Chapter 23: Stress
The fatigue was a different enemy. It didn’t charge. It settled. It seeped into her bones like the Blackwood’s fog, heavy and cold, making every movement an act of will.
Two days after the sickness, Astrid stood in the training yard, her seax in hand. The familiar weight felt wrong. Her arms, usually whipcord-strong, trembled after a dozen practice swings. The bright clang of steel on the pell was a jarring shock to a system that craved silence. The smell of wet straw and sweat, usually so comforting, turned her stomach.
Kael lowered his sword, his brow furrowed. “You’re slow.”
“I’m tired,” she snapped, the words coming out as a gasp. She leaned over, hands on her knees, sucking in air.
“You’re always tired,” he said, not unkindly. He’d noticed. They all had. The missed morning drills. The way she picked at her food during feasts, pushing rich sauces aside. The shadows under her eyes no amount of sleep seemed to lift.
She straightened, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist. “It’s just… it’s lingering. From the Gloom.”
He didn’t look convinced. Nobody who’d faced the Gloom felt like this weeks later. They had nightmares. Jumpy nerves. Not this deep, draining sap of energy.
She made it through the session on sheer stubbornness, but the victory was empty. Walking back to the main keep, the stairs seemed to multiply. Each step was a mountain. In their rooms, she stood before the window, staring out at the bustling courtyard below. Children chased a dog. A laundress hung linens that snapped in the wind. Life, simple and relentless.
Her hand drifted again to her stomach. A cage of muscle, and maybe something else. A different kind of anchor, growing in the dark.
She needed to know. Not from some Eldorian court physician with his whispering and his polite congratulations to the prince. She needed her mother’s voice. The blunt, unvarnished truth of the North.
At the writing desk, she took a sheet of parchment and a charcoal stick. She hated the delicate Eldorian script. Her own letters were sharp angles, like chips of flint.
Mother,
The Blackwood is clear. The pass is open. The thing is done. Caius is… well. He fought well.
She paused, the charcoal grinding under her tense fingers. How to ask without asking?
I feel a strange weariness. Like a fight has been won inside my own body. The healers here speak in riddles. Do you remember when Aunt Hilda returned from the Ice Marshes, how she slept for a week and could not keep water down? What root did Old Nanna give her?
Send word of the northern flocks. And of you.
Astrid.
It was code, but barely. Her mother would read between the slashing lines. She would understand the terror disguised as a request for folk remedies.
She sealed the message with a drop of plain wax, no signet ring, and carried it to the rookery herself. The smell of bird droppings and feathers was sharp. The master falconer, a grizzled man with one eye, nodded to her. “North, my lady?”
“North,” she confirmed. He selected a great, grizzled raven with intelligent, black eyes. It cocked its head, accepting the message tube tied to its leg with a disdainful ruffle.
As the bird was launched, spreading its wings against the vast, indifferent sky, Astrid felt a piercing loneliness. Her question was now a physical thing, flying across mountains and rivers, and she was rooted here, in this stone place, waiting.
Caius found her there, still staring at the empty sky.
“You’re shivering,” he said. He didn’t ask about the raven. He just took off his own riding cloak—dark blue, finer than anything she’d own—and draped it over her shoulders. The residual warmth from his body was an immediate, shocking comfort.
“I sent word home,” she said, not looking at him.
“Good. They’ll want to know you’re safe.” He leaned on the parapet beside her. “You’re not, though. Are you?”
The directness startled her. She was used to his circling, his diplomacy. This was a clean cut.
“I don’t know what I am.”
“You’re not eating. You trained for an hour today and you look like you faced an army.” He turned to face her, his light blue eyes scanning her face. “Talk to me, Astrid. Is it the Gloom? Is it… is it me? This?” He gestured between them, then back at the castle.
“It’s not you.” The words were true, but they felt inadequate. “It’s this place. It’s the silence after the screaming. My body doesn’t know what to do with it.”
“So it’s punishing you?”
“Maybe.”
He was silent for a long moment, watching the last sliver of sun bleed below the horizon. “I had a dream last night,” he said, his voice lower. “I was back at the stones. But the whispering wasn’t coming from the Gloom. It was coming from you. And I couldn’t understand the words.”
A chill that had nothing to do with the wind went through her. She saw it then, the same fractured fear in him, masked by courtly grace. They were both haunted. Just by different ghosts.
“It was just a dream,” she said, but her voice lacked conviction.
“Was it?” He pushed off the parapet. “Come inside. Please. Let’s just… sit. Without an audience. Without a purpose.”
She let him lead her back to their rooms. A small fire was lit against the evening chill. He poured two cups of weak, honeyed wine and handed her one. She took it, staring at the liquid’s amber swirl.
“I’m scared,” she said, so quietly the crackling fire almost ate the words.
He didn’t flinch. He didn’t try to comfort her with empty platitudes. He just nodded, his eyes holding hers. “I know. So am I.”
For the first time since returning, they weren’t a prince and a princess, or even warriors who had survived a nightmare. They were just two people, sitting in a dim room, waiting for an answer to come flying out of the north, terrified of what it might say.
They sat like that for a long time, not speaking, the silence between them a fragile, shared thing. The fire burned down to glowing embers that pulsed like a slow heartbeat. Astrid’s mind was a trapped bird, fluttering against the cage of her ribs, frantic and directionless. She hated the waiting more than any battle. In a fight, you could move. You could do something. This was just a slow bleed.
Caius finally stirred, the chair creaking under his weight. “You should sleep.”
“I’m not an invalid.”
“Didn’t say you were.” He stood and offered his hand. It wasn’t a princely gesture. It was tired. Practical. “You’re just dead on your feet. Come on.”
She let him pull her up. The room tilted slightly, the fatigue a vertigo that had nothing to do with height. In the dimness, his face was all sharp angles and soft shadows, the perpetually amused expression completely absent. He looked his age. He looked as frayed as she felt. They didn’t undress, just kicked off their boots and fell into the giant bed in their day clothes, the wool of his tunic rough against her arm.
She expected to lie there staring at the canopy. Instead, a black, depthless sleep swallowed her the moment she closed her eyes.
The raven returned the next afternoon.
Astrid was in the solar, pretending to mend a torn strap on her gambeson. Her stitches were jagged, useless. She saw the shadow first—a swift, dark slash across the sunlit floor. Her head snapped up. Her heart did a hard, painful slam against her breastbone.
She was on her feet and out the door before the bird had even landed on the rookery perch, her sewing forgotten on the floor. She took the tower stairs two at a time, the nausea rising not from illness now but from a pure, keyed-up dread.
The falconer was already removing the message tube. He turned, saw her wild-eyed approach, and handed it over without a word. The small leather cylinder was cold in her palm. It smelled of distant pine and wind. Of home.
She didn’t wait. She tore down the nearest empty corridor, finding a shallow alcove with a narrow window slit. Her fingers, clumsy and cold, broke the plain wax seal. The parchment inside was coarse, northern stuff, not the smooth Eldorian sheet she’d sent. The handwriting was a series of decisive, slashing marks, the ink a deep, smoky black.
Astrid,
The flocks are thick with winter wool. I am the same. Your father’s ghost is quiet.
Hilda’s sickness was a marsh fever. It passed in ten days. She kept down broth and Nanna’s red-root tea. Your sickness is not a fever. Your fight is not with a swamp.
You know what root this is. You have always known. You feel it taking anchor. A new kind of vow, written in blood and bone, not on stone.
There is no herb for this. There are only choices. You must make yours before the choice is made for you. The court will see it as a blessing. A binding seal. You must decide what you see.
Come home if you need to. The north is always here. But you cannot outrun a storm that lives inside your own skin.
Mother.
The words didn’t read. They detonated. Each sentence was a shockwave that left her hollowed out, ringing with a terrible, silent frequency. The coarse parchment scraped against her thumb. The confirmation was there, in her mother’s unflinching script. No riddles. No comfort.
A new kind of vow.
The corridor was cold, but a sweat broke out across her back, hot and prickling. She leaned her forehead against the rough stone of the alcove. The world outside the window slit—the distant green of the hills, the white specks of grazing sheep—seemed to warp, tilting on a new and terrifying axis.
All of it, every strategic alliance, every political expectation, every careful step of this diplomatic dance, just became terrifyingly simple and impossibly complex. She was no longer just a princess who had fought a demon. She was a territory. A battlefield. A promise made flesh without her consent.
She heard a footstep on the flagstones, soft but familiar. She didn’t turn.
“Astrid?” Caius’s voice came from the end of the corridor. He must have been looking for her. He must have heard. “Did it come?”
She swallowed, but her throat was dust. She couldn’t speak. She could only hold the letter out behind her, her arm trembling slightly.
His footsteps approached, hesitant. She heard the rustle of parchment as he took it. Then a long, profound silence as he read. She listened to his breathing, waiting for it to catch, to change. It just went very, very quiet.
When he finally spoke, his voice was low, stripped bare of all its charming layers. “Oh.”
That single syllable held everything. Astonishment. Dread. A flicker of something that might have been hope, instantly smothered by the sheer magnitude of it. He moved closer. She felt the heat of him behind her, not touching.
“Your mother,” he said, the paper crinkling in his hand. “She doesn’t mince words.”
“No,” Astrid managed, the word cracking.
“Are you…” He stopped. Started again. “What do you need?”
She finally turned. His face was pale, his light eyes wide. He looked utterly lost. The letter hung limply at his side. She saw her own vertigo reflected in him, and it made the stone floor under her feel less solid.
“I don’t know,” she said, and it was the most honest, most terrifying thing she’d ever said to him. “I don’t know what I need.”
He nodded, slowly, as if absorbing a blow. He looked from her face to the letter and back again. The future, all their careful, uncertain truce, had just collapsed into the fierce, undeniable reality of the present, contained within the taut skin of her belly. The momentum of their story was now a gravity, pulling them toward a precipice neither of them had planned to approach.