Chapter 35: My Son
The heat in the lower bailey was a physical presence, a dense, shimmering blanket that made the very air taste of dust and hot stone. It had been three weeks since the crypt, since the gold cloth, since the world had fractured. Time had lost its shape, flowing in two distinct streams: the stagnant, haunted quiet of Eleanor’s chambers, and this new, relentless rhythm that now governed her surviving son’s life.
Eleanor watched from a shaded archway as Ronan, dwarfed by a practice gambeson, struggled to raise a wooden longsword. His instructor, Ser Davos, a man whose face resembled old saddle leather, circled him with the predatory patience of a wolf.
“Again,” Ser Davos grunted. “Heels planted. The power comes from the ground, up through your legs, into your core. Not from your scrawny arms. You’re waving a stick, boy. A foe would knock it from your grip and carve you like a Sunday goose.”
Ronan’s face, already flushed with heat and effort, screwed up in concentration. He repositioned his feet, his small boots scraping on the sun-baked dirt. He hefted the sword, grunting with the effort, and executed a clumsy horizontal slash.
“Better.” The praise was as dry as the dust. “Now, do it two hundred more times. Until you don’t have to think about your feet.”
Two hundred times. Eleanor’s own muscles ached in sympathy. This was Alistair’s prescription. Not grief, not talk, not shared silence. Action. Repetition. The forging of a new heir from the broken pieces of the old.
Every evening, Ronan would stumble into her solar, smelling of sweat, hay, and leather. He’d collapse onto a stool, often wincing as he moved. He was nine. Lucian had been eleven. The gap between them now seemed an impossible chasm.
“Ser Davos says I have a decent eye for distance,” he’d mumbled into a cup of watered wine two nights prior, a faint pride fighting the exhaustion in his voice.
“That’s wonderful, Ronan.”
“But my footwork is ‘a tragic comedy,’” he continued, parroting the knight’s gravelly tone perfectly. Then the boyish facade would crack. He’d look at his hands, blistered and raw. “Mother? Did it hurt Lucian like this?”
The question was a shard of ice in her chest. She’d learned to breathe around it. “The training? I’m sure it did, at first. Everyone’s hands hurt at the beginning.”
“No,” he’d whispered, his eyes, so like his father’s, seeking hers. “The… the other thing. At the end.”
She had no answer for that. No answer that could ever fit inside her boy’s gentle mind. “We don’t know,” she’d said, the truth a vile, insufficient thing. “He was very brave.”
Now, watching him in the brutal sunlight, she saw the fear beneath the effort. It wasn’t just the fear of Ser Davos’s bark, or the sting of the blisters. It was in the way his shoulders tightened before each movement, the way his eyes darted, calculating, always calculating the correct form. He was trying so hard to disappear into the drill, to become the motion, to escape the thoughts that waited for him in the quiet.
Later, she found him not in her solar, but in the old schoolroom, long abandoned since Lucian’s tutors had been dismissed. He was sitting at a dusty table, not with a book, but with a small, sheathed dagger in his hands. Eleanor recognized it immediately—the bone hilt carved with a running stag, Lucian’s first nameday gift from their grandfather in Ashworth.
Ronan was tracing the carving with a grimy finger.
“He let me hold it once,” Ronan said without looking up, his voice flat. “He said I could have it when I turned ten.”
Eleanor leaned against the doorframe, the cool stone a relief. “It’s yours now.”
“It doesn’t feel like mine.” He unsheathed it slightly, the steel whispering. “It still feels like his. When I hold it, I think… I think maybe I’m turning into his placeholder. That everyone looks at me and sees the space where he’s supposed to be. Ser Davos shouts the same instructions. Father watches from the same wall. I eat in his chair now.” He finally looked at her, his blue eyes swimming. “What if I forget what it felt like to be me? What if I’m just… him, but wrong?”
The raw loneliness in his words broke her. She crossed the room and knelt beside him, the dust puffing up from her skirts. She took his small, calloused hands in hers, the dagger between them. “Listen to me. You are not a placeholder. You are Ronan. You are my son who could name every hawk in the mews by sight when you were five. You laugh at your father’s terrible jokes just to be polite. You put honey in your porridge when no one is looking. Lucian hated honey.”
A faint, wobbly smile touched his lips.
“You carry him here,” she said, tapping his chest over his heart. “You carry the love. Not the duty, not the chair, not the sword lessons. The love. That is your part of him. The rest… the rest you build for yourself. You understand?”
He nodded, a tear cutting a clean track through the dust on his cheek. “I don’t want to forget him.”
“You won’t. I won’t let you.” She kissed his forehead. “Now, put the honey away before Cook tells your father. And for heaven’s sake, have the maid tend those blisters.”
He sheathed the dagger, holding it more comfortably now. “Ser Davos says blisters build character.”
“Ser Davos can have his own blisters. You’re having salve.”
That evening, after Ronan had been sent to bed, slightly less burdened, Eleanor stood on the western battlement. The sunset was a bloody gash across the sky. She heard the firm, measured tread behind her long before he spoke.
“He did better today,” Alistair said, coming to stand beside her, not looking at her, his gaze fixed on the distant, darkening hills. “His coordination is improving.”
“He’s terrified he’ll disappear,” Eleanor said, the words hanging in the twilight air.
Alistair was silent for a long moment. A muscle feathered in his jaw. “Good.”
“Good?” She turned to him, the simmering heat of the day finally finding its outlet. “How is that good?”
“Because it means he understands the stakes.” His voice was low, devoid of its usual commanding ice. This was something else, something weary and brutal. “Fear is a fuel. Better than grief. Grief is a swamp. Fear of failure, fear of oblivion… that can make a man move. It can make him learn. It can keep him alive.”
“He’s a child.”
“He is a prince,” Alistair corrected, his eyes finally slicing to hers. The calculation was there, but beneath it, she saw the reflection of her own anguish. “The only one. The world will not pause for his childhood, Eleanor. I cannot pause it. The men who took Lucian… they are not pausing.”
The name, spoken aloud between them for the first time since the crypt, was a shock. The air left her lungs.
“You have names,” she stated.
“I have suspicions.”
“What will you do?”
He looked back at the dying light, his profile stark. “What I must. It is a calculus.” He repeated his own bleak phrase from the bailey. “But the first sum is ensuring Ronan is not the next variable subtracted. If that means forging him in fear, so be it. I would rather have a living son who is afraid, than a dead one who was happy.”
He pushed off the wall and left her there, the words settling over her like a leaden cloak. The last of the light faded, leaving the world in cool, dangerous blue. Down in the yard, a lone stable boy lit a torch. A small, brave flame in the gathering dark. Eleanor wrapped her arms around herself, watching it, thinking of blistered hands tracing a bone-hilted stag, and of the terrible, relentless arithmetic of kings.