Chapter 7: The King's Confession
The wind in the watchtower wasn’t a sound. It was a physical presence, a howling beast that sucked the warmth from your lungs and made the ancient stones groan. Imoria climbed the last spiral step, her hand skimming the damp, rough wall. The air tasted of salt and coming rain.
Markus stood at the open archway, his back to her, a silhouette cut from the night itself. He didn’t turn.
“William sent you,” he said. His voice was flat, carried away by the gale almost before she heard it.
She moved to stand beside him, not too close, following his gaze out over the chaos of black forest and darker sky. The torches of the lower bailey were mere pinpricks, pathetic against the vast swallowing dark. “He did.”
He let out a short, harsh sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Of course he did. He thinks he’s helping.”
“He usually is.”
This time the laugh was real, bitter. “He usually is,” Markus agreed. He finally shifted, just his head, to look at her. In the thin, cloud-blurred moonlight, his face was all severe angles and deep shadow. “Do you know what I’ve been doing up here?”
“Watching.”
“Counting,” he corrected, his tone grimly amused. “I counted seventeen separate people seek you out today. The cook. Two stable hands. A laundress with a wobbly cart wheel. Brenna, twice. A guardsman with a headache who swore you knew a pressure point for it. Roric, for gods’ sake, asking your opinion on timber seasoning.” He shook his head, looking back at the void. “I brought you here to see the kingdom. To see if you could see it. Not to… adopt it.”
Imoria leaned her shoulder against the cold stone of the arch. The wind whipped strands of her silver hair across her face. “You gave me a test. I passed. You don’t get to be angry about the consequences.”
“I’m not angry.” The words were quick, defensive. He exhaled, a plume of steam torn to shreds. “I’m jealous.”
The admission hung between them, stark and unbelievable as a declaration of war.
“Jealous of a laundress,” Imoria said slowly, testing the words.
“Of her, yes. And the farrier. And the boy who brings the firewood.” His voice was low, rough with a frustration that had nothing to do with statecraft. “They get your attention. They get your… competence. Your smile. They come to you with their broken things and you fix them. And I stand up here, or in my solar, with my scrolls and my tariffs and my political puzzles, and I have to… send for you. Like a supplicant.”
The raw honesty of it was a shock. It wasn’t the calculated confession of a king maneuvering for advantage. It was the unvarnished, irritable truth of a man. It was more disarming than any flattery.
“You never asked,” she said simply.
“What?”
“For my attention. You watched. You assessed. You tested. You’ve never just… asked.” She turned fully toward him now, the wind chilling the back of her neck. “In Eltheria, I was a tool in the corner, waiting to be used. Here, people ask. They demand, even. It’s different. It feels like being alive, not being stored.”
Markus was silent for a long moment, the only sound the relentless moan of the wind through the arrow slits. “William told me I was pouting,” he said finally, the words grudging. “In the armory. After you saw us.”
“You were.”
He shot her a look, but there was no real heat in it. “He said you were a person, not a siege plan.”
“He’s annoyingly perceptive when he’s drunk.”
A faint, reluctant smile touched Markus’s mouth. “He is.” The smile faded. He pushed away from the wall, closing the distance between them until she could see the fine lines of fatigue around his eyes, the faint stubble darkening his jaw. The cold radiated from his armor. “So I’m asking now.”
Her heart gave a single, hard thump against her ribs.
“Stay,” he said, the word almost lost to the wind. He didn’t touch her. He just stood there, a king in a forgotten tower, his voice stripped of all its authority. “Talk to me. Not about patrol routes or inventory. Just… talk. To me. A man who has no idea what to do with this… feeling. This feeling that I’m standing here watching the one thing I need get pulled into the current, and I’m too damn clumsy to know how to wade in after it.”
The vulnerability was terrifying. More terrifying than any show of strength. This was the man beneath the crown who had fought his own father, who protected his brother with a silent, ruthless ferocity, who was trying to build something true on the ashes of madness. And he was confessing clumsiness.
Imoria’s breath caught. The mask of quiet duty, the shell she’d worn for twenty-six years, felt thin and brittle here in this howling dark. She thought of Kathryn, basking in the sun. She thought of her mother’s dismissive eyes, her father’s bland disregard. She thought of the servants with missing tongues.
This was the opposite of that. This was being seen, not for utility, but for the current she created.
Slowly, she lifted her hand. Her fingers, chilled and trembling slightly, didn’t go to his face. They went to the cold, hard steel of his gorget, the intricately crafted piece that guarded his throat. Her touch was feather-light, just a brush against the metal. It was an anchor point in the swirling dark.
“You’re not losing me,” she said, her voice quieter than the wind but somehow clearer. “You just haven’t caught me yet.”
His eyes, locked on hers, darkened. The reflection of the distant, struggling torches vanished into the black of his pupils. He didn’t move for a century. Then, his hand came up. Not to pull her in, not to seize. He covered her hand where it rested against his armor. His palm was warm, calloused, enormous. He pressed her fingers more firmly against the steel, as if making her feel the solid, unyielding reality of it, of him.
“Then what does catching look like?” he asked, his voice a gravelly whisper. “Is it a treaty? A political arrangement? Because I have drafts of those. Or is it something else?”
Before she could answer, a shout echoed up from the bailey below, sharp and urgent. Then another. A bell began to clang, a rapid, frantic toll that sliced through the wind’s moan.
Markus’s head snapped toward the sound, his body instantly shifting from the man in the tower back to the king on the wall. The vulnerability shut away, sealed behind a face of hardened concentration. He released her hand and was at the tower’s edge in two long strides, leaning out over the dizzying drop.
“Riders!” he yelled down, his voice a command that carried. “How many?”
The answer was lost in the wind, but the bell kept ringing. Markus turned back to her, the moment shattered, the air now charged with a different, sharper kind of tension.
“Come,” he said, and it was not a request. It was an order. He was already moving for the stairs.
Imoria followed, the ghost of his warmth still on her hand, the cold imprint of the gorget on her fingertips. The intimacy of the tower was gone, replaced by the rushing vertigo of the spiral descent. The stone steps were treacherous in the dark.
They emerged into the controlled chaos of the lower bailey. Men were running, buckling sword belts, grabbing spears from racks. Torches streamed toward the main gate. Roric was there, his face like thunder in the flickering light.
“Scout party,” he grunted as Markus strode up. “The one we sent northeast three days ago. Two returned. One’s hanging over his saddle, bleeding out. The other’s babbling about an ambush. Bracken colors.”
Markus’s jaw tightened. “Bracken.” He said the name like a curse. “Get the wounded man to the infirmary. I want the coherent one in the gatehouse now. Imoria.”
She stepped forward, her own heart hammering, not from fear but from a sudden, fierce clarity.
“With me,” he said. His eyes met hers, and the look in them was no longer one of jealousy or confused longing. It was the look he’d given her in the gatehouse when she’d pointed out the frayed rope. A look of stark, professional trust. The test was over. This was the work.
As they moved swiftly through the rushing men toward the gatehouse, the rain began. It wasn’t a gentle drizzle. It was a cold, slashing downpour that hissed against the torches and turned the mud underfoot to slick grease. The night, which had held a fragile, personal tension, had broken open into something wider, darker, and wet with the promise of blood.
The rain felt like needles. It soaked through Imoria’s wool cloak in seconds, plastering her hair to her scalp as she followed Markus into the cramped, smoky gatehouse. The surviving scout, a boy younger than William with a face grey from shock, was shivering violently on a stool. Roric stood over him, a hand on his shoulder that was meant to be steadying but looked like it was holding him down.
“Start from the tree line,” Markus said, stripping off his sodden riding gloves. His voice was calm, a forced steadiness that cut through the boy’s panic. He didn’t raise it.
“We were following the creek bed, sire, like ordered,” the scout stammered, eyes darting. “Thought we’d made the tree marker. Then the arrows came from the west slope. Not from ahead. From the side.” He swallowed, a thick, painful sound. “Jorn took one in the back, just… fell. The horses screamed.”
Imoria moved to the small brazier, pouring a clay cup of heated wine from a pot. She handed it to the boy. Her fingers brushed his; they were icy. He clutched the cup like a lifeline but didn’t drink.
“How many?” Markus asked.
“Dunno. Eight? Ten? Wore Bracken’s fox crest, plain as day. They came down screaming. Got Derrin clean through the throat.” The boy’s gaze fixed on the fire. “I grabbed Jorn, got him over his saddle, and just… kicked. Didn’t look back.”
Markus exchanged a look with Roric. “Bracken’s lands are two days’ hard ride northeast. This wasn’t a patrol. This was a planned intercept.”
“A message,” Roric grunted, his mouth a grim line. “They knew the route.”
The gatehouse door slammed open again, bringing in a gust of wet wind and William. He was bareheaded, rain streaming down his face, his usual gentle composure sharpened into acute focus. He took in the scene—the shaking scout, his brother’s stony expression, Imoria standing quiet by the fire—in a single glance.
“Jorn’s gone,” William said flatly, answering the unasked question. “The healers couldn’t stop the bleeding. It was… deep.”
A heavy silence filled the room, broken only by the sputter of torches and the drumming rain. The scout began to cry, silent, shoulder-shaking sobs he tried to smother in the cup of wine. That was the weight of it. Not just an ambush. A death. A man who’d eaten at their tables yesterday was now cold in the infirmary.
Markus closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, he looked at the boy. “You did well to bring him home. Go to the kitchens. Get warm. Tell them I said to give you a double ration of whatever’s hot.”
The dismissal was a kind of mercy. The boy stumbled out, leaving the four of them in the thick, tense quiet.
“They’re testing the new border,” William said, leaning against the map table. “Seeing if we’re looking the other way. Seeing if we’re soft.”
“We’re not,” Markus said, but it was reflexive. He braced his hands on the table, studying the worn map as if the ink would reveal an answer. His shoulders were a tight line under the wet, scaled armor. Water dripped from the pauldrons onto the parchment, blurring the lines of the creek bed where his men had died.
Imoria watched the water spread. She remembered the feeling of his hand pressing hers against that same cold steel in the tower, the confession of jealousy. That man was buried now under the king, buried under duty and death and this fresh, muddy grief. An impulse, clear and direct, cut through her. He was carrying the weight, all of it, and the armor was just another layer of it.
She stepped forward.
Without a word, she began unbuckling the heavy pauldron on his left shoulder. Her fingers worked the cold, wet leather strap, clumsy at first, then finding the rhythm. The metal was shockingly cold, the underlying padding soaked through.
Markus went very still. He didn’t turn.
William’s eyebrows lifted slightly, but he said nothing. Roric coughed, looking away, suddenly finding the rafters deeply interesting.
The first pauldron came free with a soft thud as she set it on the bench. She moved to the right side. Her knuckles brushed the rain-damp skin at the nape of his neck. He flinched, not away, but a tiny intake of breath. The second buckle released. She set that piece aside, then moved to the gorget—the very piece she had touched in the tower. The central clasp was stubborn, jammed with grit or tension. She worked at it, her breath a faint warmth against his jaw.
With a final click, it came loose. She lifted the rigid steel collar from his throat. Beneath it, the linen of his undershirt was dark with sweat and rain. He rolled his shoulders, a slight, almost unconscious movement of relief.
She didn’t stop. Her hands went to the buckles at his sides that secured the cuirass, the main breastplate. The actions were methodical, impersonal, and deeply intimate all at once. This was not a servant’s duty. This was something else. An acknowledgment. The rain hammered the roof. A guardsman’s voice yelled something indistinct outside.
The final buckle gave way. She lifted the front plate, heavier than it looked, and he shifted to help her, shrugging out of it. He stood before them then in just the padded arming doublet, looking younger, more mortal. Vulnerable. The king’s shell was stacked on a bench, a puddle of rainwater forming beneath it.
Markus finally turned to look at her. His eyes were dark, questioning, but the rigid set of his jaw had softened by a fraction. The weight was still there, the grief and the rage, but he was no longer bearing it alone in full battle gear in a cramped room. She had, quietly and without permission, taken some of it from him.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice low.
William pushed off from the table. “I’ll double the watches on the northeastern walls. Roric, we’ll need to send a patrol at first light to retrieve Derrin’s body.” He was already moving, pulling the old commander with him, giving them a moment in the chaos he’d sensed they needed.
The door shut, leaving them in the sudden, relative quiet. The brazier crackled.
Markus reached out, not for her hand, but to catch a strand of her wet hair stuck to her cheek. He tucked it behind her ear, his touch startlingly gentle. “You catch me off guard,” he murmured.
Before she could answer, a fist pounded on the gatehouse door. It opened before either could speak. A guardsman, breathless, his eyes wide. “Sire. The scout. The boy. He remembered something else.”
Markus’s hand dropped. “What?”
“He said one of the Bracken men yelled it, clear as anything, before the arrows flew.” The guardsman’s voice was tight. “He yelled, ‘Give the Bastard King our regards.’”
The air in the room turned to ice.
Markus’s face, just beginning to unclench, hardened into something utterly lethal. It wasn’t just an attack on his border. It was a deliberate, pointed insult to his legitimacy, to the very blood and tears he and William had shed to seize their throne from their father. This was personal.
He looked at Imoria, and the vulnerability was gone, burned away by a cold, familiar fire. “It seems the test isn’t over,” he said, the words flat and dangerous. “They’ve just changed the parameters.”
The words hung, poison-tipped, in the damp air. Markus didn’t move. The cold fury radiating from him was a tangible force, tightening the space in the small gatehouse. Imoria watched a muscle feather in his jaw. His hands, now free of their steel gauntlets, slowly curled into white-knuckled fists.
“Dismissed,” he said to the guardsman, the word clipped and final.
The door shut. The silence that followed was thicker than before, choked with the unspoken history of a contested throne. Markus turned back to the map, his shoulders rigid. He placed a finger on the spot marking the ambush, pressing down until the parchment threatened to tear. “Parameters,” he repeated, a low, vicious sound. “They want a war of whispers before they commit to steel. They want to see if the insult cracks the foundation.”
“Does it?” Imoria asked. Her voice was calm.
He shot her a look, all sharp edges and banked fire. “No. It ensures theirs will be the first foundation shattered when I bring the mountain down on their heads.” He began tracing routes on the map, his movements rapid, obsessive. “We’ll need to recall the southern patrols. Fortify the outlying villages. Roric’s timber report is suddenly critical. The grain stores from Eltheria need auditing—if they’re hitting scouts, they’ll target supply lines next.”
He was already five steps ahead, building a wall of strategy brick by furious brick. But the bricks were being laid by trembling hands. She saw it now, clearly, in the slight shake of his fingers as they skated over the parchment, in the unnatural glassiness of his eyes staring at lines they’d stopped truly seeing. This wasn’t just fury. It was exhaustion so deep it had become a frantic, second-wind madness.
“Markus,” she said.
“We’ll need to send a rider to your father at dawn,” he continued, not hearing her. “A formal notification of border aggression. The tone must be precise. Not alarmed. Resolute. William can draft it, his phrasing is always—” He swayed, just a fraction, catching himself on the table’s edge.
The door opened again. William entered, his hair still damp. He took one look at his brother—the discarded armor, the feverish focus, the pallor beneath his weathering—and his face settled into a grim understanding. He met Imoria’s eyes, a silent communication passing between them.
“The watches are set,” William said, his tone deliberately casual. “Roric’s seeing to the body. It’s handled for tonight.”
“Nothing is handled,” Markus snapped, not looking up. “It’s just beginning. Fetch me the tax ledgers for the northern march. I need to see what Bracken’s been importing.”
“The ledgers can wait until sunrise,” William said, leaning against the doorframe, blocking the exit.
“I said fetch them.”
“And I’m saying you’re no use to anyone like this.” William’s voice remained light, but there was steel beneath it. He pushed off and walked to the brazier, warming his hands. “You’re weaving threats out of shadow. Bracken’s a provocateur, not a strategist. He sent brutes who shout insults. This is a pinprick, not a dagger to the heart. Reacting like it’s the latter plays right into his hands.”
Markus finally looked up, his eyes blazing. “A pinprick that killed one of my men.”
“And Jorn will be avenged. With clarity. Not with you running yourself into the ground until you mistake a cook’s shadow for an assassin.” William turned to Imoria, his expression open. “He hasn’t slept for days. Only minutes in between, sitting upright in that chair. I’ll take the reign for a time. Make sure he listens to you.”
The admission hung there. William was handing her the reins, openly, in front of his brother. It was an act of profound trust, and a desperate tactic.
Markus stared at his brother, betrayal and furious understanding warring in his gaze. “You don’t give my orders, William.”
“Tonight, I do.” William held his stare. “Or I’ll tell the entire hall the story about you, the stuck practice sword, and the beehive when you were twelve. In vivid detail.”
A beat of silence. Then, Markus’s anger cracked, just for a second, revealing sheer, bewildered irritation. “You wouldn’t.”
“Watch me.” William nodded to Imoria. “He’s all yours.”
That was all the invitation she needed. The protective impulse that had made her unbuckle his armor now solidified into a plan. She moved to Markus’s side, not touching him, but her presence an unyielding fact. “Come on.”
“I have work—”
“Now.” She didn’t raise her voice. She simply turned and walked out of the gatehouse, into the relentless, cooling rain. She didn’t look back.
For a moment, she heard nothing but the downpour. Then, a muttered curse and the sound of footsteps following her. She led him across the sodden bailey, up the inner keep steps, down the torch-lit corridor to his chamber. He followed like a stormcloud, silent and simmering.
She opened his door, walked in, and turned as he crossed the threshold. Before he could speak, she stepped past him, grabbed the iron handle, and swung the heavy oak door shut. A sharp, decisive click echoed as she slid the interior bolt home, locking them both in.
He stared at the bolted door, then at her. “What is this?”
“You’re an idiot,” she said plainly, leaning back against the carved wood. Water dripped from her clothes onto the thick rug. “And we are not leaving this room until you’ve slept.”
He blinked, his exhaustion making him slow. He genuinely seemed to think she was joking. A smile, brittle and unconvincing, touched his lips. “Imoria. Unbolt the door. This isn’t amusing.”
“I’m not amused either. I’m serious.” She crossed her arms. The room was spacious, dominated by a large canopied bed, a worn desk buried in papers, and a cold fireplace. It smelled of leather, ink, and the faint, metallic scent of armor polish.
His disbelief curdled into annoyance. “You can’t imprison the king in his own chambers.”
“I just did. Try to move me.” She didn’t move from the door. Her stance was loose, ready, the same one she used in the training yard. Her black eyes held his, unwavering. “You’re exhausted. Your decisions will become mistakes. Your reactions will become overreactions. William sees it. Roric sees it. I see it. Only you’re too stubborn to see the cliff you’re walking toward.”
“There is a crisis now,” he ground out, stepping closer. The room felt suddenly smaller. “Men are dead. Borders are threatened. I don’t have the luxury of a full night’s sleep like a child.”
“You have the luxury of a brother more than capable of holding the watch for eight hours.” She didn’t back down an inch. “What you don’t have is the right to sacrifice your judgment on the altar of your pride. ‘Bastard King’ got under your skin. I get it. Now let it go. For a few hours. Let it go so you can come back and actually deal with it, not just rage at its shadow.”
He was close enough now that she could see the intricate network of fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the dusting of old scar across his temple. Fatigue had etched itself deeply into his face, aging him. The fury in his eyes was bright, but behind it was a hollowed-out desperation that had nothing to do with Bracken.
“I can’t just switch it off,” he said, his voice dropping, raw.
“You don’t have to.” She unfolded her arms, her own posture softening a fraction. “Just sit down. Start with that.”
He held her gaze for a long, battling moment. Then, with a sound of pure defeat, he turned and walked to the edge of the bed. He didn’t sit so much as collapse onto it, the ropes beneath the mattress creaking in protest. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, head in his hands.
Imoria stayed by the door, giving him the space. The only sounds were the distant murmur of the rain and the ragged pull of his breath.
“They shouted it where my men could hear,” he said, his voice muffled by his hands. “They wanted it reported back to me. They wanted me to know the story they’re telling.”
“So tell a better one,” she said from across the room. “After you sleep.”
He laughed, a dry, cracked thing. “You’re infuriating.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
He lifted his head. He looked at her, really looked, taking in her own soaked state, her stubborn stance by the bolted door, the quiet certainty in her face. The anger seemed to drain from him, leaving only a vast and weary resignation. “You’re really not moving, are you?”
“No.”
He shook his head, a slow, bewildered motion. Then, moving with the stiff care of an old man, he toed off his boots. They dropped to the rug with two dull thuds. He swung his legs up onto the bed and lay back on the coverlet, staring at the canopy above. He didn’t undress. He just lay there, in his damp clothes, a king forcibly stood down.
“Happy?” he muttered, closing his eyes.
“Not yet.” She finally left her post by the door. She walked to the hearth, knelt, and began building a fire from the laid kindling. The simple, physical task was a relief. She struck a spark from the flint box, coaxed the flame to life, and watched as it began to eat at the dry wood, pushing back the room’s deep chill.
The growing light danced over the walls, over the still form on the bed. She didn’t look at him. She simply tended the fire until it was stable, a warm, crackling heart in the dark room.
When she finally turned, his breathing had changed. It was deeper, slower. The rigid line of his shoulders had sunk into the mattress. His brow was still furrowed, but the frantic energy had left him. Sleep hadn’t claimed him fully—it was a wary, shallow surrender—but it had begun its work.