Chapter 44: Awokr
The knock was a dull, persistent thing. It drilled through the fog of a sleep Ronan hadn’t realized he’d fallen into. He was still fully dressed, lying atop his bedspread, the cold light of morning slicing through a gap in the drapes. He hadn’t meant to sleep. After fleeing from his parents’ door, the world had become a muffled, grey place, and he must have stumbled here, collapsing into a void.
The knock came again. Not a servant’s discreet tap. Sharper.
“Come,” he croaked, his throat rough.
The door opened. Seraphina stood there, backlit by the corridor torchlight. She was dressed for outdoors in a deep green riding cloak, her hair braided tightly. She looked alert, poised, utterly unlike the gutted wreck he felt. Two of her Lyramor guards, stone-faced in their polished silver, stood like sentinels behind her.
“They tell me the gardens here are worth seeing,” she said. Her voice was neutral, but her eyes were doing a swift, inventory of his crumpled clothes, his shadowed face. “I require an escort. And you look like you could use air that hasn’t been breathed by a hundred courtiers.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a diplomatic extraction. Ronan pushed himself up, his body heavy. “Of course.”
No more was said. He splashed icy water from the basin onto his face, the shock clarifying nothing. He grabbed his own cloak and followed her.
The walk to the south gardens was conducted in a silence that felt thicker than the castle walls. Their footsteps, his slightly lagging, hers precise, echoed in the empty halls. The guards’ boots clacked in military unison a few paces behind. It was less a walk, more a procession for prisoners of state.
They passed a window overlooking the inner bailey. Ronan saw a cart being loaded with crushed white stone—for the pathways, no doubt. The practical, unending business of the kingdom, grinding on. He thought of his father’s voice, raw with a pain twenty-three years old. They brought me basins of it.
He blinked, forcing the memory back.
The garden was a masterpiece of controlled nature. Neat geometric hedges, dormant flower beds tucked under blankets of straw, gravel paths raked into perfect lines. It was beauty made orderly, predictable. Safe. The winter sun was weak but bright, glinting off frost that still clung to the shaded edges of things. Their breath plumed in the cold, silent air.
They walked. The guards maintained their distance, close enough to intervene, far enough to grant an illusion of privacy. An illusion everyone knew was false.
“You look terrible,” Sera said finally, her gaze fixed on the path ahead.
A brittle laugh escaped him. “You have a talent for diplomacy.”
“I have a talent for observation. You didn’t come to the evening meal. Or the morning audience.”
“I was counting tiles,” he muttered, the old shame now layered with a new, horrific understanding.
She stopped then, turning to face him. She pulled her cloak tighter. “Stop that.”
“What?”
“The defeated joke. It doesn’t suit you. It’s what they expect.” Her voice was low, meant only for him. The guards halted, looking politely away at a frozen fountain.
Ronan met her eyes. The understanding from the solar was still there, but it had hardened. It was no longer a shared secret; it was a shared burden. “What would you have me do, Sera? Enlighten me. Since all my options seem to be… bricked up.”
She glanced meaningfully at the guards, then back at him. “You assess the walls. You look for the mortar that’s weakest. You don’t just lean against the door and sigh.”
“I tried the door,” he said, the words sharp. “Your keeper was most thorough.”
A flicker of something—annoyance, empathy—crossed her face. “She is not my keeper. She is my father’s hand. There is a difference. Just as those,” she gave a slight nod toward the distant castle, “are your father’s hands. We are both gloved in them.”
The metaphor settled over him, cold and tight. He started walking again, needing to move. She fell into step beside him, their pace slower now.
“I heard them,” he said, the confession torn from him in a rush of white vapor. He hadn’t meant to say it. But the weight of it was too much to carry alone in this pristine, silent garden. “Last night. My parents. Arguing. About me.”
Sera said nothing. She just listened, her profile calm.
“My birth… it was difficult. It nearly killed my mother. My father… he had to choose. He blames me. For what it cost her. For… for taking her from him, in a way.” The words felt alien, poisonous. Speaking them made them more real. “Everything. Every cold look, every impossible standard, every time he’s pushed me… it’s not just king to prince. It’s a man trying to make a ghost worth its price.”
Sera was quiet for a long time. The only sound was the crunch of gravel underfoot and the distant caw of a crow.
“That,” she said finally, her voice flat, “is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”
Ronan startled, glancing at her.
“It’s a tragedy, yes. A wound that never closed. But to let it fester and dictate every moment since?” She shook her head, a gesture of pure, fierce contempt. “It’s emotional incompetence on a staggering scale. My father let my mother die of a fever he could have prevented by summoning a better physician. He regrets it only insofar as it deprived him of a valuable political partner. That is a clean, cruel logic. This?” She gestured vaguely toward the keep. “This is a messy, selfish indulgence. He’s a king playing at being a wounded poet. It’s unbecoming.”
Her brutal, dispassionate analysis was a bracing slap. It didn’t erase the pain, but it shifted its shape. It made his father seem smaller, somehow. Not a monstrous Minotaur, but a man nursing a canker in a clumsy, destructive way.
“He loves her,” Ronan said, unsure why he was defending him.
“Obviously. And it has made him cruel. Love often does, in wrong hands.” She glanced at him. “You are not a debt to be repaid. You are a fact. A living, breathing fact they both had a hand in making. The only power that memory has is what he feeds it. And what you let it take.”
They reached a high stone wall, covered in skeletal veins of ivy. The path ended here. A dead stop. Ronan leaned against the cold stone, looking back at the way they’d come. The castle loomed, beautiful and severe.
“He said I have her eyes,” Ronan whispered. “And it terrifies him.”
For the first time, Sera’s armored composure seemed to soften at the edges. She sighed, a small, tired sound. “Then he is afraid of his own wife. And that is his problem to solve. Not yours.” She paused. “Our wedding is in ten weeks. The contracts are being inscribed. My household arrives in five. The walls are not coming down, Ronan. We must learn to live within them. Perhaps even, one day, to build a room of our own inside.”
It wasn’t hope she offered. It was a grim, practical blueprint for survival. A ceasefire, not a revolution.
He nodded, feeling emptier than before, but cleaner, too. The wound was named, its poison described. “A room of our own,” he repeated, the concept foreign.
“It starts,” she said, turning to walk back, the audience clearly over, “with not drowning in the ghosts of other people’s rooms. Now come. We have been seen walking together, in civil discourse. The spectacle is complete. Let’s go in before we freeze to death out here. My guard looks bored.”
The walk back was just as quiet, but the silence was different. The unspoken words between them were no longer a tangled, suffocating knot. They were simply laid out, spent and acknowledged, like tools on a bench after a hard day’s work. There was no comfort in it, only a stark, mutual recognition.
As they re-entered the castle’s warmer, scented air, Ronan felt the fog return, but it was thinner now. He could see the shapes of the walls more clearly. He saw the guards not just as guards, but as pieces on the board. He saw Sera not as a refuge, but as a fellow player, her own set of chains expertly concealed beneath her cloak.
He saw his own path, not as a escape route, but as a long, narrowing corridor inside a structure built long before he was born, its foundations cemented with old blood and older fear. And he began, for the first time, to truly count its stones.