Chapter 14: The King's Summons
The knock at the door of the Rose Suite, an hour after Caspian had left, was too polite to be anything but a servant. Ria was sitting on the floor by the hearth, the grey wolf’s head heavy in her lap as she picked burrs from its fur. She went still, her hands freezing.
Caspian, who had returned to report Lyon’s reluctant agreement, was on his feet in one fluid motion, positioning himself between her and the door. “Come.”
A young page entered, eyes wide at the sight of the wolf. He bowed stiffly, holding out a small, sealed parchment. “His Majesty the King,” the boy stammered. “He requests your presence. Both of you. In his private study. He said… to come alone. And that you must see something before you ride out.”
The page fled. The silence he left behind was thick.
Ria pushed the wolf’s head gently aside and stood. “A ‘something’ doesn’t sound like a strategy map.”
“No,” Caspian agreed, turning the heavy parchment in his hands. The wax seal was the Ashford crest: a rearing hawk. “It doesn’t.”
They went without speaking, the wolf padding silently behind them until Ria gave a soft, sharp whistle at the corridor’s end. It melted back into the shadows of her room.
The journey to the king’s private study felt longer than the flight through the burning city. The castle here was a different creature—older, its stones weeping a damp chill, the grand tapestries on the walls depicting hunting scenes and pastoral bliss frayed at the edges. The air grew colder. They passed a stretch of marble flooring that was spiderwebbed with cracks, stained a dark, permanent brown near the base of a statue. Ria’s eyes tracked the stain, her expression blank. Caspian knew she was mapping exits, weighing threats.
Two royal guards, not Lyon’s men, stood outside a pair of immense oak doors. They opened them without a word.
The study was a tomb of opulence. Gilded bookshelves reached towards a vaulted ceiling lost in shadow. A massive desk of blackwood dominated the center, scarred and ink-stained. But the room’s grandeur was compromised. A tapestry hung askew, revealing crumbling plaster. One entire section of shelving had collapsed, sending a drift of leather-bound volumes across the floor. The air smelled of ink, old parchment, and beneath it, faint but unmistakable, the iron-tinge of blood.
King Aldrich stood by the cold fireplace, his back to them. Queen Elara was seated in a high-backed chair, her hands clenched together in her lap so tightly her knuckles were white. Lyon stood near the window, his face a grim mask. Kaelen, the brother with the black hair, leaned against the desk, arms crossed, watching Ria with an intensity that felt surgical.
“Close the doors,” Aldrich said, his voice echoing slightly.
Caspian pulled them shut. The thud was final.
“You said there was something to see,” Ria said. She didn’t move from her spot just inside the room. Her voice was flat, guarded.
Aldrich turned. He looked older in this light, the lines on his face deep crevices. He didn’t look at Ria, not directly. Instead, he walked to a large, framed painting covered by a dusty velvet drape in the corner. “For seventeen years,” he began, then stopped, his throat working. Elara made a small, pained sound.
Lyon stepped forward. “Father, perhaps I should—”
“No.” Aldrich’s voice was rough. He gripped a corner of the drape. “They asked for trust. This is… a down payment.”
He pulled.
Dust motes exploded into the still air, dancing in the weak light from the window. The painting revealed was a portrait, the colors still vibrant under a layer of neglect. It showed a little girl, no more than five, sitting on a sun-drenched garden bench. She wore a simple yellow dress. In her hands, she held a slender branch laden with delicate, lobed leaves. Her smile was a shy, gap-toothed thing. And her eyes, wide and clear, were a pale, piercing grey.
Ria took an involuntary step back, as if struck.
The background of the portrait was a blur of dappled gold and green. Honey-oak groves.
“We commissioned it the spring before she was taken,” Elara whispered, the words tearing from her. “She loved those trees. She’d always bring a branch inside, leave them on everyone’s pillows.”
Caspian watched Ria. She wasn’t breathing. She was just staring at the girl’s face, at the branch, her own head giving a minute, frantic shake of denial.
“Her name,” Aldrich said, the words cracking like dry wood, “was Victoria. Ria, for short. She hated ‘Victoria.’ Said it was too many letters.” A broken laugh escaped him, wet and terrible. “We called her our little magpie. Because she collected shiny things. Bits of quartz. Lost buttons.”
Kaelen pushed off the desk. “The branch,” he said, his voice softer than Caspian expected. “You wouldn’t go anywhere without one. You believed they were magic. That they kept the bad dreams away.”
Ria’s hand came up, not towards the painting, but to her own chest, fingers clawing at the rough wool of her tunic. A memory, not of sight, but of sensation: the smooth, cool bark under her small palms. The specific weight of it. The smell of sun-warmed sap.
“I…” The sound was a scrap of nothing. She tried again. “I remember the feeling. The… the light. Through leaves.”
“Yes,” Elara sobbed, the single word a dam breaking.
Aldrich’s composure shattered. He turned his ravaged face to Ria, finally looking at her, seeing through the grime and the scars and the years of hunger. “The man who took you—the old emperor—he sent a finger. A child’s little finger, in a box. With a note that said ‘Stop looking.’” The king’s whole body trembled with the confession. “We thought… we believed it. We mourned you. We buried an empty coffin. But we never stopped. Not really. Agents in every court. Bribes to every jailer. For seventeen years. Because a king does not let his child become a ghost.”
The room spun. The cracked floors, the bloodstain, the collapsed shelves—they weren’t neglect. They were the physical evidence of a grief that had turned inward and rotted the house from the inside out. The screams that had haunted these stones were their own.
Ria looked from the painting to the queen, to the brothers whose faces now held a desperate, painful hope. She looked at Lyon, the stern soldier, whose eyes were bright with unshed tears. She looked at Caspian, the outsider, the mirror to her own displacement.
Her knees buckled.
Caspian was there, catching her elbow, holding her up. She leaned into the support, her weight slight and trembling.
“The warm feeling,” she said, her voice a child’s whisper lost in the vast room. “It was you.”
Elara rose from her chair, a sudden, graceful movement. She crossed the space but stopped a few feet away, her hands outstretched but not touching, as if Ria were a vision that might dissolve. “My girl,” she wept. “My brave, brave girl. What did they do to you?”
Ria didn’t answer. She couldn’t. The history was written on her skin, in the hollows of her cheeks, in the way she held herself ready to flinch. The portrait was a child. She was a weapon forged in a dark place.
Aldrich straightened, wiping his face with a brutal swipe of his sleeve. The grief wasn’t gone, but it was now fused with a terrifying, focused rage. “Theron Vex,” he said, the name a curse. “He kept you. He knew. All this time, he knew who he had in his dark.”
“Yes,” Ria said, the word finding solid ground. It was the one truth that anchored her. “He knew.”
The king’s gaze shifted to Caspian, who still held Ria’s arm. The look was complex: gratitude, resentment, calculation. “You bring my daughter out of hell,” Aldrich said, “and you bring the devil to my gates. A balanced ledger.”
“He’s my devil too,” Caspian said quietly.
“Then we share the debt.” Aldrich nodded, a king again. “You ride for Eagle’s Rest at dawn. You will find what Theron left there. And then we will use it to pull him down. Not for an empire. For a stolen childhood.” He looked back at the painting, at the smiling girl with the magic branch. “For her.”
There were no more words. Elara stepped closer, finally placing a trembling hand on Ria’s hair. Ria stiffened, but did not pull away. She simply stood, absorbing the touch, a foreign and ancient language she once knew.
Caspian let go of her arm, giving her space to navigate this impossible shore.
As they filed out of the tomb-like study, the last to leave, Ria paused and looked back. Not at her family, but at the covered portrait. Lyon, following her gaze, understood.
“We’ll bring it to the Rose Suite,” he murmured, his voice thick.
She gave a single, tight nod. Then she turned and walked into the corridor, her shoulders straight, the ghost of a honey-oak branch finally, after seventeen years, solidifying in her grip.