Chapter 34: Healing
The gold cloth was finally, mercifully, drawn back over Lucian’s face. The finality of the gesture was a physical blow. Eleanor’s knees buckled, but she locked them, forcing her spine straight. She had looked. She had memorized the cold, waxen stillness of him, the impossible serenity that bore no resemblance to her vibrant, grinning boy. That image would now live behind her eyes, forever superimposed over every memory.
She turned first, breaking the dreadful trance of the crypt. The cold air of the cathedral’s main floor hit her like a slap after the close, earthy scent of the tomb. Ronan was a pale statue beside his father, his small hand still swallowed in Alistair’s grip. The king hadn’t let go since they’d descended the steps.
“Go with Sir Gareth,” Alistair said, his voice a low rasp scraped from stone. He nodded to the knight who hovered nearby. “He’ll take you to the solar. There’s food.”
Ronan just nodded, detached his hand, and followed the knight without a backward glance. The silence he left was dense.
Eleanor’s body began its betrayal immediately. Her legs, encased in heavy velvet skirts, felt filled with wet sand. Each step up from the crypt’s mouth was a separate, trembling negotiation. The procession of nobles had dissolved into murmuring clusters, but a path cleared for her as she moved toward the cathedral’s vast northern exit. Their stares were like insects on her skin. Pity. Morbid curiosity. Political calculation, already resuming its hum beneath the veil of mourning.
She pushed the great oak door open herself, needing the solid resistance of it. The grey afternoon light was blinding after the candlelit gloom. A raw, wet wind whipped across the cathedral close, cutting through her black gown. She drew a sharp breath, the cold air scouring her lungs.
The walk back to the castle was a league of agony. It wasn’t the distance—it was the act of moving forward, away from him, leaving him in that dark, cold hole. Her muscles, stiff with disuse and shock, screamed with a strange, hollow burn. She focused on the ground: slick cobblestones, a crushed winter berry, a lost prayer bead. Anything but the towering bulk of the keep ahead, which promised only empty rooms and the terrifying void of what came next.
She didn’t hear him approach. One moment there was the sound of her own ragged breathing and the wind, the next his larger, heavier footsteps fell in beside hers. Alistair. He didn’t offer an arm. He just walked, a dark sentinel matching her painfully slow pace.
They passed under the portcullis, its shadow chilling her further. The inner bailey was deserted, everyone still at the cathedral or clustered in the great hall. The silence between them was a living thing.
“You shouldn’t have looked,” he said suddenly, the words torn out by the wind.
She stopped walking, her legs nearly giving way. She turned to him, the anger a flash of heat in the frozen core of her. “Don’t.”
“It’s a memory you cannot unsee.”
“I am his mother,” she said, her voice trembling not with grief now, but with a furious, wild intensity. “You don’t get to dictate my grief. Or my memories. You, of all people.”
His blue eyes were not cold now, but volatile, like a storm-chopped sea. The control from the cathedral was gone, stripped away by the howling wind in this empty yard. “You think I wanted to remember him like that? You think I wanted that to be the last…”
He couldn’t finish. He looked away, his jaw working.
“Then why did you look?” she whispered.
“Because someone had to!” The words were a roar that echoed off the stone walls. A sentry on the far rampart flinched. Alistair took a step closer, his face a mask of raw, unkingly pain. “Someone had to witness it. To be sure. To carry it, so that everyone else could carry on with their pretty, sanitized version. That is the weight. That is the duty. You don’t get to choose which parts you bear, Eleanor.”
The truth of it, vicious and unfair, left her breathless. He had looked so he could be the sole repository of that horror. To spare others. To spare her. It was the most terrible, possessive thing he had ever done.
“You had no right,” she said, but the fight had bled out of her voice.
“I have every right,” he said, quieter now, exhausted. “He was my son. My heir. My failure.”
The last word hung in the air, colder than the wind. He believed it. She saw the absolute conviction of it in the bleakness of his gaze. This was the root of his silence, his rage. Not just loss. Guilt.
Eleanor’s legs finally gave out. She didn’t collapse, but sagged, catching herself against the rough-hewn stone of the barracks wall. She pressed her forehead to the cold rock, shutting her eyes. “It wasn’t your fault.”
A bitter, hollow sound escaped him. Not a laugh. “The treaties I signed. The borders I drew. The enemies I made. It is a calculus, Eleanor. His life was the sum.”
She heard him move, felt his presence close behind her. He didn’t touch her. “Get to your rooms. The physician will bring you draught for sleep.”
“I don’t want to sleep.” She pushed off the wall, facing him. “I want to know who did it. I want to hear you say their names. I want to know what you will do.”
For a long moment, he just looked at her. The calculating king was returning, piece by piece, reassembling himself over the shattered father. The grief was still there, but it was being forged into something else, something hard and sharp and purposeful.
“You will know,” he said, his voice finally flat, imperious. The moment of shared confession was over, sealed back up in the crypt with their son. “When it is time for you to know. Now, go inside.”
It was a command. The old defiance rose in her throat, acid and hot. But the fatigue was deeper. Her body was shutting down. She had nothing left to fight with.
She turned without a word and began the endless climb to the royal quarters. Each step up the spiraling staircase was a mountain. Her muscles quivered with a deep, neurological protest, as if they’d forgotten their function. She stumbled into her chambers, past a wide-eyed maid, and fell onto the bed, still in her funeral clothes.
The room was darkening. She stared at the canopy overhead. She did not see the embroidered vines and flowers. She saw the gold cloth, descending. She heard Alistair’s voice: It is a calculus.
And she knew, with a certainty that seeped into her bones like the pervasive cold, that the equations had already begun anew in his mind. The balance of their world had been upset. Blood would be required to reset the scales. The trembling in her legs was gone, replaced by a new, more profound stillness: the calm before a different kind of storm.