Chapter 32: Death
The knowing came three days after Lucian left. It wasn't a messenger or a sound. It was a cessation. Eleanor woke from a thin, anxious sleep and the world had gone mute. The distant, constant rhythm of the armory hammers had stopped. The courtyard below, usually a swamp of shouts and clattering hoofbeats by dawn, was still. The castle itself seemed to be holding its breath.
Her own breath caught, a sharp hook in her lungs. She sat up, cold sweat beading on her neck. It was just a feeling, she told herself. A mother's fear. But her hands, clasped in her lap, were already shaking. The quiet was wrong. It was the quiet of a battlefield after the last scream, of a house after the coffin leaves.
She waited by the window, her cheek pressed against the cold glass. The sky lightened from iron grey to a sickly peach. No birds sang. Below, a single servant scuttled across the flagstones, head down, moving too fast. Then, nothing.
The knock, when it came, was not Alistair’s. It was hesitant, a scratch. She didn't answer. The door opened and Ronan stood there. He was still in his nightshirt, barefoot on the stone. His face was pale, his eyes wide and dry. He looked five years old.
“Something’s wrong,” he said, his voice flat.
Before she could form a word, the heavy tread of boots echoed in the corridor. Quick, purposeful. Alistair’s pace. But wrong—too heavy, too fast, stumbling once. Ronan flinched at the sound and slid into the room, pressing himself against the wall beside the door as if he could disappear into the mortar.
The door flew open.
Alistair filled the space. He was still in his travel-stained leathers, mud splattered to his thighs. His cloak was gone. His hair was wild, as if he’d ridden through a gale. But it was his face that stopped her heart. It was a ruin. The ice-king mask was shattered, blown apart from the inside. His eyes were red-rimmed, unfocused, darting around the room before landing on her. He looked straight through Ronan.
He opened his mouth. No sound came out. He tried again, a raw scrape of air.
“Silver Gap,” he managed. The words were torn, ragged. “Ambush. Not the main force. A splinter group. They knew the route.”
Eleanor felt the room tilt. The colors bled from the world, leaving only shades of grey. She heard a high, thin noise, and realized it was her own breath whistling between her teeth.
Alistair’s hand rose, clutched at his own chest, as if trying to physically contain something. “Vedrus… fell first. Took the arrow meant for…” He swallowed, a convulsive motion. “They swarmed the escort. He fought. They said he fought… like…”
He couldn’t say it. Like me.
He finally saw Ronan then, huddled by the wall. His gaze locked on his youngest son, and a fresh wave of agony twisted his features. He took a step into the room, his boots leaving grimy prints on the floor. “He was protecting the standard bearer. A spear. It… there was nothing. No time.”
He was describing it to no one and everyone. Reliving it. The report had become a confession.
“Where is he?” Eleanor’s voice was a stranger’s. Small. Calm.
Alistair blinked, confusion swimming in his blue eyes. “The men… they brought him back. To the cathedral. He… he needs to lie in state.” The final word broke, crumbling into a whisper.
The Cathedral. Of course. Not here, in the rooms he’d grown up in. In the cold, echoing vault where kings were monuments. A symbol to the end.
A low, animal sound came from the wall. Ronan had sunk to the floor, his arms wrapped around his knees. He was rocking, his forehead pressed to them. No tears. Just that silent, rhythmic rocking.
Eleanor stood. She felt outside her body, watching a woman made of glass stand on unsteady legs. “You let him go,” she said to Alistair. The calm was glacial.
His head jerked as if slapped. “He was protected. I had orders—”
“You let him go to die for your pride. For a show.” Each word was a chip of ice, dropped carefully between them.
“It was his duty!” The roar was back, but it was broken, a damaged thing full of splinters. “He was my son! My heir!” He was shouting at her, but his eyes were wild with a pain so profound it looked like madness. He was shouting at the fates, at the spearman, at himself.
“He was my boy,” Eleanor whispered. “And you fed him to your war.”
Something in Alistair snapped. The towering king seemed to shrink, to fold in on himself. He staggered forward, not towards her, but past her, collapsing into the chair she had just vacated. He dropped his head into his filthy hands. His shoulders shook. No sound escaped him, just the terrible, silent heaving of a man whose world had just been amputated.
Eleanor looked from the broken king to her broken son on the floor. The silence rushed back in, thicker now, smothering. It was the silence of a before and an after, and the chasm between them was too wide to cross.
Ronan stopped rocking. He lifted his head. His face was blotchy, but still dry. His eyes, so like hers, were empty. Hollowed out. He looked at his father, a slumped giant weeping in the dawn light, and then at his mother, standing rigid as a statue.
He uncurled himself. He stood. He walked, barefoot and silent, to the door.
“Ronan,” Eleanor said, her voice cracking.
He didn’t look back. “I’m going to the cathedral,” he said, his tone flat, adult. “Someone should sit with him. They’ll all just stand around and say prayers. He hated that.”
He left, the door clicking shut behind him.
Alistair remained, a monument to grief in the center of the room. Eleanor turned her back on him. She walked to the window. The sun was fully up now, a pale, meaningless eye in a grey sky. Down in the courtyard, a single black banner was being raised on a pole, its heavy fabric snapping once in the lifeless air.
Somewhere, in the grand, cold cathedral, her firstborn lay on a slab of stone. And somewhere, walking the empty halls towards him, was what remained of her second.
She had no tears. Not yet. There was only a vast, howling quiet, and the taste of lemon cakes gone to ash in her mouth.