Chapter 36: Rebellion
The reports landed on Alistair’s council table with a soft, damning finality. Parchment, not vellum. Cheaper. Disposable. Just like their contents.
Ser Davos’s handwriting was a series of efficient slashes. Prince Ronan: lacks natural aggression. Hesitates before striking even a straw dummy. Footwork improving, but slowly. Shows fatigue easily. Request reduced session duration.
Master Cillian, the stoic tutor, was more verbose. His Highness comprehends history and geometry at an acceptable level. However, his focus is sporadic. He asks about agricultural yields in Ashworth when the lesson is on Eldorian battle formations. He does not connect strategy to consequence as Prince Lucian did.
Alistair’s fingers tapped once, a silent metronome of displeasure, on the wood. He didn’t need the summaries from the Master of Hawks or the riding master. He’d seen it himself yesterday in the yard.
Ronan, facing a squire two years his senior in a controlled drill. The squire came in with a straightforward overhead strike. A simple parry was drilled, expected. Ronan had flinched. Not a full retreat, but a visible, whole-body cringe, his own practice sword dipping uselessly. The squire’s blow had been pulled, landing on Ronan’s padded shoulder with a soft thump, but the boy had stumbled back, his face a mask of humiliated shock.
He was nothing like his brother.
Lucian had walked into his first lesson at seven with his chin up, taking a knock to the ribs without a sound, his eyes already calculating the counter. Ronan took a pat on the shoulder like a mortal wound.
“He’s nine,” came Eleanor’s voice from the doorway. She’d entered silently, a shaft of cold morning light cutting across the floor between them. She’d read the reports over his shoulder, her green eyes sharp. “And he watched his brother die. That tends to dampen aggression.”
“It cannot,” Alistair said, not looking up. He stacked the parchments neatly. “The world is not a nursery. My enemies will not care for his reasons. They will see only weakness and exploit it. Hesitation is a luxury paid for in blood. He must learn that.”
“By having a fifteen-year-old squire beat it into him?” Her tone was dangerously calm.
“If that’s what it takes.” He finally looked at her. She was dressed in a deep grey, her hair a contained flame. Still in mourning, still in defiance. “You coddle him in the evenings. You soften every lesson Ser Davos tries to impart.”
“Someone has to remind him he’s a boy, not just a replacement part.”
Alistair stood abruptly, the chair scraping. “He is the only part. The mechanism is broken without him. Do you think I enjoy this?” The question hung, raw and unexpected. He didn’t continue. He never would.
Ronan felt the wrongness in his bones. It was a physical ache beyond the bruises and the blisters. It was in the way Ser Davos’s praise felt thin, forced. ‘Adequate pivot.’ Not ‘good.’ Never ‘excellent.’ It was in the way the stable master still called him ‘young prince’ with a hint of a sigh, remembering how Lucian could calm a skittish destrier at twelve.
He was trying. By the gods, he was trying. He practiced the footwork sequences in the corridor outside his chamber at night until his legs trembled. He recited lineage charts until his head buzzed.
But his mind kept drifting. During a tedious lecture on grain tax logistics, he found himself wondering how the system worked in his mother’s lush, rainy homeland of Ashworth. Were their storage barns built differently? He’d asked. Master Cillian had blinked, perplexed. “The focus, Your Highness, is Eldoria.”
He was in the library, searching for a bestiary with pictures of Ashworth hawks, when he heard the voices from the adjoining alcove. Two courtiers, their backs to him, unaware.
“…a different creature entirely,” one murmured, a man with a Veltrim accent.
“Softer,” agreed the other. “The late prince had a fire in his gaze, even as a child. This one… his eyes are always somewhere else. Counting tiles on the ceiling, perhaps.”
A dry chuckle. “The king must be dismayed. All that remains, and it’s a rabbit where a wolf was needed.”
The words nailed Ronan’s feet to the floor. His throat tightened. Rabbit. He looked down at his hands, clean now, the blisters calloused over. Useless rabbit’s paws.
He didn’t find the bestiary. He slipped out, the great hallways of the keep suddenly feeling like a funnel, pressing him toward a shape he could never fit.
That night, he didn’t go to his mother’s solar. He went to the armory.
It was a cavernous, soot-stained room smelling of metal, oil, and old sweat. The rack of training swords stood against one wall. He walked past them. His eyes landed on a smaller, real dagger, its blade dull from honing. He took it. Then he saw Lucian’s old practice sword, the leather grip darkened from use. He took that too.
In a forgotten corner of the upper bailey, near the old granary where the straw was stale, he started. He hacked at a mound of straw, the dagger in his left hand, the practice sword heavy in his right. He wasn’t practicing forms. There was no Ser Davos to correct him. This was pure, frantic energy.
“You’re not Lucian!” he grunted through clenched teeth, slashing wildly. Straw flew. “You’re a rabbit!” A two-handed chop with the sword. The impact shuddered up his arms. “You look at the ceiling!” He stabbed with the dagger, over and over, panting.
Tears of frustration blurred his vision. He swung again, missed the straw, and the sword’s tip slammed into the granite wall with a sharp, discordant clang. The vibration was so violent it wrenched the hilt from his sweaty grasp. The sword clattered to the cobbles.
Ronan stood there, heaving, the dagger hanging limp in his other hand. The silence after the noise was absolute. He’d accomplished nothing. Not even this. Just noise and a stinging in his palms.
“Your brother,” a voice said from the shadows, “once broke his finger on that same wall. Trying a reverse grip he’d seen a mercenary use. Against explicit instructions.”
Alistair stepped into the thin moonlight. He wasn’t in royal garb, just a dark tunic and boots. He looked at the sword on the ground, then at Ronan’s heaving chest, his tear-streaked face.
Ronan braced for the cold analysis, the lesson about control.
Alistair walked over and picked up the practice sword. He examined the fresh scar on the blade’s tip. “He hid it for three days. Until the fever set in and the maester found it.” He handed the sword back, hilt first. “He was not a wolf. Not then. He was a stubborn boy who made mistakes. Loud, painful ones.”
Ronan took the sword, confused. This wasn’t a lesson about calculus. This was… a story.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Alistair’s gaze was unreadable in the dark. “Because the reports are correct. You are not like him. You hesitate. You observe ceilings. You ask about Ashworth’s barns.” He paused. “Your brother would never have thought to ask that. His world was the sword, the horse, the direct threat. It was a strength. It was also a blindness.”
He took a step closer. Ronan didn’t flinch.
“I need a king who sees the threat. But also one who sees the granary, the tax ledger, the alliance woven through a trade route. One who hesitates long enough to consider if the strike is wise, or merely easy.” He placed a hand, heavy and real, on Ronan’s shoulder. Not a pulled blow. An anchor. “The noise you made tonight is not skill. It is frustration. Turn that frustration into observation. See what Lucian missed. Then,” his hand tightened, almost painful, “learn to strike anyway. Because sooner or later, you must.”
He turned and left, melting back into the keep’s darkness.
Ronan stood alone, the two weapons in his hands. The rabbit’s heart still hammered against his ribs. But the king had not called him a rabbit. He had, in his own icy way, given him a different door to walk through. Ronan looked at the straw, at the wall, at the dark shape of the granary. He saw it all, every detail, his mind already tracing the connections.
Then he raised the sword again, his grip more deliberate this time.