Aria,
I love you. I don’t blame you for anything that happened to Henry. What I’m about to do will contradict both ideas, but you must trust me, as you asked me to trust you. I know you’re the heir, but it isn’t your responsibility to fix everything Father breaks.
I’m sorry we couldn’t speak in person. I knew you would talk me out of it. I knew if I hugged you, I would never, ever leave.
But I love him, and if exile is to be his sentence, I choose to bear it as well.
Please find happiness, Aria, and tell Mother I’m sorry.
Eliza
Cold dread settled across Aria like winter. She rushed from the room, shouting her sister’s name, but if Eliza heard, she gave no answer. How long ago had she left the note? Perhaps she was already in a port, already on a ship, already—
“Eliza!”
Aria burst from the castle into a courtyard, sliding on stones slick with frost. Her breath puffed in the air, and the only witness to her despair was a net of curious stars caught around a silent moon. There was no movement at the palace gate, no sign of Eliza’s passing.
Only a horse missing from the stables.
When the first wisp of dawn’s pink touched the horizon, Aria was already standing beside her father’s bed. He blinked groggily awake as she dropped Eliza’s letter on his face.
“You did this,” she whispered harshly. Her unnatural energy from the night had bled into her familiar daytime exhaustion, nearly collapsing her where she stood, but she gripped a bedpost to remain upright.
It took her father a few moments to read, to wake, to grasp. Then he shouted for guards, sent runners after his missing daughter, demanded a closure and search of every nearby port.
“What if they don’t find her?” Aria asked.
Her father raked his fingers through his hair. He’d thrown on a red silk housecoat and his gold circlet, and while Aria stood still, he paced the room, murmuring curses to himself and a repeated oath all its own: “Ridiculous girl. Ridiculous, lovesick girl.”
“What if they don’t—”
“They’ll find her!” he snapped.
“And what if they do?”
He stopped pacing.
Aria gripped the bedpost tighter, using the solid oak as much for emotional support as physical. “Will you repeal Henry’s punishment? Will you allow them to be together? Or will you drag Eliza home just to leave her miserable?”
“Running away is the action of a child, and I will not indulge her ridiculous, naïve heart.”
“Eliza isn’t ridiculous! She’s—”
“She has no grasp of what she’s doing!” He shook the letter in Aria’s face. “Throwing her entire life away for a boy she’s glimpsed at a few parties! She’s always taken after her mother, with a head full of clouds and not a raindrop of sense.”
“My mother.”
He frowned. “What?”
“Mymother. She’smymother, too, and she would never call my sister ridiculous.”
“Because she shares the same deficiencies.”
The early morning light cast the king’s face in harsh shadows, and Aria realized it was the worst light she’d ever seen him in. It revealed things she’d never seen before.
“You talk about Mother’s deficiencies often enough yet never mention your own.”
He dropped Eliza’s letter, dismissing her in the same annoyed gesture.
