Chapter 29: Night Terrors
The nightmare wasn’t a narrative. It was a prison of sensation.
There was no castle, no brother, no knife. Only the feeling of sinking into thick, warm mud that pressed in on her chest, stealing her breath. The smell of sickly-sweet decay filled her nose, her mouth. She was the rot, packaged and sealed, dissolving from the inside out. She tried to scream, but the mud poured in, a solid, suffocating weight.
A sound escaped her—a thin, animal whimper of utter helplessness.
Kellen was awake before the first thrash of her limbs hit the mattress. He slept in a chair by the dead fireplace, a blanket over his legs, a habit from years of field campaigns. He was on his feet, crossing the cold marble floor in three silent strides.
In the faint moonlight from the high window, he saw her. Not a princess, but a captive of her own mind. Her body arched, tendons standing out in her neck, hands clawing at the heavy linen sheets twisted around her. The sweat on her skin gleamed like a second, terrified skin.
“Clara.”
His voice was a low command, but it didn’t reach her. Her eyes were wide open, unseeing, glazed with the terror of the void.
He couldn't risk her tearing the meticulously healing wound open. He moved with decisive efficiency, sitting on the edge of the bed. One hand found her wrist, pinning it gently but immovably to the mattress beside her head. The other pressed against her shoulder, holding her twisting torso still. His weight was an anchor.
“Clara. Look at me.”
She fought him. Not with awareness, but with the blind, chemical panic of a trapped thing. Her free hand flailed, striking his bicep with a weak, dull thud. Her ragged breaths were sobs caught in her throat.
He leaned closer, putting his face in her line of sight, blocking out the terrifying unseen things in the dark corners of the room. “Eyes on me. Now.”
His voice cut through the mud. Something in its iron certainty snagged her consciousness, a line thrown into a drowning sea. Her wild gaze skittered across the ceiling, the wall, before crashing into his. Ice-blue, clear, and relentlessly present. She stared, panting.
“You are in the infirmary,” he said, each word a deliberate, rhythmic beat. “You are safe. The door is guarded. You are safe.”
Her chest heaved. A tremor wracked her from head to toe. The fight was leaching out, replaced by a shivering aftershock. The horror in her eyes slowly refracted into recognition. Not of him, but of the room, the reality.
“Kellen?” His name was a cracked whisper.
“I’m here.”
The confirmation seemed to unravel the last knot of the dream. A tear broke free, tracing a hot path through the sweat on her temple. Her body went limp beneath his hands, drained. The silence that followed was profound, loud with the echo of her fear and the soft sound of their breathing.
For a long moment, he didn’t move. His hands remained where they were, a steady pressure grounding her to the bed, to the moment. The clinical part of his mind noted her racing pulse under his thumb, the cool clamminess of her skin. The other part, the part he kept locked in the same vault as his old surgical instruments, felt something else—a fierce, startling pang of sympathy.
He had seen soldiers scream from night terrors. He had never felt the urge to quiet them like this.
Very slowly, he released her wrist. His hand moved, almost of its own accord, to brush the damp hair from her forehead. The gesture was so foreign to him it felt like watching someone else do it. Then, leaning down, his lips touched her skin, just above her brow. A fleeting, dry contact. A breach in his own fortifications.
“Good girl,” he murmured, the words rough and unfamiliar on his tongue. “It’s over.”
She blinked, more tears following the first. She didn’t speak. She just looked at him, her eyes holding a universe of unasked questions and a vulnerability so stark it was almost offensive.
He stood up abruptly, the spell broken. The commander reasserted himself. “Your wound is intact. You didn’t damage it.” He turned, fetching a cup of water from the side table. “Drink.”
She pushed herself up on trembling elbows and took the cup. Her hands shook so badly he had to help guide it to her lips. She drank greedily, water spilling down her chin. When she finished, she sank back, exhaustion weighing her every feature.
“The mud,” she whispered hoarsely.
“I know.”
“It felt so real.”
“The mind translates pain and fear into symbols it can drown in.” He placed the cup back on the table, his back to her. “It won’t be the last time. But it will become less frequent.”
“Do you promise?” The question was childlike, stripped of all her defensive sharpness.
He didn’t turn. “No. I don’t deal in promises. I deal in statistics. And statistically, with time and distance from the trauma, the frequency decreases.”
A weak, damp laugh escaped her. “Always the scholar.”
“It’s what I am.” He finally faced her again, his expression back under its customary control. “Sleep. I’ll be here.”
“You should rest in a proper bed,” she said, her eyes already closing.
“This is adequate.”
He returned to his chair, pulling the blanket over himself. He did not sleep. He listened to her breathing deepen and even out, waiting for the telltale hitch that signaled a return to the mud. It didn't come.
Dawn was a grey smear at the window when the infirmary door opened softly. Jared entered, his bulk moving with a guard’s quietness. He took in the scene: Clara asleep, Kellen awake and watching from the chair. He raised a brow.
“Rough night?” Jared’s voice was a low rumble.
“A predictable one,” Kellen replied, standing and stretching the stiffness from his muscles. “The mind processes.”
Jared walked to the bedside, his gaze softening as he looked at Clara. He reached out and carefully adjusted the blanket where it had tangled around her feet. “She’s too quiet when she sleeps. Makes me nervous.”
“You prefer the screaming?”
“I prefer knowing she’s not fighting battles alone in the dark.” Jared turned, crossing his arms. “Freir’s in the kitchens, arguing with the head cook about the nutritional content of bone broth. It’s a truly terrifying sight. The man has theories about marrow.”
Despite himself, Kellen’s mouth twitched. “He’s worse than you with sword forms.”
“Don’t start. A proper grip is fundamental.” Jared glanced back at Clara. “She’s walking today?”
“If she can. The goal is to reach the window.”
The window was maybe fifteen feet from the bed. It might as well have been a league.
When Freir arrived with a tray holding not just broth but a small, cautious portion of soft cheese and stewed apple, the day’s campaign began. The nightmare had left Clara pale and hollow-eyed, but there was a grim set to her mouth as Jared and Freir helped her sit up.
“The window,” she said, her voice still scratchy.
“One milestone at a time, Your Highness,” Freir chided lightly, offering the broth. “First, fuel. My honor depends on you tolerating this. I’ve threatened a man’s livelihood over it.”
She ate slowly, under their collective, watchful gaze. The silence was companionable now, filled with the mundane sounds of the fortress waking up: distant clangs from the smithy, the tramp of boots changing guard.
Then, the walking.
It was a brutal, humbling repetition of the day before, but with a key difference: Clara was fully conscious for every agonizing second. The pain was a living, teaching thing. She bit her lip until it bled, stubbornly refusing to cry out as they helped her stand. Her legs shook like saplings in a gale.
“Breathe,” Freir instructed, his arm solid as a bar of iron behind her.
“I am,” she hissed.
“No, you’re holding your breath. It makes the pain brighter. In, out. With me.”
She followed his rhythm. Out. The world narrowed to the cold stone underfoot, the strain in her thighs, the fire in her core. Jared counted again, but this time Clara’s eyes were fixed on the window—a rectangle of grey, clouded sky.
“Forty-five,” Jared said, his voice tight with the effort of supporting her without seeming to. “You’re past yesterday.”
“The window,” she gasped.
“Clara—” Kellen began, a warning in his tone from his post by the chair.
“The window.”
They moved as a clumsy, four-limbed organism. A shuffle. A agonizing step. Another. Each one a victory and a fresh defeat. The portraits of the dead soldiers seemed to lean in, watching her pilgrimage.
When her fingertips finally brushed the cold silver of the windowsill, a sound escaped her—not a whimper, but a hard-won sigh. She let her weight settle back into Freir’s support, her forehead resting against the glass. She was weeping, silently, from the sheer, overwhelming magnitude of it.
Outside was a courtyard. Grey cobbles, a bare-branched tree, a sliver of the fortress’s outer wall. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
Freir squeezed her shoulder. “See? Marrow theory vindicated.”
A wet laugh-sob shook her. Jared, still holding her, chuckled into her hair. “He’s unbearable.”
Kellen watched them from the center of the room. The sight was incongruous: the Imperial Captain, the foreign prince, and the hated princess, huddled together at a window, finding triumph in a view of stones. A unit, forged in pathology and necessity.
He looked at Clara’s hands, pale against the dark stone. He remembered the feel of her fevered skin, the exact weight of her panic beneath his palms. The ghost of his lips on her forehead burned.
The path ahead was littered with pitfalls—political, personal, violent. But in this sunless room, a single, incontrovertible fact had taken root. She was theirs to protect.
And he would. With statistics, with scalpels, with whatever cold, precise tools he had at his disposal. The thought was as clear and cutting as the morning light finally breaking through the clouds outside, scattering the grey and throwing a sudden, bold slash of gold across the infirmary floor, right to the foot of her bed.
The thought was as clear and cutting as the morning light finally breaking through the clouds outside, scattering the grey and throwing a sudden, bold slash of gold across the infirmary floor, right to the foot of her bed.
Another full week passed, measured not in days but in incremental, hard-fought victories.
The first was the cane. Kellen produced it one afternoon, a simple, polished length of dark cherrywood topped with a silver knob worn smooth by some other forgotten hand. He presented it without ceremony. "Your next tool," he said. "It's not a surrender. It's a lever."
Clara hated it on sight. It symbolized everything she was fighting against: frailty, dependence, permanence. She glared at the thing leaning against the wall for an entire day, refusing to touch it. "I don't need it."
"You do," Freir remarked from his habitual chair, not looking up from his book. "Unless your new strategy is to crawl to your brother's throne. It has a certain dramatic flair, I'll grant you, but it's terribly hard on the knees."
Jared just picked it up and held it out to her, his expression offering no argument, just a steady expectation. "Try."
Her first attempts were clumsy and infuriating. The cane slid on the marble, or she placed it too far, throwing her already precarious balance into chaos. Jared would catch her, his hands firm at her elbows, setting her upright again without comment. The cane clattered to the floor more than once, each time sending a spike of hot shame through her.
"Your grip is too high," Kellen noted during one disastrous session, his tone that of a scholar observing a failed experiment. "You're fighting the wood. It's there to redirect force, not oppose it. Lower your hand. Let it work."
She adjusted. The next step was firmer.
By the end of that bedridden stage, the cane was no longer an enemy. It was an extension of her will. A third leg, a testing prod, a weapon to push open the heavy infirmary door herself. The metallic tap-tap-tap on stone became the soundtrack of her days, a stubborn metronome counting her progress from bed to window, window to chair, chair to the daunting threshold of the corridor beyond.
She could now stand at the window unattended, leaning into the cane, watching the world for ten, then twenty minutes at a time. The colour returned to her face, not the hectic fever-flush of illness, but the softer hue of slow recovery. The hollows under her eyes remained, but they were now shadows of fatigue, not of death.
She began to overhear things.
They stopped treating her presence as something vegetative, a potted plant to be tended. Conversations continued around her, voices dropping only occasionally, forgetting to censor.
"She's gaining strength faster than projected," Kellen stated to Jared one evening as they stood near the fire. Clara was pretending to sleep, her breathing even. "The human body's resilience, when given the correct conditions, is statistically remarkable."
"Could you for one minute just say she's getting better?" Jared muttered, stirring the embers with an iron poker. "It's not a lab report."
"The data is encouraging. But the political variables remain unstable. My sources say the Crown Prince is growing impatient with the 'mountain retreat' story. He's making noises about a visit to her sickbed."
A cold that had nothing to do with the room seeped into Clara's bones. She didn't move.
"We're weeks from being able to move her with any safety," Jared said, his voice low and tense. "And where would we go? Your borders are watched. Mine are a political minefield. Freir's?"
"Is an option," Freir's voice came softly from the doorway. He’d entered unheard. "But the journey would kill her in her current state. My father would also see her as a bargaining chip, not a person. We are her best defense right here. This fortress is a cliff face. He can’t scale it without an army everyone would notice."
"And if he brings one?" Jared asked.
"Then we have a very different fight." Kellen’s reply was chilling in its simplicity. "We prepare for that contingency, but we proceed on the current path. Her mobility is our primary tactical objective."
Clara lay still, the words etching themselves into her mind. Political variables. Contingency. Tactical objective. She was a piece on a board to them, too. The realization should have hurt. Instead, it crystallized something. They were all pieces. The game was just larger, and the opponent was her brother.
The next morning, she pushed further.
"Let me walk to the door," she said, gripping the cane. "Just to the door and back. Alone."
All three men looked at her. Jared took an instinctive half-step forward, then stopped, forcing his hands to his sides. Freir gave a slow, considering nod. Kellen just watched, analytical and silent.
She turned her back on them, focusing on the twelve feet of gleaming marble. She planted the cane, exhaled, and stepped. Tap. Step. Drag. The pattern was awkward, her gait lopsided, the still-tender core of her protesting with a deep, constant ache. But it was hers.
She heard the faint creak of Jared’s leather jerkin as he shifted his weight, ready to spring. She didn't look back.
The door grew closer. The world narrowed to the grain of the wood, the iron bands across it. When the silver tip of her cane finally tapped the base of the door with a soft click, a wave of dizzying triumph washed over her. She’d done it.
Turning was harder. She pivoted on her good leg, using the cane as a pivot point, a maneuver Kellen had drilled into her. The three of them were arrayed behind her, a silent, watchful tribunal. Their expressions were unguarded for a fleeting second: Jared’s fierce pride, Freir’s approving sharpness, Kellen’s intense, calculating satisfaction.
It was Kellen who spoke, breaking the silence. "Good."
The single word, from him, felt like a medal.
She made her way back, slower now, the fatigue descending fast. When she reached her chair, her legs were trembling, but she lowered herself without their help. She looked up, meeting each of their eyes.
"I heard you talking last night," she said, her voice calm. "About variables and contingencies."
The atmosphere tightened. Jared shot a look at Kellen, who didn't flinch.
"I am your primary tactical objective," she continued, parroting his phrase back without venom. "So tell me the plan. Not the pieces you think I need to hear. The real one. How do we stop my brother from scaling the cliff?"
Freir’s lips curved into a smile that didn't reach his eyes. Jared looked at the floor, a muscle ticking in his jaw. Kellen walked over to the window, his back to them for a moment, composing his thoughts.
Then he turned. The morning light caught the silver in his hair and the cold determination in his gaze. He didn't speak to her like a patient, or a pawn.
He spoke to her like an ally.
"We turn you from a liability into a weapon," he said. "We teach you not just to walk, but to stand. And then we remind the Empire that a forgotten princess is still a blood legitimate heir, and a brother who kills in secret is afraid of the light."
Clara’s fingers tightened around the smooth wood of her cane. The fear was there, a familiar taste at the back of her throat. But beneath it, something else stirred, resonant and hungry.
"You want me to fight for the throne?" she said, but she didn’t sound against the idea. Rather, intrigued by it.
Rather, intrigued by it.
The silence in the room condensed, heavy with the dust motes swirling in that single, slanting beam of sun. Clara’s question hung between them, a live wire.
Kellen didn’t blink. “I want you to survive. The throne is merely the most effective tool for ensuring that.” He paced a short, tight line. “Your brother’s power relies on your silence, your invisibility. It’s a fragile construct. We make you visible. We give you a voice. That is the weapon.”
Freir stretched his legs out, crossing them at the ankles. “It’s a particularly vicious form of theater. We draft the play, hand you the script, and your family will tear itself apart trying to shut the curtains.” He smiled, all sharp edges. “I’ve always enjoyed theater.”
Jared looked profoundly unhappy. He ran a hand through his dark hair. “So we prop her up in public, a smiling puppet, while they take shots from the shadows? That’s the plan?”
“No,” Clara said. The word was quiet, but it cut. They all looked at her. She leaned forward, her grip on the cane turning her knuckles white. “No puppets. If I’m going to be visible, I won’t be reciting your lines.” She looked at Kellen. “You said you’d teach me to stand. So teach me. All of it. Not just the walking.”
Kellen studied her. The clinical detachment was gone, replaced by something more assessing, more predatory. “It will hurt. More than the walking.”
“I’m familiar with the concept of hurt.”
“This is different. This is the hurt of reshaping a mind. Of learning to see the world as a series of levers and weaknesses.” He took a step closer. “Your kindness, that hidden heart you think is a secret? We will have to box it up. It is a vulnerability your brother will exploit without a second thought.”
A cold tremor went through her. The idea of locking away the last soft part of herself felt like a different kind of death. “And if I refuse? If that’s the part I want to keep?”
Jared answered, his voice rough. “Then he’ll use it to pull your guts out through a smile, Clara. He already tried.”
She closed her eyes. She saw the bird, cupped in her childish hands, its heart a frantic drumbeat against her palm. She saw her brother’s smiling face before the crunch. False hope. That was his specialty.
“Fine,” she whispered. Then she opened her eyes, and her voice hardened. “But I’m not a blank slate. I’ve been watching from a cage my whole life. I know the court’s rhythms. I know who craves favor, who nurses grudges, who my father ignores. That has to be worth something.”
Freir let out a low whistle. “The prisoner mapped the prison. Of course you did.” He looked at Kellen with new interest. “Our tactical objective has a mind. This changes the math.”
“It does,” Kellen conceded, a flicker of something that might have been respect in his eyes. “Very well. Your first lesson starts now. With a question.”
“Ask it.”
“Your brother’s name is on the warrant for your death. But the Emperor, your father, sealed it with his signet. Why would he agree?”
The question was a blade, slipped between her ribs. The air left her lungs. She had avoided that particular truth, letting it fester in the dark. Now he was dragging it into the light.
“I don’t know,” she breathed.
“You have a theory. I can see it circling behind your eyes. Give it words.”
She looked away, at the red marble floor. “He… he has always been indifferent. I was a mistake. A political liability with a face. My brother is his pride, his mirror. Maybe it was just… easier. To sign the paper than to face the mess.” The words tasted like ash.
“Indifference is a motive,” Kellen said, unmoved. “But it is a weak one for imperial patricide. We need a better one. What does he gain from your disappearance, specifically now?”
Clara’s mind, so long turned inward, strained against its old limits. She thought of the last strained audience, a year ago. Her father’s tired eyes, fixed on a point beyond her shoulder. Her brother’s too-bright smile.
“My marriages,” she said slowly, the connections forming like frost on glass. “They were his deals. To you,” she nodded at Kellen, “to secure the northern fortresses. To Jared, to bind the Imperial Guard’s loyalty closer to the crown. To Freir, for a temporary peace with the Eastern Kingdom.” She took a shaky breath. “The deals are struck. The alliances are, on paper, sealed. I am the token that was exchanged. Once the transaction is complete…”
“The token can be lost,” Freir finished, his voice flat. “And the deal remains. In fact, with the troublesome token gone, the alliances might even be simpler. No messy personal attachments.”
Jared made a sound deep in his throat, pure disgust. “So we’re all just… paid in advance. And she’s the receipt they’re shredding.”
“Precisely,” Kellen said. His gaze never left Clara. “So. Your value to them is concluded. Your value to us is just beginning. But to wield it, you must understand the currency. Yourself. Your history. Every slight, every glance, every piece of gossip you overheard. We will mine it all.”
The scope of it was terrifying. He was asking her to dissect her own life, to turn every lonely moment, every cruel whisper, into a tactical datum. “And then what? I stand up at the next court banquet and accuse them? They’ll laugh me into a real asylum.”
“No.” Kellen’s smile was thin and humorless. “You stand up at the next court banquet and you are serene. You are gracious. You thank your brother for his concern during your ‘illness.’ You speak of your gratitude for your strong, loyal husbands. You are the picture of imperial unity.”
Clara stared. “That’s…”
“The script,” Freir supplied. “Act One. The Return. We remind everyone you exist, framed not as a victim, but as a virtue. It will poison your brother in his own court. His narrative of your cruel manipulation cracks if you return looking like a recovered saint.”
“He’ll try to kill me again. Immediately.”
Jared finally moved, crouching down before her chair so his eyes were level with hers. “Let him try. That’s what we’re for. But he won’t do it openly. Not at first. The play has to look right. That’s our window.”
“To do what?”
“To find the proof,” Kellen said. “The surgeon who packed your wound. The servant who carried the sealed order. The master of ceremonies who can confirm your ‘retreat’ was a fiction. We find one thread, and we pull. Publicly.”
Clara looked from Jared’s fierce, open face to Freir’s sharp calculation, finally to Kellen’s icy resolve. The fear was a cold stone in her stomach. But beneath it, for the first time, a spark of something hotter and more dangerous ignited. It wasn’t hope. It was purpose.
“When?” she asked.
“When you can walk across the throne room without that cane,” Kellen said. “When you can stand through a three-hour audience without fainting. When your voice won’t shake. We have time. The story of your convalescence needs to be believable.”
She nodded, absorbing the monumental task. Then a practical, mundane thought surfaced. “I’ll need clothes. Not infirmary shifts. Court clothes. Armor.”
Jared barked a surprised laugh as he stood. “Armor? Let’s start with a dress that doesn’t require you being sewn into it.”
“Both,” she insisted, looking at Kellen. “You teach me the mind. He,” she gestured to Jared, “teaches me the body. How to not be easily… grabbed.”
Freir raised a brow. “And what, pray tell, is my role in this tripartite tutelage?”
Clara met his gaze. “You teach me the smile. The one that means nothing and everything. The one that makes them nervous.”
A slow, genuine smile spread across Freir’s face, bright and beautiful and utterly terrifying. “Now that,” he said, “is a subject I can profess with true passion.”
The following days took on a new, grueling rhythm. The infirmary was no longer a sickroom. It was a theater of war.
Her physical therapy became combat training. Jared started with balance, having her stand on one leg, then the other, near the bed. “A shove is just a sudden redistribution of weight,” he’d say, his hands hovering near her shoulders. “Feel it coming. Root down.” When she wavered, he wouldn’t always catch her. Sometimes he let her tumble onto the thick rug, a shock of pain and surprise. “Better the rug than the marble. Learn how to fall. It’s the first defense.”
Kellen’s lessons were verbal assaults over meals. He’d drill her on noble houses, their alliances, their debts. He’d present a scenario: “Lord Hale’s son is caught cheating at cards. Who is offended? Who sees an opportunity? What does your brother do?”
At first, her answers were hesitant guesses. He’d dissect them, pointing out flawed logic, missed connections. “Sentiment is not analysis. Try again.”
Freir’s instruction was the strangest. He’d sit across from her, mirroring her posture, then subtly shift—a tilt of the head, a fractional narrowing of the eyes. “That is the expression of someone who has heard a mildly disappointing fact. Now, give me the expression of someone who has heard the same fact and is already planning to use it against the speaker. No, not a scowl. A smile. A very small one. There. You see? It’s in the eyes.”
She practiced in the gilded mirror. She watched her own face learn to lie.
The cane became a tool for disengagement. Jared showed her how to plant it to block an incoming grab, how to use the silver knob to strike a pressure point on a wrist. The moves were simple, reliant on surprise and leverage, not strength. “Create space, then scream the palace down,” Jared said. “We’ll be coming.”
One afternoon, a week into this new regime, a package arrived. It was a dress, draped over Freir’s arm. Not the intricate, constricting gowns of the Imperial Court, but a deceptively simple column of deep emerald wool, high-necked, with long, tight sleeves. “Baseline armor,” Freir announced. “It doesn’t scream ‘attack me.’ It says ‘I am a serious statue, do not touch.’”
With Jared’s help and her own stubborn persistence, she dressed in it. The fabric was heavy, substantial. It hid the lingering thinness of her frame. Standing before the mirror, leaning on her cane, she didn’t see a convalescent. She saw a stranger, poised and severe.
Kellen entered and stopped. He looked her over, not like a man looking at a woman, but like a sculptor checking the lines of his work. “Adequate. The colour works. Now walk the length of the room in it.