’s skull, tightening the headache that had begun the moment his father had whispered that final threat. He needed air that didn’t smell of roasted meat and ambition.
He wove through clusters of Novaris courtiers, their silks and laughter feeling like a suffocating mist. He nodded absently at a comment from a minor lord, his eyes scanning the room. He saw King Hoster, deep in amiable conversation with a white-haired archivist. He did not see Aurelia. The absence was a fresh agitation.
A gap in the crowd, a shadowed alcove near the hall’s northern wall. Behind a massive, floor-to-ceiling tapestry depicting the mythic founding of Novaris—some verdant goddess offering a sheaf of wheat to a kneeling knight—was a sliver of space, a pocket of quiet. Gareth shouldered his way behind it, the thick fabric brushing his shoulders, smelling of dust and aged wool.
The music from the gallery muted, became a dull throb. He leaned his head back against cold stone, closing his eyes. In the dark, he saw two things: his father’s fist clenched on white linen, and the faint tremor in Aurelia’s fingers when she took his arm.
The tapestry rustled. The scent changed—old leather, iron, that sharp, aggressive cologne.
Gareth opened his eyes. King Aldric filled the narrow space, blocking the slivers of light from the hall. His expression was not one of false merriment now. It was pure, distilled contempt.
During a lull in the music, King Aldric corners Gareth behind a heavy tapestry depicting Novaris's founding. "Hoster actually proposed a marriage between you and the princess," Aldric hisses, his voice dripping with contempt. "Can you imagine? A Durnish prince wed to a Novarian milkmaid."
The words hung in the dusty air. They were meant to wither, to shame. They ignited something else instead. Gareth’s jaw tightened, and he met his father’s gaze steadily. "She is no milkmaid. And a marriage would secure the treaty without bloodshed."
It was the most direct rebellion he’d ever offered. A statement of alternative fact.
Aldric’s eyes narrowed to slits. The amber vanished into reptilian shadows. "The wolf does not wed the sheep," he snarled, his voice a low, vicious thing. In one brutal motion, he grabbed Gareth’s wrist, his fingers digging into the tendons with practiced, painful precision. "We came here to conquer, not to breed with the livestock. Remember that, or I will remind you in a way that leaves scars."
The grip was crushing. It was the same hand that had taught him to hold a sword, that had backhanded him for hesitating during his first kill at sixteen. The threat was not idle. The scars it referenced weren’t metaphorical; Gareth carried a fine, white line across his ribs from a ‘lesson’ in obedience years ago.
He releases him with a shove, striding back into the light.
The tapestry swung shut, leaving Gareth in near darkness. The ache in his wrist pulsed in time with his heartbeat. He unclenched his fists, fingers stiff. He remained in the shadows, his fists clenched, the echo of his father's words warring with the memory of Aurelia's hand on his thigh.
Livestock. Milkmaid. The ugly, reductive sounds clanged against the quiet intelligence in her hazel eyes, the strategic precision of her mind over the river maps, the shocking, quiet bravery of her touch beneath the table. The warmth of her. The scent of her—like parchment and lavender, not dung and straw.
Conquest was a clean, if brutal, equation. Seize, hold, administer. This was a muddle. This was his father’s clear, vicious path colliding with a sudden, vertiginous chasm of a different future. A future with a woman who looked at him not as a weapon, but as a man. A future that promised not the grim silence of a subjugated hall, but the lively debate of a library.
The music swelled again in the hall beyond. A waltz.
Gareth pushed himself off the wall. He didn’t re-enter the main banquet hall. He moved along the periphery, behind the tapestries and pillars, a shadow with a purpose.