Chapter 2: The Vigil Before Dawn
The cold in the tapestry room was a living thing. It seeped from the stones, climbed the ragged threads of the banners where Valenne’s golden lions were now indistinguishable from patches of mildew and old, brown blood. Elodie paced, her boots a sharp, relentless tattoo on the flagstones. Back, forth. Each turn was a whip-crack of sound in the silence.
“The crypts,” El said, her voice a low, sawing edge. “There’s that passage, the one that comes out by the old mill. It’s narrow, but you could fit.”
“It’s been blocked for a decade,” Odette muttered. She wasn’t pacing. She was a statue by the narrow window, her fingers tracing the carved bone grip of her bow, her knuckles bleached white. “Rubble. Rats.”
“Then we clear it.”
“With what time, El? He takes her at dawn.” Odette’s gaze stayed fixed on the courtyard below, a black pit in the predawn gloom. “I could put an arrow through his eye from the gatehouse. A clean shot. No one would know it was me.”
Lia sat on the low, iron-bound chest that held their mother’s gowns. The scent of cedar and faded rose oil lifted from the wood. She smoothed the silk of her own skirt, a pointless, calming motion. She watched her sisters, this furious, broken pendulum swing between them—El’s frantic mind, Ettie’s violent certainty. A strange, quiet smile touched her lips. It felt foreign on her face.
“Or the wine,” Elodie hissed, spinning to face her. “His men will feast in our hall tonight. It wouldn’t be hard. A few drops in the flask he carries at his belt.”
“And then what?” Lia asked, her voice so soft it barely stirred the dust motes dancing in the lone candle’s flame. “His generals see their king choke on his own blood at our table? They’d burn Valenne to its foundations. They’d start with Father.”
The truth of it hung in the air, thicker than the cold. Elodie’s shoulders slumped. She stopped pacing, her energy guttering out like the candle wick. Odette finally turned from the window, her face a mask of furious despair. “So we do nothing? We just let him take you? After what he said in the courtyard? ‘Your father’s grief is a better dowry.’ That’s not a man, Lia. That’s a monster.”
“I know what he is,” Lia said. She looked down at her hands, pale and idle in her lap. Her mother’s voice was a whisper in her memory. No important talents. They will only ever want one thing. She clenched her fingers briefly, then let them go slack. “But he’s also a king who won. Doing nothing is not the same as having no plan.”
Elodie barked a laugh, brittle and sharp. “What plan? Marrying him?”
“Yes.” Lia looked up, her deep blue eyes catching the frail light. “He chose me to hurt Father. I understand that. But he looked at me, too. Not past me. He was… curious. That’s a crack. A tiny one. You plant seeds in cracks, and eventually, they split stone.”
Her sisters stared. Lia never spoke like this. The quiet one. The painter. The girl who loved silks.
Odette shook her head, bowstring taut in her voice. “You’re talking about shaping a conqueror from his bed. It’s a fantasy.”
“Maybe.” Lia’s gaze drifted to the half-finished portrait on the easel, her own face looking back from a layer of dust. “But I’ve been living in a fantasy here, too. The fantasy that we were still safe. That our walls were still high.” She took a slow breath. “Caerwyn has cliffs that look over the Unending Sea. I’ve seen sketches in old books. The water is a colour I’ve never been able to mix—not quite blue, not quite green. A living turquoise. And the cliffs are white, like sun-bleached bones, but wildflowers grow in the seams.”
The room fell utterly silent. The panic, the rage, it drained away, leaving a hollowed-out space filled only with her quiet words.
“I’m going to see them,” Lia said, and that strange smile returned, warmer now, touched with a genuine, aching wonder. “I’m going to stand there and feel the sea wind, and I am going to paint them. For the first time in my life, I will paint something real. Not from a book. Not from a dream. Something that is mine.”
Elodie’s eyes filled. She looked away, swallowing hard. Odette leaned her forehead against the cold stone of the wall, her bow hanging limp at her side.
There was nothing more to say. The schemes were ashes. The shot would not be taken.
The grey light outside the window began to bleed from black to charcoal, then to a feeble, cold iron. Dawn was not a sunrise today; it was an accusation.
Lia stood. She wore a simple travelling gown of deep grey wool, practical and warm. She had left the embroidered silks in the chest. One part of her life was ending. She opened the chest once more, pushing aside folds of fabric until her fingers found cool, smooth wood. She drew out a small, flat case her mother had given her: her finest brushes, wrapped in velvet, and a few cakes of precious pigment. Ultramarine. Vermilion. She tucked it into the pouch at her belt.
She kissed Odette’s stony cheek, then pulled Elodie into a fierce, brief hug. “Keep Father alive,” she whispered into her sister’s hair.
Then she walked out, alone.
The corridors were empty, echoing. Every banner seemed a shroud. She passed the door to her father’s solar; it was shut, and from behind it came no sound at all. He could not face this. She had known he wouldn’t. His grief, as Gareth had so precisely noted, was complete. It was all he had left to give.
The great oak doors of the keep stood open to the courtyard. The pyres had burned down to mounds of ash and ember, the scent now a sickly-sweet undernote to the chill morning air. The bodies were gone, but the memory of them was etched into the stones.
And there, in the centre of that empty, grim space, was Gareth.
He was not in his full battle plate. He wore a leather brigandine over a dark tunic, his black curls damp from the morning mist. He held the reins of two horses, one a sturdy palfrey meant for her. He was just… waiting. Studying the keep’s scarred walls as if memorizing their weaknesses.
He turned as she approached, his dark eyes finding her immediately. He didn’t smile. He just looked, taking in her plain gown, the determined set of her shoulders, the absence of any entourage.
“Princess,” he said, his voice a low rumble in the quiet.
“King Gareth,” she replied, stopping a few feet from him. She did not curtsy.
His gaze flickered to the pouch at her belt, the subtle bulge of the paint box. “You travel light.”
“I take only what I need.”
A faint, almost imperceptible nod. He moved then, closing the distance between them. He didn’t touch her face this time. Instead, he offered his hand, not to kiss, but to help her mount. A simple, pragmatic gesture.
Lia looked at his hand, the callouses, the old nicks and scars. The hand that had signed her father’s surrender, that had lifted her chin amidst the dead. Her father’s grief was her dowry. This hand was her future.
She placed her own in it. His grip was firm, solid, not harsh. He boosted her into the saddle with an easy strength, his touch through the wool of her gown impersonal, efficient.
He mounted his own horse, a massive chestnut destrier, and gathered the reins. He looked back at the keep once more, at its closed doors and shuttered windows, then at her.
“Ready?” he asked.
Lia did not look back. She fixed her eyes on the road ahead, a scar of dirt leading away from the only home she’d ever known, towards the sea, towards the cliffs, towards the unknown man beside her.
“Yes,” she said.