Chapter 17: Stress
The silence after Alistair finished reading the traitor’s words stretched taut enough to snap.
Eleanor’s hand had gone still over Leo’s blanket. Her eyes, though shadowed with fatigue, were acute, dissecting each syllable Alistair had uttered. The message was not long. Lord Sanna’s brother-in-law, a minor lordling named Ferris, claimed the funds for the Blue Mountain rebellion had been funneled through a network of merchants in free city of Valenport. Not by a rival kingdom, but by a consortium. A group of Ashworth’s own nobility, testing the strength of the crown’s new, unconventional marriage.
“A test,” Eleanor repeated, her voice low. “To see if the King who listens to his wife is a king who can be fractured from within.” She let out a short, pained breath. “They saw your restraint as a vulnerability. My influence as a crack in the wall.”
Alistair crumpled the scroll in his fist. The parchment crackled like a dry bone. “They saw wrong.”
“Did they?” She shifted, a minute adjustment that cost her, her face tightening. “You sent the army to contain, not to crush. You used Tristan’s diplomacy alongside the threat of force. A surgeon’s knife. They wanted to see if we’d revert to the warhammer. We didn’t. So now they try a quieter poison. Rumors. Financial sabotage. Turning our own court against us.”
“Then we root them out.” Alistair’s tone was final, the sound of a door slamming shut. “Tristan will leave for Valenport at dawn. He will trace the money. He will find the names.”
“Tristan?” The word was a sharp exhalation. Eleanor’s gaze locked onto him. “You’re sending Tristan? Now?”
“He is the only man I trust who can navigate both a merchant’s ledger and a back-alley knife fight. He speaks three languages fluently. He is invisible when he needs to be.” Alistair stated it as logic, immutable as stone.
“He is also the only man in this castle, besides you and Lydia, that I trust with my life. With their lives.” She gestured weakly toward the cradle where Leo slept, then to the door beyond which Jon practiced his swordsmanship. “You would send my shield away when I am… like this?”
A cold knot formed in Alistair’s gut. He had not considered it in those terms. He saw the move on the political board: send your best piece to uncover the enemy’s heart. He had not allowed himself to see the bedroom, the woman pale as parchment against the linens, the profound vulnerability that permeated the very air.
“The threat is there. It must be cut out,” he said, his voice harder than he intended.
“The threat is here!” she insisted, a flicker of her old fire burning through the exhaustion. “It’s in the looks the courtiers give me when they think I don’t see. It’s in Berrick’s ‘kind’ suggestions that I retire to the country air for my health. It’s in every whispered doubt about your judgment since you married me. Sending Tristan tells them you are scared enough to dispatch your spymaster. It tells me that you value the hunting of ghosts over the safety of your family.”
He stood abruptly, the chair scraping against stone. “That is not true.”
“Then what is it?” She pushed herself up slightly, wincing. “Is it because you cannot stand this? This room? The smell of medicine? My weakness? Is it easier to send your best man to fight a shadow war than to sit here with a wife who can’t stand without help?”
The accusation landed with the precision of a crossbow bolt. It found the secret fear he had been refusing to name: his helplessness. He could command armies, but he could not command her cells to knit faster. He could stare down a charging knight, but the sight of her struggling to lift a cup of water filled him with a terror that bordered on rage. Action was his language. This waiting, this vigilant stillness, was a form of torture.
“Do not be a fool,” he growled, the insult a defense. “This is about securing your future. Their future. A threat left to fester becomes a wound that kills.”
“And who protects the present, Alistair? Who protects now?” Her eyes were bright, not with tears, but with furious, brilliant intensity. “You will surround me with guards? Men who are loyal to your crown, but who think of me as the sharp-tongued noblewoman who bewitched their king? Tristan listens to me. He understands what I see. Without him, I am alone in a room full of people waiting for me to either die or disappear.”
The truth of it echoed in the space between them. Tristan was more than a spymaster. He was a translator between their two worlds—Alistair’s blunt force and Eleanor’s intricate webs. He was, in his own way, a friend.
Alistair turned toward the window, his broad back to her. He watched a hawk circle in the cold blue sky. Free. Unencumbered. “What would you have me do? Ignore the information?”
“Send someone else. Send Captain Varin. Send the red-headed one, the clever one from the eastern garrison. Train them. Trust them. But do not strip this house of its last line of true defense while I am… while I am like this.” Her voice finally broke, the anger giving way to a raw, humiliating fear she would never have voiced before the blood on the sheets.
He heard it. That tiny fracture. It undid him more completely than any shout.
He turned back. The sunlight caught the scar on his jaw, turning it silver. “You think I find it easy to look at you this way?” The words were torn from him, low and rough. “Every time you wince, it feels like a failure. My failure. I am a king who cannot keep death from his own chambers. Sending Tristan… it is something I can do. It is a clean problem with a solution I understand.”
Eleanor stared at him. The anger drained from her face, leaving behind a profound understanding. They were both trapped—she in a body that had betrayed her, he in a terror he could not fight with a sword.
“The cleanest solution is often the bloodiest,” she said softly, echoing his own long-ago lesson to her. “Keeping Tristan here is the messy one. The hard one. It requires you to stand guard in the one place you feel most powerless.”
He crossed the room in two strides, kneeling again beside the bed. He didn’t take her hand. He just looked at her, his blue eyes stripped bare. “If I leave him, and the conspiracy grows…”
“Then we fight it together, when I can stand beside you. Not from this bed.” She met his gaze. “We have shown them the surgeon’s knife. Now we must show them the unbreakable wall. A wall does not chase shadows. It stands. It endures. Let them waste their coin on rumors. Our answer is silence, and strength, and a man they cannot buy sitting right outside that door.”
Alistair was silent for a long time. The only sounds were Leo’s soft snores and the distant cry of the hawk. He thought of Ferris’s words, of hidden gold and secret meetings. He thought of the slow, simmering poison of doubt. Then he thought of the much swifter, more final poison that could be slipped into a cup, or the “accident” that could be arranged on a staircase when the only man tasked to watch for such things was five hundred miles away.
He bowed his head. It was surrender, but not a defeat. It was a strategic redeployment.
“Captain Varin leaves at dawn,” he said, his voice returning to its usual, firm timber. “He will take the red-headed one. They will follow Ferris’s trail. They will report to Tristan, who will report to me. Tristan remains as Master of the Household. His primary duty is the security of the royal family.”
A breath Eleanor didn’t know she was holding left her lungs. The tension in her shoulders unknotted a fraction. “Thank you.”
“Do not thank me,” he said, standing. He moved to the cradle, looking down at his son. “It is not a concession. It is a calculation. You are correct. The strongest fortress does not send out its garrison when the siege has just begun. It bolsters its gates.” He looked back at her, a ghost of his old coldness in his eyes, but it was warmed now by a different resolve. “But know this, Eleanor. The moment you are able to walk from this room to the throne room without faltering, we stop enduring. We start hunting. And it will not be a clean hunt.”
A faint, true smile touched her lips. It was the first in days. “I would expect nothing less.”
He gave a single nod and turned to leave, the decision made, the new course set.
Her voice stopped him at the door. “Alistair.”
He glanced back.
“The wall stands stronger,” she said quietly, “with the king inside it.”
He held her gaze for a moment longer, then stepped out into the antechamber. Tristan was there, leaning against the far wall, pretending to examine a tapestry. He had heard every word. Of course he had.
Alistair stopped before him. “You’re staying.”
Tristan’s expression didn’t change. “I had prepared two sets of travel papers. I had a feeling which set I’d be using.”
“Varin goes. You teach him what he needs to know by dawn. The trail leads to Valenport. Follow it through him. Your eyes stay here.”
Tristan pushed off the wall, his usual casual grace firmly back in place. “Understood.” He paused. “She’s right, you know. About the wall.”
“I know,” Alistair said. He walked to the outer door, his hand on the iron ring. He looked not toward the throne room, but down the corridor toward the nursery, where Jon’s laughter suddenly rang out, clear and unafraid. The sound was a weapon against the silence, against the whispers. It was the sound of the present, demanding to be protected.
He would stand his ground.