Chapter 13: Decompress
The walk to the Rose Suite was silent, besides the hollow echo of a hammer from somewhere deep in the castle. Caspian followed a half-step behind Ria, his guard—Lyon’s man, a stocky fellow with bored eyes—lingering ten paces back, a living reminder of the terms.
Ria pushed open the doors like she hadn’t only lived there for one night so far and went to a couch, slumping into it. She was still dizzy from significant blood loss and recovering from the miscarriage.
“Sit,” Ria said, her voice tired. “Unless you’d rather stand at attention all night.”
He sat. The guard took a position outside the open door, leaning against the frame, giving them the illusion of privacy.
For a long minute, the only sound was their breathing.
“How are you holding up?” she asked finally. She wasn’t looking at him. She was staring at her own hands, tracing a faint, silvery scar across her knuckles. “I know this is a lot. The stares. The whispers. Lyon looking at you like you’re a bomb that might go off. I know they’ve probably treated you more like a prisoner than a guest.”
Caspian let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. It came out shaky. “I am a prisoner.”
“You’re alive,” she countered, her grey eyes lifting to meet his. “Which, in my experience, is several steps up from the alternative.” She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. The gesture made her look younger, smaller, but her gaze was ancient. “You kept me alive in those woods. Carried me when my legs gave out. That should count for something. In here, maybe it doesn’t. But with me, it does.”
The words were simple. They shouldn’t have felt like a lifeline, but they did. He’d been drowning in the suspicion, in the memory of his brother’s smile, in the phantom feel of his mother’s blood on his hands. This was solid ground. Acknowledgment.
“Thank you,” he said, the words thick. “For what you said in the council. It was… a sharper tactic than I would have expected.”
A faint, humorless twist of her lips. “I learned from the worst. Bargaining with your life is the only kind of bargaining they understand down there. You offer something they need, and you make the cost of taking it too high.” She rested her chin on her knees. “But I meant it. They take both of us, or they get neither. We’re a set.”
“A set,” he repeated, testing the word. It felt strange. Alliance was too strong. Partnership was too trusting. A set was just two things that belonged together, for better or worse.
“You showed him Eagle’s Rest,” she said, not as an accusation. A flat fact.
The guilt was a physical cramp in his gut. “I was sixteen. He asked about the stars. I thought he was making an effort. To be… a brother.” The memory was brittle, pathetic now. Theron, pretending interest in celestial navigation, clapping him on the shoulder. A week later, Caspian had drawn him a detailed map. “I built the trap for my own mother with my own hands and didn’t even know I was holding the hammer.”
Ria was silent for a while. “He’s good at that. Making you hand him the knife. He’d ask me about the South, though I didn’t know that’s what he was doing. Whatever I remembered. The food. The songs. I’d get… flashes. A smell. A color. I’d tell him, starving for the memory myself. He’d just nod, write it down. I didn’t know he was building a file. Learning how to break a kingdom by learning what a little girl missed most.”
The horror of it sat between them, a third presence in the room. Their traumas were mirrors, reflecting the same monstrous craftsmanship.
“What do you remember?” Caspian asked quietly. “Of before.”
She closed her eyes. “Warmth. A… a yellow light. Through leaves, maybe. Laughter. Not a sound, just the feeling of it. In my chest.” She opened her eyes, and they were bleak. “That’s it. That’s the core of it. Just a feeling. Everything else is stone walls and cold porridge and his boots on the stairs.”
“My mother,” Caspian said, the words coming unbidden, “used to hum in the gardens. This old, off-key tune. She couldn’t carry a note to save her life.” He smiled, a broken thing. “The court musicians would wince. I’d pretend to be embarrassed. Now… I’d give anything to hear it again. The more I try to remember the exact melody, the fainter it gets.”
They weren’t looking at each other anymore. They were looking at the patterns on the walls, at the mirror, each seeing different ghosts.
“He’s coming,” Ria said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper. “He won’t wait. He knows you’re here. He can feel it. A living heir is a loose thread, and he can’t stand a messy tapestry.”
“I know.”
“They’ll want to use us to draw him out. To set a bigger trap.”
“I know that, too.”
She turned her head, her profile sharp against the lantern light. “Are you ready for that? To be the bait in your own brother’s trap?”
Caspian thought of the map room. Of the cold, strategic light in Aldrich’s eyes. Of Ria’s fierce, pragmatic defense. He was a piece on their board now. A valuable, vulnerable piece.
“I don’t have a choice,” he said.
“There’s always a choice,” she said, standing up abruptly. She walked to the mirror, looking at her own fractured reflection. “You can run. Right now. I wouldn’t stop you. The guard outside is slow; you could probably get past him. You’d be dead in a week, but it’s a choice.”
He watched her. The tension in her wiry frame. “Is that what you’re doing? Making a choice to stay?”
“I made my choice in the alley,” she said, her reflection’s eyes finding his in the broken glass. “When I didn’t slit your throat for your boots. This is just… seeing it through.” She turned to face him. “So. We see it through. Together. We watch each other’s backs. And when the time comes, we make sure the trap snaps on the right neck.”
She held out her hand. Not a royal gesture. A practical one. A deal sealed.
Caspian looked at her scarred, offered hand. He thought of the warm feeling she couldn’t quite remember. He thought of his mother’s off-key humming, fading forever. He stood, crossed the space, and took her hand. Her grip was surprisingly strong, calloused and solid.
“Together,” he said.
Outside the door, the guard shifted his weight, bored. In the darkness of the suite, the pact felt flimsy, made of spider-silk and shared pain. But for now, in the silence that followed the word, it was the only thing either of them had to hold onto.
Ria actually smiled, a soft genuine smile. “Together.” She repeated after him. “And… I know I’ve only been on edge since you met me… but I do trust you. For what it’s worth. You could’ve left me behind in those woods when I passed out. You could’ve left with the wolves and known I’d probably be fine with them. But you stayed. You came here with me, knowing you’d be a prisoner and they could just turn you in to your brother to protect me. Why did you stay?” She couldn’t help herself from asking, the gut feeling she had about him had been bothering her. It was a pull, maybe an attraction. But she was unfamiliar with such feelings. She only knew pain. A decade of Theron’s hands, his mouth, his cock buried inside her. She shivered at the thought and shook it out of her head, focusing back on Caspian.
She shivered at the thought and shook it out of her head, focusing back on Caspian.
He was silent for so long she wondered if he’d heard her. The question hung between them, clumsy and raw. He studied the weave of the rug beneath his boots as if the answer were knotted there.
“I was alone in the woods with a stranger who knew my brother’s rituals,” he said, his voice low. “A person who should, by every right, want me dead.” He finally looked up, and his dark eyes were stripped bare. “You didn’t. That seemed… significant. More significant than any flag or border.”
Ria absorbed this, the simplicity of it. A decision based on a negative, an absence of expected violence. It was logic she understood.
“Also,” he added, the ghost of a wry smile touching his mouth. “The wolves liked you. I figured that was a character reference worth noting.”
A real, short laugh escaped her, startling them both. It sounded strange in her own ears, like a forgotten language. “They’re better judges than most,” she conceded.
The momentary lightness faded, replaced by the heavy, practical silence of their situation. She tugged the borrowed wool blanket tighter around her shoulders; the castle’s stone chill was a different beast than the dungeon’s, less cruel but more pervasive.
“They’ll want to move on Eagle’s Rest soon,” she stated, pushing away from the mirror. “Before Theron’s man there finishes his work. A small group. Fast.”
Caspian nodded, already shifting into that strategic space she’d seen in the map room. “Lyon will lead it. He won’t let me go without him. And he won’t want you to go at all.”
“He doesn’t have a choice.” Ria’s tone left no room for debate. “I’m the only one who might recognize what Theron left there. A phrase carved into stone. A particular brand of wine left to gather dust. His arrogance has patterns. I know the grammar.”
She walked to the window, pushing the shutter open a crack. The cold night air rushed in, smelling of pine and distant ruin. “You’ll need to convince your shadow to convince the King.”
“He’s not my shadow,” Caspian muttered, but he followed her logic. Lyon was the pivot point, the grudging conduit to Aldrich’s trust.
“He is tonight.” Ria turned, leaning back against the cold stone sill. “Go find him. Talk to him. Man to man. Prisoner to guard. Tell him we need to scout, not fight. That his job is easier if I’m there to spot the traps before we blunder into them.”
“And if he says no?”
“Then we go anyway.” She said it with a chilling calm. “But ask first. It’s good practice for diplomacy.” The hint of that strange smile again, fleeting and sharp. “Something princes should know.”
Caspian stood, feeling the weight of the task settle on him. It was a test, as deliberate as her earlier question. Proving his usefulness, proving his alignment. He moved toward the door, then paused.
“That warm feeling you remember,” he said, not looking back. “The yellow light. It sounds like late afternoon sun through the honey-oak groves. They ring the southern palaces. The leaves are almost translucent that time of day.”
He left, pulling the door shut behind him with a soft click. Ria didn’t move from the window. Her breath fogged in the sudden, solitary quiet of the room.
Honey-oak groves. The words unfolded in her mind, vivid and scentless. A specific image where before there was only a blur of sensation. It was a gift, she realized. A tiny, deliberate piece of her own past handed back to her.
She didn’t know if it was true. But she chose, in that moment, to believe him.
The large grey wolf from the woods padded silently into the room from the adjoining antechamber, as if it had been waiting for the prince to leave. It circled twice before lying down at her feet, a solid warmth against the cold stone floor. She rested a hand on its broad head, the coarse fur a tangible comfort.
Down in the courtyard, she could just make out Caspian’s dark shape approaching Lyon’s stiff-backed silhouette near the well. Their conversation was too low to hear, but she saw Lyon cross his arms, saw Caspian gesture toward the high mountain pass visible as a jagged black tear against the star-dusted sky.
She watched, her fingers absently scratching behind the wolf’s ears. The animal sighed, a contented huff of breath. The two figures below did not come to blows. After a long minute, Lyon uncrossed his arms, gave a single, sharp nod.
Ria let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. The first move was theirs. For now. She closed the shutter, locking out the night, but the momentum of it thrummed in her veins, a counter-rhythm to the old, familiar dread.
“Tomorrow, then,” she whispered to the quiet room. The wolf’s tail thumped once, softly, against the floor.