Chapter 3: A False Note
The whetstone’s whisper from that night seemed to have etched a new line between them, invisible but palpable as a castle wall. A week later, the invitation to visit the city orphanage, a monthly duty of the Lord and Lady, felt less like a charitable outing and more like a deployment into enemy territory. Her territory. The territory of performance.
The infirmary was a long, narrow room that smelled of stubborn hope and fading sickness. Lavender bundles tied to bedposts battled the tinny scent of blood tonic and damp wool. Pale light from a high, cracked window fell across small forms bundled in thin blankets. Nadine’s stomach tightened. She could handle courtiers. She couldn’t handle this—the unguarded trust in a child’s fever-bright eyes.
“Just a short song,” Kaelan had said, his voice neutral, as they’d walked through the quiet halls. “It… comforts them.”
So she chose the least dangerous thing she could think of. A silly, simple round she and her friends had sung during that first terrifying captivity, to keep their spirits up, to feel human. “The sky is grey, the bread is stale, but we’ll tell a tale of a shining whale…” It was a child’s song, even on Earth. Here, it was just nonsense with a bouncy tune. Safe.
She began by a small bed where a girl with matted braids watched her, solemn. Her voice was clear, deliberately light, painting the ridiculous whale with fins of gold. She moved down the row, the simple melody weaving through the room. A few weak smiles appeared. A boy with a bandaged foot tapped a feeble rhythm against his cot.
Then she reached the toddler.
He was propped on a stack of pillows, his cheeks flushed with returning health, his eyes crinkled with pure, unburdened delight. The song’s silliness tickled him. As she hit the goofy, gurgling sound that was the whale’s call, he erupted. A peal of laughter, high-pitched, unabashed, a sound of pure survival and joy.
It went through her like a shard of glass.
Megan. In the dark of the woods, after the changing had begun but before the sounds stopped being human, there had been a terrible, wet gurgle. A final attempt at a laugh, or a breath, choked by something thick and rising. That sound, that specific, dying vibration, had lived in Nadine’s bones for a year. The toddler’s innocent laughter now touched that exact frequency, that same pitch, and for a heart-stopping second, the two sounds fused in her mind. The joyous and the grotesque, one echoing the other.
Her breath hitched. The next line of the song—“who sailed on a sea of strawberry jam”—died in her throat. The cheerful note cracked, sour and flat, revealing the hollow fear beneath. She froze, the smiling mask slipping, her eyes wide with a terror these children could not understand.
A baritone voice, smooth and steady as deep water, slid beneath her fractured melody before the silence could stretch.
Kaelan.
He stepped beside her, not looking at her, his gaze on the children as he took up the lyric about the jam, his voice warm and sure. He filled the space her voice had abandoned, his harmony weaving around her silent panic, covering it, making it sound intentional, like a playful rest. His hand came to rest on her elbow, his grip firm, grounding. It was more than support; it was an anchor, hauling her back from the precipice of memory.
She shuddered, a full-body tremor she hoped only he could feel. The performance snapped back into place. She leaned into him, letting her shoulder press against his arm, turning her face up with a smile she poured every ounce of false warmth into. Her voice rejoined his, weaker but present, a vine clinging to his sturdy trunk.
They finished the song together. The children clapped, the toddler giggled again—a sound she now flinched from internally but greeted with a wider, more brilliant smile.
“You saved me,” she murmured to Kaelan, her voice a honeyed whisper meant for the matron’s ears. She tilted her head, giggled as if sharing a secret, and brushed a quick, feather-light kiss against his stubbled cheek. His skin was warm. He went very still.
The rest of the visit passed in a blur of her cheerful façade. She distributed honey candies, smoothed blankets, her touch gentle, her laughter frequent. She was the perfect Lady, compassionate and kind, anchored perpetually to her Lord’s side, her hand occasionally finding his arm, her smiles including him in every gesture.
The moment the orphanage doors shut behind them, the carriage awaiting, the smile vanished. It didn’t fade; it was switched off. She dropped his arm as if it were hot iron and climbed into the carriage first, settling herself against the far side, staring out the window at the passing cobblestones.
The silence on the return journey was dense. Kaelan watched her, his dark eyes taking in the rigid line of her spine, the hands now clasped tightly in her lap, the complete absence of the woman who had leaned and giggled and kissed him not an hour before.
In their chambers, she walked swiftly to the hearth, putting the width of the room between them. She shrugged off her cloak, folded it with brisk efficiency, and headed for the door that led to the small solarium, a place she’d claimed for her own.
“Nadine.”
She paused, hand on the latch, but didn’t turn.
“What,” he began, his voice carefully measured, “was that?”
“My duty,” she said, her tone flat.
“No. The… shift. There, you were… and now, you are…” He lacked the vocabulary. The contradiction was a physical sensation, a sudden jerk in opposing directions.
She glanced over her shoulder, a flicker of something almost like pity in her eyes. “It’s called whiplash.”
“Whiplash.” He tested the strange, sharp word. It fit the violent, snapping feeling.
“It’s what you get when you stop too fast,” she said, her voice devoid of its earlier musicality. “Or when you’re pretending to go in one direction and have to suddenly correct.” Then she slipped through the door and closed it softly behind her, leaving him alone with the new, aching word and the lingering, ghostly sensation of her kiss on his cheek.